Vassar Girls Don't Understand
The Widener Stacks are a good place to have sex, as good of a place as any, really, although some of the romance has been drained by the recent installation of motion sensitive lighting throughout the stacks. You’ll wander in a few minutes apart from and apparently unaware of your love interest, who is waiting for you somewhere sexily, convinced the granite-faced desk people watching the entrance to the library are paying attention to you and her, meet up on the third floor of C-Stack, and then skitter gigglingly into some dark corner which will become undark with a robotic click and whir, killing whatever mood your covert cassanova moves may have built up.
In contrast - but just barely, as some have argued - the Widener Steps, which extend from the front of the building, the part facing Memorial Hall and the Sever Quad, are a good place to shoot a man and kill him.
The installation of motion-sensitive lighting probably had nothing to do, one way or another, with the widely talked about but relatively rare sexual activity Widener had become famous for among generations of Harvard students, particularly after the creation of satellite libraries made actually studying in the huge, confusing building unnecessary. The idea behind the motion-sensitive lighting was to save electricity, as there is no reason to light up the really enormous expanse of the stacks system when, at any given moment, most of it was not being used. This, at least, was the logic touted by the smug, scrubby greens when they proposed the system to the administration. The wholehearted support of the greens should have doomed the plan, as it had doomed the half-dozen other projects the greens had wholeheartedly supported that semester alone, but a year later the lights were up, as if by magic. In reality, the only magic was the fact that nobody bothered to ask why there were workmen messing about with the ceilings in Widener – Widener was hella old, and it workmen were a common enough sight.
In Widener, the motion-detecting light system’s most important role - as who really gives a good goddamn about electricity bills when you’re sitting on 20 billion dollars in endowment money? – it’s primary function, if not intent, was to make sex in the stacks a dangerous proposition for the kind of people who were worried about having sex in a library under lights. You could argue that these people are precisely the kind of people who wouldn’t have sex in a library in the first place, who would stick to their girlfriend’s bedrooms and the Wellesely campus, which in our ignorant stories consisted entirely of a potential girlfriends’ (note the apostrophe, which is tellingly placed, hee hee hee) bedroom, and you’d have a good point, and hey, good for you, you’re really clever and observant, I bet many people respect that in you, but I’m telling you something important, so sheath your mind for a second.
The Widener steps were a good place to shoot a man and kill him in part because they had been a good place to shoot a man and kill him for hundreds of years. For example: if the unlucky person in your killing scenario was lucky enough to fall just right he might resemble, in the outline they drew of him afterward, at least, the famous son of an oil magnate shot through the temple, right through the brim of his hat and dead-on into his skull, despite having the quickest draw in the class of 1934, when his pistol failed to fire after having been left out in the rain by a careless manservant, who later killed himself, two nights before. If you survived your duel you might, like future secretary of state Tyler Reston McFee, class of 1859, coin a cool, nonchalant, shaky-handed gesture as you reholstered your weapon, a brush of gunbarrel against the sky that would be copied by future duelists for decades and enter legend.
Another reason the Widener Steps were good for killing was, well, look at them, they’re big and gray and serious, they’re gravestones ready to be cut out and placed in rows, as I once described the steps to a curious friend safely making his way through State. With the big, beautiful church, non-denominational or not, across the way and a seemingly ever-present promise of solemn autumn in the very New England trees between you and the steeple, there’s something about those steps that just breathes blood, in the same way the Romance Language section of the stacks inside are supposed to breathe sex, although in both cases the breathing is pure bullshit conjecture, is a fake impression you don’t have while standing there with your gun in your hand; nobody breathes, let alone has, sex in the Romance Language section of the Widener Stacks, not really, as those two aisles are right by one of the busiest stairwells in the place, the central one, it’s just something people say because of the word “romance,” and places can’t breathe blood, that’ silly, if anything the Widener steps breathe good craftsmanship, but you’re not going to try to describe that with your hands over a beer with your roommates, are you? Still, there’s a poetry at work there if you’re willing to submit to it, which of course we all were, we’d all been working our asses off for the past four years of high school for the chance to submit to it. Rahid, from Lebanon? You know where Lebanon is? He came from Lebanon to get shot at, and if he makes it back, he’ll have come back from America to tell people at home, Lebanese people, about it, how crazy and globalized is that?
