AN EXPENSE OF SPIRIT
a timelessness proper to my task which can never be finished, at least
not without becoming something quite different.
Each morning I am among the first to arrive, waiting quietly
on the stone steps between the stone Greek jars for the iron grille
to be folded back, the glass doors to be opened. I rush up the marble
inner steps to the Reading Room where the tables wait, long and
polished, as if for a feast. The younger librarians nod to me, for I
am a familiar figure, distinguished among the rabble of bums escaping
the cold, their ruined faces bowed to unread newspapers, high school
students glumly searching periodical indexes, and frantic old men
compiling statistics for pamphlets on vegetarianism or currency reform.
Sometimes a friend (our friendship has shrunk to precisely this
encounter) will seek me out at my customary place, and in a comer
we will whisper of the progress of my current book in the hushed
voices a Library compels. But I speak to none of the habitues, nor
do they offer to address me. Once, a young man who had sat beside
me for nearly two months took to smiling at me and making various
motions of the head inviting confidence, and I was forced to move.
I did it with reluctance, for I had grown accustomed to my particular
spot, and there is in the habitual a kind of peace; besides, the young
man in question had amused me with an odd nervous habit of pull–
ing the skin of
his
neck, in an unbelievable fashion, up over his chin
to the verge of his lower lip.
In those moments, experienced by everyone who tries to write,
when words simply would not come, I found some solace in watching
him
guardedly, examining the texture of his neck, which seemed
not a bit different from that of anyone else, until rapt (he read only
poetry) he would pull the grotesque lap of flesh incredibly upward.
That unforeseeable extension of the skin, useless, a little disgusting,
but-somehow-a feat, seemed to me a just metaphor of my own
work.
I find it hard to say why I, so unremittingly on guard against
the casual encounter, the idle expense of conversation, went to the
first of the Library's Sunday lectures on Great Books. That it was a
mistake I must have known even then, but there was in their being
given in the Library a specious warrant of familiarity, and in their
being given on that day the appeal of the uncustomary. I had often
walked past the dark unused buildings on Sundays, dismayed at
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