Viva la Library! - Nautilus

W e’ve all been there. In fact, I find myself there several times a day. A question emerges and my memory stumbles. Decades of education dematerialize into an expensive mist. I know I know this, or at least I should.

But what if it hadn’t been so simple? What if—instead of having my screen cluttered instantly with infinite reproductions of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—I was forced to live in a period of contemplation? Of not knowing? Might that have generated a spark of curiosity?

If so, I might have found my way to the library. And while there, I might have stumbled on a good deal more about Nighthawks and its enigmatic portrayal of urban loneliness—as, once upon a time, as a Midwestern kid longing for a life in the big city, I did within the stacks at the Iowa City Public Library. There, I followed the streets of Hopper’s metropolis to the stories of John Cheever and Ralph Ellison, their characters often under the spell of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, whose records I checked out. I could step backward, too, following Hopper’s urban themes to Degas and Manet—their gamines encountered with the longing felt in the pages of Proust.

Or I could fast forward through time, following the throughline of Hopper’s influence on another painter, George Tooker, who focused a paranoid gaze on waiting rooms and subway platforms to paint a bureaucratized modern dystopia. From there, it was a short trip to Zamyatin’s We or Orwell’s 1984. In the library, with its faint arboreal scent of binding glue, I was able to have my first encounters with a life beyond the prairies.

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