Speaker 1: Hollo I moalcan stories all the time. Glad you are here,
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: It was a Thursday morning made for memory, sunlight angling
Speaker 2: onto the flagstones, the city's usual bustle, as gentle and
Speaker 2: predictable as the river that curled, wide shouldered and brown
Speaker 2: green passed downtown. My walk followed the path it always did,
Speaker 2: up the stone steps, between the giant sycamores, through the
Speaker 2: bronze doors of the public Library, past the stained glass
Speaker 2: coat of arms, whose details I'd studdied a hundred times
Speaker 2: for calming effect. The old place still gave me that
Speaker 2: odd sense of anticipation, a kind of readiness, as if
Speaker 2: each visit promised some fragment of the city's vanished past,
Speaker 2: tucked between stacks and sunbeams. I was seventy three, a
Speaker 2: retired history teacher. I've been coming here in one version
Speaker 2: or another for most of my life. My week was
Speaker 2: built around these routines, the slow uprising of Thursday, to
Speaker 2: the library, lingering among books, then lunch at the riverside cafe,
Speaker 2: and an afternoon stroll. I measured time in small pleasures.
Speaker 2: Yet for all this I rarely thought of the architecture itself,
Speaker 2: except of course, for the River Alcove. Some spaces are
Speaker 2: more than convenient corners. They become characters in your life,
Speaker 2: story fixtures more permanent than friendships. The River Alcove had
Speaker 2: been my favorite place to read, annotate, and years ago
Speaker 2: to prepare class lectures on late century civic history and
Speaker 2: temperamental mares. A rounded nook tucked at the far end
Speaker 2: of the second floor. Its colored window glass looked out
Speaker 2: over the south bend in the river, making rainbows ripple
Speaker 2: across the face of any one absorbed in a book.
Speaker 2: The wood paneling had a particular creek. The chair arms
Speaker 2: bore notches, softly worn in the brass by five decades
Speaker 2: of elbows. This specific morning, I drifted back toward it
Speaker 2: by instinct, but the corridor ended in a jarring way,
Speaker 2: ordinary shelves tight against a blank uninterrupted wall, no curve,
Speaker 2: no traces of old doors or thresholds. The niche where
Speaker 2: the River Alcove should have been simply wasn't there. Instead,
Speaker 2: a row of atlas, volumes and gardening encyclopedias occupied the space,
Speaker 2: pressed close as if nothing had ever existed beyond. I
Speaker 2: stopped feeling foolish and transient. I palmed the shelf's edge.
Speaker 2: Craned for some sign painted over trim, faint scoring of wood,
Speaker 2: and found nothing. Even the dust settled like it had
Speaker 2: always lived there. I could not immediately decide whether my
Speaker 2: memory had twisted around some old addition, or if I'd
Speaker 2: blundered into a pocket of the library I hadn't charted
Speaker 2: since the renovations decades ago. Confusion I've found isn't so
Speaker 2: much unpleasant as electrifying, A little current that wakes you up.
Speaker 2: I flagged a librarian shelving reference books two aisles down.
Speaker 2: She was a new face to me, young with an
Speaker 2: easy practiced smile. Excuse me, I'm looking for the river alcove.
Speaker 2: I used to spend hours there, the nook with the
Speaker 2: colored glass window overlooking the river, second floor, just beyond
Speaker 2: the periodical shelves. She shook her head, apologetic, haven't heard
Speaker 2: that name. I'm afraid we have the Riverside Room on
Speaker 2: the first floor. Maybe you mean that. No, No, not
Speaker 2: the Riverside Room. This was a small space up here,
Speaker 2: rounded woodwork, a little plaque, colored glass. I searched for
Speaker 2: the right detail, something to make the memory tangible. It
Speaker 2: had an old plaque from the Lascar family. I think
Speaker 2: you could see the water curve toward the south bridge.
Speaker 2: She offered a courteous blank look. I only started here
Speaker 2: last year, but I don't remember any nook quite like that.
