REPO·RT FROM THE ACADEMY
THE MEZZANINE
N el mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
. . .
I understand that the Modern Language Association met this
year in a place called Madison, Wisconsin, during a month called Sep–
tember. I did not attend; that isn't the MLA that I know. Do they have
a Statler Hotel in Madison?
If
so, did that Statler have a Christmas
tree in the lobby? Obviously not-September isn't Christmas. But did
that Statler have a Mezzanine? Of course it did. The MLA only exists
on the Mezzanine.
I attended last year's MLA convention. It was held at the Statler
in Washington, but once I came into those crowded corridors it didn't
matter what city I was in. I was in the city which can only be called
the Mezzanine-the middle place, suspended in air above the lobby
of the Statler in Boston or the Palmer House in Chicago or the Ambas–
sador in New York, and when I walked up that carpeted short flight
I came back into the place where I had left myself a year before. For
the life of the Mezzanine is like the life of the Meson: it exists both
intermittently and continuously; between Christmas and Christmas it
ceases to be, and yet it is always there. It survives, it is a form of life,
and like other forms of life it is compounded of flux and fixity. It
changes in place (Chicago, Boston, Washington), but its Place is ever
the same (the Mezzanine) ; it changes in time (1953, 1954, 1955), but
its Time has been ever the same (Christmas).
The Mezzanine exists in the Hotel. The Hotel is an organism too;
single examples are different from each other, but together they partake
of a corporate life which transcends anyone of them. The Hotel has
a Lobby: rugs, columns, sofas, registration desk, men's shop, green plants,
telephone booths, bellboys. The business world flows slowly through its
of elevator doors. It is difficult to retain identity in the Lobby; when
veins, eddying among the columns and forming stagnant pools in front
a man walks through the revolving doors and is confronted by the jumbo
