Today we have a guest blog from Daniel James Brown, author of The Indifferent Stars Above, which just received a great review in the New York Times. Dan writes: "Recently, almost forty years after the fact, I came back to the library that changed my life, perhaps even saved my life, in 1969..."
"That was the year I dropped out of high school. Beset by anxiety disorders and tormented by phobias that no one really understood very well in those days, I stood up one day in the middle of a biology lab session, walked out of school, drove home, and announced to my parents that I wasn’t going back. Ever. As you can imagine, it caused quite an uproar in the household. I was shattered—depressed, filled with self-loathing, terrified about my future—but utterly unwilling to go back to school and the demons that haunted me there. But in the days that followed, my mother, bless her, came up with a plan. I was to enroll in a combination of correspondence and extension courses at the nearest university—U.C. Berkeley—and apply the credits back to my high school in order to earn a diploma. My part of the deal was that I was to spend seven hours a day at the university library completing the work.
So one dreary winter day, I packed up all my new course materials and drove into Berkeley. I found Doe Library on a campus map, sloshed across campus in the rain, and walked apprehensively under the words “Fiat Lux” etched into a slab of granite above the doorway. I entered the building and made my way up a grand staircase of cool, white marble steps, and into the vast, quiet, and extraordinarily beautiful space of the North Reading Room, with its high vaulted ceiling, its soaring windows, and its long rows of oak study desks. Shafts of soft light fell from the tall windows and the skylights overhead, burnishing the ancient wood of the desks. The only sound was a soft murmuring of people out in the foyer and the shuffling of paper. The room smelled of old books and leather bindings. University students just a little older than myself sat hunched over under green-shaded reading lamps, poring over their books, absorbed in whatever they were reading. I had never seen anything so lovely. It took my breath away. I found a spot at one of the desks, sat down, opened a book, and to my utter surprise sank rapidly and happily into a world of words and ideas from which I have never emerged. Soon I began staying in the library eight or nine hours every day, finishing my course work in the first four or five and then browsing the stacks for more books, toting armloads of them back into the reading room, propping them open under the green-shaded reading lamps, and eating them up. Within a few weeks, you couldn’t keep me away from the place. Sometimes I even went in on Saturdays, forsaking my friends and our custom of watching morning cartoons and afternoon re-runs of Batman on TV.
So I graduated from high school after all—albeit somewhat unconventionally—and then went on to community college, back to Berkeley as an undergraduate, and on to UCLA for graduate school. And then, forty years later—after far too long an absence—I found myself back in Berkeley, once again climbing those cool marble steps in Doe Library, heading for the North Reading Room. I had come back to do research for my book, The Indifferent Stars Above. It just so happens that pretty much everything that has ever been collected about the subject of that book—the Donner Party—is housed at U.C. Berkeley. And I have to tell you that when I walked into the North Reading Room a shiver went up my spine. I paused at the doorway. The room has been remodeled some, but the old oak desks are still there, the soaring windows are the same, the vaulted ceiling still makes you feel as if this is a place where the soul can soar. The students that sit at the oak desks now are my daughter’s age, and instead of the glow of green-shaded reading lamps the glow of hundreds of laptop computers lights up the old wood. But it’s still a sanctuary, a place of birth and rebirth. And as I walked in and took my place at one of the old desks a tear crept into my eye, a tear of utter gratitude for this quiet and holy place."
So one dreary winter day, I packed up all my new course materials and drove into Berkeley. I found Doe Library on a campus map, sloshed across campus in the rain, and walked apprehensively under the words “Fiat Lux” etched into a slab of granite above the doorway. I entered the building and made my way up a grand staircase of cool, white marble steps, and into the vast, quiet, and extraordinarily beautiful space of the North Reading Room, with its high vaulted ceiling, its soaring windows, and its long rows of oak study desks. Shafts of soft light fell from the tall windows and the skylights overhead, burnishing the ancient wood of the desks. The only sound was a soft murmuring of people out in the foyer and the shuffling of paper. The room smelled of old books and leather bindings. University students just a little older than myself sat hunched over under green-shaded reading lamps, poring over their books, absorbed in whatever they were reading. I had never seen anything so lovely. It took my breath away. I found a spot at one of the desks, sat down, opened a book, and to my utter surprise sank rapidly and happily into a world of words and ideas from which I have never emerged. Soon I began staying in the library eight or nine hours every day, finishing my course work in the first four or five and then browsing the stacks for more books, toting armloads of them back into the reading room, propping them open under the green-shaded reading lamps, and eating them up. Within a few weeks, you couldn’t keep me away from the place. Sometimes I even went in on Saturdays, forsaking my friends and our custom of watching morning cartoons and afternoon re-runs of Batman on TV.
So I graduated from high school after all—albeit somewhat unconventionally—and then went on to community college, back to Berkeley as an undergraduate, and on to UCLA for graduate school. And then, forty years later—after far too long an absence—I found myself back in Berkeley, once again climbing those cool marble steps in Doe Library, heading for the North Reading Room. I had come back to do research for my book, The Indifferent Stars Above. It just so happens that pretty much everything that has ever been collected about the subject of that book—the Donner Party—is housed at U.C. Berkeley. And I have to tell you that when I walked into the North Reading Room a shiver went up my spine. I paused at the doorway. The room has been remodeled some, but the old oak desks are still there, the soaring windows are the same, the vaulted ceiling still makes you feel as if this is a place where the soul can soar. The students that sit at the oak desks now are my daughter’s age, and instead of the glow of green-shaded reading lamps the glow of hundreds of laptop computers lights up the old wood. But it’s still a sanctuary, a place of birth and rebirth. And as I walked in and took my place at one of the old desks a tear crept into my eye, a tear of utter gratitude for this quiet and holy place."
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