Speaker 2: Maybe a reading corner has been converted, but nothing called
Speaker 2: river Alcove. That answer, delivered kindly, had the peculiar effect
Speaker 2: of intensifying my curiosity. The memory was sharp, hours hunched
Speaker 2: over exam booklets, the nubby arm chair, the stretch of
Speaker 2: afternoon sun. I was used to feeling nostalgia as a
Speaker 2: soft ache. This was different. How could a physical place
Speaker 2: just slide out of history, unacknowledged, unmarked? I tried again,
Speaker 2: with more detail. She met me with gentle apology but
Speaker 2: shrinking patience. I'm sorry, sir, I can check with another
Speaker 2: librarian if you like, I demurred, stepping away. The sense
Speaker 2: of times layering here had always calmed me. These walls
Speaker 2: had witnessed entire eras, the waxing and fading of fads
Speaker 2: and festivals, the persistent undercurrent of people searching for something.
Speaker 2: But now my own recollection was suddenly at odds with
Speaker 2: the evidence of my eyes. I lingered, glancing down the
Speaker 2: length of fluorescent lit corridors and along the stacking of atlases,
Speaker 2: half expecting the world to offer up a clue. The
Speaker 2: mood wasn't ominous. Rather, there was an atmosphere of everyday
Speaker 2: life ttinuing just as vigorously as ever. Yet somewhere a
Speaker 2: boundary had shifted My certainty in place, and memory was
Speaker 2: no longer absolute, and curiosity had become suddenly vividly urgent.
Speaker 2: Every library is a palimpsest, layers upon layers of architecture, ownership, ambition.
Speaker 2: Hours stood out only because the passage of time hadn't
Speaker 2: quite buffed out the seams. City Hall perched diagonally across
Speaker 2: from it with its modern glass swoop, while the library's core,
Speaker 2: built in nineteen thirty nine, remained true to kind of
Speaker 2: institutional art deco, bold trim brick, the color of dried cherries,
Speaker 2: and a heavy stone staircase that always seemed to echo
Speaker 2: even when empty. The years had brought additions and removals,
Speaker 2: a new children's wing funded by a burst of nineties optimism,
Speaker 2: a multi media hub installed and then quietly neglected. Replacement
Speaker 2: windows that distorted both sunlight and sound. Each merger of
Speaker 2: old and new left slight mismatches, a wall too thick
Speaker 2: for a modern vent, mosaic tile patterns that stuttered to
Speaker 2: a halt at invisible borders. If you paid attention, the
Speaker 2: building's history was as much in what didn't match as
Speaker 2: what did. After teaching high schoolers for nearly forty years,
Speaker 2: my sense of history had become not just academic but tactile.
Speaker 2: I noticed how elevator buttons had switched from bakerlite to
Speaker 2: brushed steel, how the original clock in the lobby remained
Speaker 2: stubbornly four minutes behind modern phones. It was a city
Speaker 2: of coexistence, new steel gleaming beside old brick chain coffee
Speaker 2: shops next to delis that still used paper ledgers. The
Speaker 2: river at the city's edge taught patients with its lazy bends,
Speaker 2: and so had I. Letting the years retirement, widowhood, adult
Speaker 2: children settle into a pattern that left room for small
Speaker 2: obsessions like this one. The library staff rotated over the years,
Speaker 2: but a handful became familiar. Miriam in the reference archive,
Speaker 2: whose glasses were always perilously low on her nose and
Speaker 2: who delighted in ferreting out missing footnotes, Kevin security guard
Speaker 2: and unofficial wit who claimed to remember every minor drama
Speaker 2: ever staged in the main reading hall, but nothing of
Speaker 2: the books. Ruth, now senior librarian and nearing retirement herself,
Speaker 2: who managed the delicate balance between order and the slow
Speaker 2: encroachment of chaos. There were regulars too, Mister Giles, a
Speaker 2: local historian with a nose for the city's obscure by laws,
Speaker 2: who believed every institution should maintain its own secret code. Anita,
Speaker 2: a university student toggling endlessly between worlds, her bag always
Speaker 2: bulging with half read novels and print outs. And old
Speaker 2: missus Chen, who preferred foreign newspapers and had been known
Speaker 2: on icy mornings to correct staff about misplaced Romanoff genealogies.
Speaker 2: After retirement, I had fallen into a rhythm three mornings
Speaker 2: a week at the library, a slow circuit through eas
Speaker 2: each floor, conversations drifting in and out, half remembered names
Speaker 2: attached to faces that seemed as permanent as the stacks themselves.
Speaker 2: I become fond of seeing how displays migrated, how rooms
Speaker 2: subtly changed place or composition depending on the whim of
Speaker 2: whoever was shelving that month. And yet through all this movement,
Speaker 2: certain landmarks had remained unmoved in my mind, especially the
Speaker 2: river alcove. The trust I placed in these recollections was
Speaker 2: almost superstitious. My own sense of time in the building
Speaker 2: ran deep, layered beneath years of changing policies and seasons.
