For them, the highest attainment lower than God Himself was culture, the practice of art, its appreciation, its love, which is inspiration, the life of the mind. And so prayers were thought with the hands then written down with the tongue and were bound up into piles known to us even now as books, which are heaps of words of letters of the unknown, which were widely read and even more enthusiastically discussed by all regardless of any condition save death, as twice every week and a third time upon the Sabbath they would flock not like dark sheep but like sheepish wolves to the marketplace, the synagogue, the risen Temple that is the perfected, sanctified, if also wholly metaphorical space that even if infinite can never contain the impulse of prayer, and there would read to each other aloud the words and the Word, too, in every language they understood and in any of them about God’s deeds, about each other and their deeds, and verily people would come to bind their wisdom between these two covers of parchment, between two of them like life and death, like air and like sea, the waters above and those below as stripped from the flesh of animals who are known to be the sworn enemies of art, then how they’d bring these books of theirs in vast teeming pilgrimages to the proverbial center of the world, only to pile them again in loose heaps every night arranged into the order most newly revealing by angels in glasses known to the assembled as Rose, Pearl, and Miss Sandy Glassman, Librarian; then, to erect a roof over this pile that was to be known as the sky and walls that were to be felt as the wind, and that within this enormity they had heaped atop the stone of the foundation of the earth, which is a petrified word, unutterable, rocky upon the tongue the last name of God that silences verb, they could all come and go as they pleased, and not just three days taxed a week or just on the Sabbath but whenever convenient, and there they could find out, they could know and even avail themselves of the opportunity to approach understanding. And in the annex of this universe known as America a mensch had arisen who was also named Benjamin, who had brought down to us the secret of glasses and that of the electricity that courses as blood through our veins — and verily he had once called such an institution a Library, and so it was and was so very good that walls of marble had to be erected within the wind, and then a roof, too, had to be set as firm as marble, there under the fundament of sky because so many people had wanted in and all of them at once needing their knowledge that it had become impossible to accommodate all.
And so the select — amid the dew and fog to mingle with the steam of the sewer, they arrive at the steps, state occasion somber in their gray leathered liveries, modest limousines impounded from the recently passed: moguls, CEOs, CFOs, directors and producers; stopping short at the tombstone of the Library, at the grave of the Avenue numbered Fifth, their passengers emerging to step the flights to the entrance under umbrellas held by attendants who are moonlighting police officers deployed in uniforms of a laughable contingency falling down the stairs and shimmying down the railings that edge the stairs as these experts keep arriving and arriving without rest from earliest morning. Age holding hands with wisdom, they shuffle out and up with the posture of questionmarks, confused, even scared, not knowing why they’ve been summoned, why they’ve been forced here and on turbulent, securitysick flights and in those dingy, secondhand limos, with classes cancelled and lectures postponed, having received little information, almost no hints, and being scholars who can countenance rumor — to gather in the lobby of the Library, then once identified, fingerprinted, to sign a number of papers attesting to silence with alien pens. They’re escorted in an order even they in their wisdom, insight, and rare instances of genius are unable to understand, not by age, certainly not by the tenure of wisdom, down a wide hall, chandelierdomed and marble, into the reading room, an expanse of extenuating proportions even in the dim of this wintry month and at an hour at which even God is rarely to be found awake to our prayers: a room lined on all surfaces except ceiling and floor with trees split into shelves then spined neatly in books, which are only trees disemboweled, against which lay the rickety trunks of ladders, intermittently runged, boughs bowed under the weight of inspiration and its desperate if meaningful reach, the mating mute of grains stained with stone, the ceiling elaborately high above the gallery, a democracy of wood tempered with kingly gold, the floor below flooded with tables bobbing in the puddles of melt brought in from outside on the bottoms of shoes and the cuffed drag of pants; tables, you should have such tables, such tables as you could write a book on, a Bible, wood wide and wrinkled, topped by coppered lamps that reflect the perilous hang of those chandeliers, hung with light.
A past near the far door giving into the lobby, its steps and the street, its perpetual arrivals, with our tomorrows, if any we have, floating loftily over the gallery by the great bays of windows above, promised behind glass mullioned in steel, beyond which the sun’s just beginning its slow, glorious rise up to noon. Nakedly white, the scalp of the morning, waxed into perfection never to wane — it’s a head, a head nude, the head of the goy or maybe it’s said mensch rumored to be known only as Das, shining over the assembled, presiding over the floor. They’re occupied settling themselves, with greeting each other, shaking hands, arching brows, colleagues long lost, old students, mentors, department heads and deans, friends they hadn’t had the pleasure of in years, and suddenly — the sun comes to rest through the windows, a breath of light across the tables to flicker the lamps, and they stop, find silence, turn heads, which are all also bald, globes of their own reflecting greater light, to gaze at the figure of Das, whose stance alone on the gallery leaning against its rail and whose height augmented by thick, heavily elevated boots render him an astronomy unto himself, his medals, badges, and citations dazzling amid the heavens of woodwork and glass — they become blinded, are burnt, then just as suddenly the figure turns from their faces, whips up his uniform in his hands and resounds his steps out the door.
At his departure, silence remains with its light…though gradually, impatience manifests, and they return to their rumors again, they gossip, grumble, slap at their foreheads, who understands; these are scholars, minds, thinkers, digressers, debaters pointed of bones drycleaned, their minds if not their appearances always buttoned and cuffed, who knows to prophet from power and from profit, reward — and then, yet another question, Is this on? one of them has taken the lectern at the other end of the room; he taps the microphone, then introduces himself as Doctor Abuya; his reputation precedes, nothing. The goy to his left’s the Nachmachen, and as that name, too, means little to anyone here, all becomes clear: illuminated, in that the eye of the sun falls even on the obscure; these days — of lack, such loss — perhaps especially so. Usurpers usurp; these two, always one speaking, always one with the nodding, explain; they take turns — one always broad, patriotically stirring; the other specific, all business.