Viva la Library!
We’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.
I reach for my phone and type:
Who painted that corner diner at night with those lonely looking people sitting inside?
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.
Libraries might be our last bulwark against the digital degradation of life and learning.
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.
When I Google now, the Image Search feature of Google brings me first to advertisements for Amazon-peddled reproductions of the painting—some of them washed out and pale, others featuring the cast of in place of Hopper’s anonymous figures—all of them available