Speaker 2: Traffic patterns shifted, events came and went, but the view
Speaker 2: from that rounded nook was until now as stable as
Speaker 2: the river itself. My feet sometimes led me there, as
Speaker 2: if tracing a groove. This is what made the loss,
Speaker 2: or the absence so disturbing. In its quiet way, the
Speaker 2: outside world remained as it had always been, festival posters
Speaker 2: taped to lamp posts, children trailing blow along the river, walk,
Speaker 2: raucous geese patrolling the bank. And yet in the library
Speaker 2: the edges of certainty felt newly porous. It wasn't menace
Speaker 2: or fear that stirred in me, but a renewed alertness,
Speaker 2: the conviction that beneath the clean, managed surfaces, something crucial
Speaker 2: had changed and was waiting to be found by someone
Speaker 2: willing to look closely enough. I'm not above a gentle persistence,
Speaker 2: especially when some facet of local law is concerned. So,
Speaker 2: after wandering the illogical corridor in hopes that some trick
Speaker 2: of angle or stacking wood betray the missing nook. I
Speaker 2: went in search of Ruth. Her office smelled of old
Speaker 2: carpet and violets, and she presided over it like an
Speaker 2: admiral over a ship, unlikely ever to leave port. I
Speaker 2: need your memory, Ruth, I launched in voice, half in jest,
Speaker 2: half serious. You ever come across something called the river
Speaker 2: Alcove on the second floor, just passed where the periodical
Speaker 2: shelves used to run. It had an old glass window,
Speaker 2: rounded walls, Lascar family dedication. She set aside her tea,
Speaker 2: the mug ring overlapping years of memo circles on her desk.
Speaker 2: River Alcove. She rolled the phrase around. No can't say
Speaker 2: I do. We had a Lascar reading room, all right,
Speaker 2: but that was long gone before I ever started. Small boxy,
Speaker 2: nothing rounded. That would have been maybe the late seventies
Speaker 2: into the eighties. But no colored glass window and no plaque.
Speaker 2: I'd remember. The board is mad about keeping donor names visible.
Speaker 2: That's half my morning making sure the right plaques hang
Speaker 2: above the right doors. She pulled out some brittle staff
Speaker 2: directories and scrolled through them with the air of someone
Speaker 2: certain she'd seen every permutation of the building twice over.
Speaker 2: No river alcove anywhere in these nor in the renovation minutes.
Speaker 2: And trust me, if there ever was a Lascar nook,
Speaker 2: someone would have raised hell when they changed it. I
Speaker 2: pressed a bit further, offering more detail, the window with
Speaker 2: yellow and blue glass, the curved bookcases, the way early
Speaker 2: sun hit the plaque, turning the letters gold. I could
Speaker 2: nearly smell the deep dry wood polish in that memory.
Speaker 2: Here the subtle would groan when you settled down. Kevin,
Speaker 2: who had wandered by on his break, chimed in from
Speaker 2: the door with a grin. Sounds like one of those
Speaker 2: spaces they made for the costume parties in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Remember that murder Mystery night. Maybe your thinking of the
Speaker 2: story Cubby in the children's wing. That thing had fake
Speaker 2: stained glass and smelled like crayons for a decade. Not
Speaker 2: a children's area, I replied, it was a space for
Speaker 2: grown ups, serious readers, near the river sunlit. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 2: renovations have changed a lot. You be amazed how many
Speaker 2: people come looking for bits that vanished before I even
Speaker 2: worked here. Missus Firth used to insist there was a
Speaker 2: genealogy gallery with arm chairs made from oak trees that
Speaker 2: had survived two floods. Rugged smiling buildings do weird things.