We talked a lot about the sex, were in fact more scared about the sex that wasn’t happening than the gunbattles that were, while we were in college, but it’s the shooting that sticks in all of our minds when we think about Widener, or at least in mine. It’s a really, really, cool place to have survived gunplay, a place and a time you could tell your grandchildren about as you cleaned your gun in front of them and their mother, your son’s wife, a Smith or Vassar girl, by the looks of her, watches on disapprovingly from the doorway.
In contrast - but just barely, as some have argued - the Widener Steps, which extend from the front of the building, the part facing Memorial Hall and the Sever Quad, are a good place to shoot a man and kill him.
The installation of motion-sensitive lighting probably had nothing to do, one way or another, with the widely talked about but relatively rare sexual activity Widener had become famous for among generations of Harvard students, particularly after the creation of satellite libraries made actually studying in the huge, confusing building unnecessary. The idea behind the motion-sensitive lighting was to save electricity, as there is no reason to light up the really enormous expanse of the stacks system when, at any given moment, most of it was not being used. This, at least, was the logic touted by the smug, scrubby greens when they proposed the system to the administration. The wholehearted support of the greens should have doomed the plan, as it had doomed the half-dozen other projects the greens had wholeheartedly supported that semester alone, but a year later the lights were up, as if by magic. In reality, the only magic was the fact that nobody bothered to ask why there were workmen messing about with the ceilings in Widener – Widener was hella old, and it workmen were a common enough sight.
In Widener, the motion-detecting light system’s most important role - as who really gives a good goddamn about electricity bills when you’re sitting on 20 billion dollars in endowment money? – it’s primary function, if not intent, was to make sex in the stacks a dangerous proposition for the kind of people who were worried about having sex in a library under lights. You could argue that these people are precisely the kind of people who wouldn’t have sex in a library in the first place, who would stick to their girlfriend’s bedrooms and the Wellesely campus, which in our ignorant stories consisted entirely of a potential girlfriends’ (note the apostrophe, which is tellingly placed, hee hee hee) bedroom, and you’d have a good point, and hey, good for you, you’re really clever and observant, I bet many people respect that in you, but I’m telling you something important, so sheath your mind for a second.
The Widener steps were a good place to shoot a man and kill him in part because they had been a good place to shoot a man and kill him for hundreds of years. For example: if the unlucky person in your killing scenario was lucky enough to fall just right he might resemble, in the outline they drew of him afterward, at least, the famous son of an oil magnate shot through the temple, right through the brim of his hat and dead-on into his skull, despite having the quickest draw in the class of 1934, when his pistol failed to fire after having been left out in the rain by a careless manservant, who later killed himself, two nights before. If you survived your duel you might, like future secretary of state Tyler Reston McFee, class of 1859, coin a cool, nonchalant, shaky-handed gesture as you reholstered your weapon, a brush of gunbarrel against the sky that would be copied by future duelists for decades and enter legend.
Another reason the Widener Steps were good for killing was, well, look at them, they’re big and gray and serious, they’re gravestones ready to be cut out and placed in rows, as I once described the steps to a curious friend safely making his way through State. With the big, beautiful church, non-denominational or not, across the way and a seemingly ever-present promise of solemn autumn in the very New England trees between you and the steeple, there’s something about those steps that just breathes blood, in the same way the Romance Language section of the stacks inside are supposed to breathe sex, although in both cases the breathing is pure bullshit conjecture, is a fake impression you don’t have while standing there with your gun in your hand; nobody breathes, let alone has, sex in the Romance Language section of the Widener Stacks, not really, as those two aisles are right by one of the busiest stairwells in the place, the central one, it’s just something people say because of the word “romance,” and places can’t breathe blood, that’ silly, if anything the Widener steps breathe good craftsmanship, but you’re not going to try to describe that with your hands over a beer with your roommates, are you? Still, there’s a poetry at work there if you’re willing to submit to it, which of course we all were, we’d all been working our asses off for the past four years of high school for the chance to submit to it. Rahid, from Lebanon? You know where Lebanon is? He came from Lebanon to get shot at, and if he makes it back, he’ll have come back from America to tell people at home, Lebanese people, about it, how crazy and globalized is that?
We talked a lot about the sex, were in fact more scared about the sex that wasn’t happening than the gunbattles that were, while we were in college, but it’s the shooting that sticks in all of our minds when we think about Widener, or at least in mine. It’s a really, really, cool place to have survived gunplay, a place and a time you could tell your grandchildren about as you cleaned your gun in front of them and their mother, your son’s wife, a Smith or Vassar girl, by the looks of her, watches on disapprovingly from the doorway.
posted by Jeremy at 1:04 PM
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