B
by Alex
My dearest B,
You are the deepest indigo to me. How do your series’d depths hold truth, revelation, mysticism, and logic within the confines of a single letter? You are the home of the long rows of concatenated completed works, alphabetical ranges authors first German, Gadamer bumping against Heidegger. How often have I gotten lost in these depths, tumbling from magnum opus to the secondary literature leaning against it. The pale, bizarre pastel lavenders and oranges of those MIT hardcovers, denuded by librarians of their dustjackets. The post-psychedelic black covers of Northwestern’s series on existentialism and philosophy whose weirdly distorted images remind one of nothing so much as the photographs included Leonard Nimoy’s epic poem Will You Love Me Tomorrow? The staid blue bindings of Brill and the formal edited volumes of phenomenology produced by unpronounceable Dutch publishers with strangely cartoony logos on their front matter.
But I love B for its small niche sections as well. I once came across the section devoted to philosophical accounts of traits of character — the two books on prudence, the handful of volumes on fear. There is somewhere in that mass of four digit call numbers a section on non-Western religion/philosophy with hybrid volumes on Hawaiian epistemology and the religious imagination in New Guinea. Not too far from the section on witchcraft, if I recall — which says something about the attitudes of the people who came up with the catalog in the first place.
It was not until I got to the Hamilton library that I discovered that Judaica is also in B. The Jewish community in Honolulu is not yet as old as a human lifetime and the pickings here are relatively slim — mostly of the “Choice Told Us To Buy This” variety. But when you’re part of a tradition that helped invent the alphabet there is something liberating about having only a couple dozen linear feet of Greatest Hits to chose from. And an additional advantage is that, let’s face it, just not not that likely that someone else has suddenly developed an interest in Through A Speculum That Shines.
B is that beguiling part of the library that seems the most interesting to me, and also the most far removed from what I’m studying at the moment. If only one could let one’s studies devolve into a cogitation on the possibility of studying the human — but such speculation will not get one’s interviews transcribed. How fascinating it would be to pick one’s way through the radical-seventies covers of the books on the social construction of reality, or finally plow through all the material on king and cult in Ugarit. B is the letter that I return to most often, but also the most avocationally.