But over the next century, the stacks became outdated and could not adequately protect irreplaceable books from sunlight, heat and humidity, library officials said.
The books were taken away in 2013 as part of the library’s plan to replace the stacks with a new lending library, which drew howls from prominent authors, scholars and many patrons.
The plan was abandoned, but the stacks remained empty as library officials figured out what to do.
The answer, library officials say after a two-year study, is that the stacks at the heart of the building will have no books — at least not anytime soon.
George Orwell once said that Nineteen Eighty-Four “wouldn’t have been so gloomy if I had not been so ill”. But the truth is that Orwell, along with many other writers, found plenty to be gloomy about in postwar Britain. As he wrote in one of his London Letters in the New York magazine Partisan Review: “No thoughtful person I know has any hopeful picture of the future.” He was magnifying a widespread sense of bomb-haunted unease rather than projecting on to the world some private torment.
Today, May 20th, 2019, a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy will be removed from a vault in the Pavillon de Breteuil in Saint-Cloud, France, just outside Paris, and relocated to a museum, officially “retired” in the terminology of metrologists, becoming the last object in human history to serve as a physical standard of measurement, or as metrologists tellingly describe such an object, an “artifact.”
This cylinder of dense metal, not much larger than a golf ball and colloquially known as “Le Grand K” or “the international prototype kilogram” or only “the IPK,” was created along with a few dozen sister cylinders at the end of the 19th century to act as the definition of the kilogram. It has been kept under three nested bell jars in an underground vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Saint-Cloud, accessible only with three separately controlled keys, while six of its sisters have been kept for reference as temoins, or witnesses. The IPK has been removed occasionally and cleaned with a chamois soaked in ethanol and ether before being steamed in distilled water, but otherwise it is merely left to rest. Of those few dozen cylinders originally made, the remaining prototypes were distributed to each of the world’s metrological powers, the signatories of the 1875 Treaty of the Metre—among which the United States numbers itself—and for the past 100 or so years these kilograms, kept and cleaned under similar conditions, have provided the citizens of each nation with their own approximation of the kilogram.
We buried my father on one of those harsh, bright New York January days. The hard glint of the sun did little to counteract the bitter wind that weaved its way through my layers of winter clothing. The cold that day found its way past skin and sinew and settled for hours in the bones. My father had been dead for 24 hours. We were in a rush to get him to the cemetery and into the ground. A Muslim funeral requires that the family bury the body as soon as possible, foregoing embalming fluid, lavish ceremony, and ornate caskets. The ritual is fast and all-consuming. The process is numbing. My siblings and I navigated a bureaucratic deathscape. We planned and coordinated moving the body, which quickly became nothing more than a package of flesh, from hospital bed to mosque, from mosque to the ground. We procured a death certificate and signed the paperwork that officiates the end of a life in the eyes of the state of New York. The constant motion of death tasks was a balm for grief in the immediate aftermath of loss.
On the day of the funeral, my family drove in silence for an hour and a half to a mosque in Bay Shore, Long Island, where my father’s body was washed, his frail form wrapped in a plain white sheet and then placed in a modest pine box, his dandyism buried with him. Suffolk County is a foreign place to my immigrant dad, who spent most of his time on the streets of Queens and Manhattan, who knew someone on every block, who had picked up a little Spanish, a little Mandarin, and a little Bengali. He bought all of his ties and crisp shirts off the folding tables that once lined Broadway, from Nigerian street vendors. He often brought my brother and me to the City and let us eat non-halal hot dogs from street carts across the island with a promise that we wouldn’t tell our mother. He walked us underground down narrow steps to Korean buffets in Midtown, bought us hot beef patties from Golden Krust in Hillside, entrusted us to the man behind the counter while he arranged some sort of clandestine business deal with the Bengali electronics-store owner down the block on Jamaica Avenue.
But what exactly makes ramen noodles, well, ramen noodles? After all, they come in all shapes, sizes, and textures. In Sapporo they’re brightly yellow and densely curled; in Hakata they’re extremely thin, brittle, and white. They can be springy or taut, wiry or thick, curly or straight, dark yellow or bright white, sometimes even tan. They can be hot or cold, long or short, translucent and dense or spongey and opaque.
What sets ramen noodles apart from other wheat-based noodles such as pasta, and what is arguably its defining characteristic, is kansui—a combination of several specific alkaline salts.
How can the contemporary novel speak the unspeakable? It’s an old question, a tired one perhaps, now that “the unspeakable” has come to encompass many forms of trauma that writers regularly speak about: self-harm, sexual abuse, genocide, fascism, climate change. Search for “speak the unspeakable” online, and the encyclopedic range of results, from the horrific (mass death) to the trivial (relationship advice) to the downright offensive (men’s rights forums, campus “free speech” controversies), makes it easy to start feeling cynical about how people deploy their memories for recognition. As the social theorist Zygmut Bauman observed, a plausible and individualized account of suffering has become a passport to social and political visibility in a world of indifference and insensitivity. “The more we try to think the unthinkable, and to speak the unspeakable, the more likely we become to qualify for a niche in a power structure, whether local or global,” Bauman writes. For the novel today, the more valid aesthetic and ethical questions concern the possibility of speaking about trauma without commodifying or further devaluing it. In what form can the novel speak, and speak self-critically, about its own processes of constructing unthinkable thoughts or unspeakable speech?
The late Croatian novelist Daša Drndić’s Belladonna (2012, English translation 2017), perhaps the most ambitious novel of the twenty-first century so far—along with its sequel, EEG—opens with three vignettes of not speaking. They are undated and without definite location: in a camp for illegal immigrants in an unidentified country, sixty incarcerated people sew their lips together and wander the grounds, not knowing how long they will be detained. Elsewhere, a woman in a red kimono throws herself through an open window. In an asylum, thirty-nine people sew their lips together to confront the staff, who refuse to address them by their names. Yet even when the pain of censorship and social death surfaces with such violent literalism, nothing comes of it. The suffering is atmospheric, the indifference unrelenting: “A still greater voicelessness reigned, a vast silence which now wafts like steam, like smoke, from the ceilings and walls of the ruined building in the back of beyond, and climbs in clouds toward the sky,” Drndić writes. “That same voicelessness, that fateful human muteness, apparently insane,” can exist anywhere and everywhere, now and throughout history.
At an advanced stage of a prolific career, Jeanette Winterson has had a surge of inventiveness. Frankissstein, her playful reanimation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic, gamely links arms with the zeitgeist. It’s a book about artificial intelligence and gender fluidity that also harks back to themes Winterson has been writing about for the past 30 years: love and desire, transformation and the unwritten meanings of the body.
Against a background of so much sensual imagery lives can seem diminished, overcome. Smither is certainly one of our most startling observers of the human condition, one of our most original and elegant wordsmiths. It gladdens a grandmother’s heart. It is a beautiful read. But its framework, its structure, seems too slight to support all that it’s called on to carry. In this poetic novel, the characters are more friendly ghosts, than storytellers demanding we hear them out.
after the fires come rain
& in the time between
one devastation & another
we delight in the normal
pleasures of a sky weeping
like an adolescent
in a multiplex parking lot—