`A Small, Metaphysical Quiver'

On Monday, when I picked up a stack of books and DVDs I had ordered from the library, the clerk took a second look at the case containing Winter Light, Ingmar Bergman’s 1962 film. I had read a brief essay about it in The New Yorker, written by Tobias Wolff, and decided to watch it again. On the case holding the DVD is a stark black-and-white still of the tormented pastor in the film, Tomas Ericsson, played by the late Gunnar Björnstrand. The clerk stared at the picture and asked, “What’s this about?” I stammered something about faith, doubt and existential anxiety, and added, “It’s a pretty serious movie.” I immediately wondered whether I had sounded condescending, but then she said, “So, it’s not Seinfeld, huh?” She laughed and said she would put a hold on it for herself.

This brief exchange reminds me how much I’ve enjoyed the company of librarians, including our own Dave Lull. Most, even if not formidably well-read, possess an old-fashioned respect for books and what used to be known, without a hint of irony, as “culture.” True, I’ve also known a few, particularly since the metastasis of the computer, who remain as doltish as, say, a Seinfeld enthusiast.

Last week, Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti asked if I had ever read anything by the poet Baron Wormser. That’s a name I would have remembered (I said he sounded like “a scion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”), so I was certain I had not. At Mike’s suggestion I ordered from the library one of Wormser’s poetry collections, When, and a prose work, The Road Washes Out in Spring. The latter is a memoir of the almost 25 years Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine without electricity or running water. Early in the book, not long after my serendipitous conversation with the library clerk, I read the following passage:

“The great Borges had been a librarian. It was easy to see why. Although librarians in America were as keen on whiz-bang technology as anyone else, there remained a certain literal dustiness to the vocation, a fascination with the mind’s alleyways, boulevards, and dead ends. Even a dull book was the product of some species of imagination. And the relations among the books, the strange neighbors that libraries created, the fraught decisions that my students made each day in choosing books and that I made in selecting them gave off a small, metaphysical quiver.”

Talking to the library clerk about Bergman, skirting matters of ultimate seriousness while trying to sound casual and friendly, that’s about what I felt – “a small, metaphysical quiver.”