Speaker 2: Memory does weirder. Ruth gave a tolerant snort. He's got
Speaker 2: a point. Rooms get absorbed, corners get squared off. Once
Speaker 2: a spiral staircase now a broom closet. Half our directory
Speaker 2: is a graveyard of names that meant something one year
Speaker 2: and nothing the next. Structures have to adapt. But I
Speaker 2: remember the plaque donated by the Lascar family nineteen hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty two, clear as yesterday. I insisted it's shaped
Speaker 2: dozens of my classes. I referenced its dedication in a
Speaker 2: spring lecture on local philanthropy. I be more inclined to
Speaker 2: doubt my taste in ties than that. Ruth offered a
Speaker 2: kind a praising expression. It's harder than you'd think to
Speaker 2: nail these things down. I've been asked about a sun
Speaker 2: parlor upstairs at least five times, but there's no sign
Speaker 2: it was ever built. Are you sure the memory is
Speaker 2: yours and not borrowed from some faded photo. We've caught
Speaker 2: ourselves out before I left with thanks, But something quiet
Speaker 2: had begun to fray inside me. My confidence Once bedrock
Speaker 2: wavered a creeping, almost exhilarating uncertainty. What did it mean
Speaker 2: if a dozen small architectural facts could have been quietly
Speaker 2: edited out of history unremarked? Could memory be so unreliable
Speaker 2: or the evidence so malleable? The contradictions stuck with me.
Speaker 2: The sharper my recollection, the more remote the chance that
Speaker 2: any one else would confirm it. Yet a part of
Speaker 2: me was quietly thrilled. Every teacher knows when facts clash
Speaker 2: learning is about to happen. I set off in search
Speaker 2: of proof something indisputable. At the entrance, pinned beside a
Speaker 2: faded schedule for Thai Chi classes, hung several up to
Speaker 2: date maps. The diagram was efficient, color coded by section,
Speaker 2: every room numbered and named, no river alcove. The spaces
Speaker 2: at that end of the second floor were marked atlases
Speaker 2: and community history. I checked another map just inside the stacks,
Speaker 2: same story, no mention of anything rounded, no hint of
Speaker 2: a space that looked toward the river, Only long rectangular
Speaker 2: reading rooms blurring into periods of beige. Curiosity doubled back
Speaker 2: on itself, hunting for another plausible path. I remembered neighborhood
Speaker 2: legends that before the largest renovation nineteen hundred and eighty seven.
Speaker 2: If memory served, the library's old maps sometimes turned up
Speaker 2: at the city archives or left overlooked in staff files.
Speaker 2: Room names had a way of changing between decades, sometimes reverting,
Speaker 2: sometimes vanishing altogether. I found Miriam in the reference area,
Speaker 2: furrowing over a stack of climate studies. Do we have
Speaker 2: any old library floor plans? I asked, keeping my tone light.
Speaker 2: Her brow furrowed in professional pleasure. You want which era?
Speaker 2: I have some collation work running back as far as
Speaker 2: the forties? Was there a particular space? I described the
Speaker 2: River Alcove, its shape, plaque window, hoping something in my
Speaker 2: specificity might spark She considered, I don't recall that name. Honestly,
Speaker 2: there was the Lascar Reading Room on some blueprints, but
Speaker 2: always listed as rectangular in the east wing. But I'll check.
Speaker 2: She led me to a microfilm reader in the basement annex,
Speaker 2: a space almost as full of ghosts as the maps themselves.
Speaker 2: Among rolls of blueprints and annotated directories, she unspooled a
Speaker 2: series from nineteen fifty six through nineteen ninety two, or
Speaker 2: not one did the River Alcove appear, not even as
Speaker 2: a former name or unassigned space. Any mention of the
Speaker 2: lascars described routine boxy study rooms. The rounded nook with
Speaker 2: its glass and view was absent, as if excised from
Speaker 2: memory itself. We speculated, was it possible a dedicated space
Speaker 2: had been carved out, then later erased or renamed. Were
Speaker 2: room names shuffled on maps even as the spaces themselves
Speaker 2: changed purpose. It happens, Miriam said, with a wry smile.
Speaker 2: Libraries are almost as fluid as their patrons. The minute
Speaker 2: someone stops using a room for its intended purpose, it
Speaker 2: can become anything. She tapped her temple. But I'll admit
Speaker 2: your description is oddly persistent. Maybe check the card catalog
Speaker 2: in the basement. Sometimes room names and dedications turn up
Speaker 2: in ways you'd least expect down there. That was the
Speaker 2: best suggestion yet. I slipped down the stairs, feeling half
Speaker 2: way between detective and ghost hunter. The air was thick
Speaker 2: with decades old paper and the pungent trace of ink.
Speaker 2: The core of the old card catalog had survived digitization.
Speaker 2: Half a dozen rolling units, each drawer holding fragile, yellowed cards.
Speaker 2: Skimming through dedications and room names, I unearthed dozens of
Speaker 2: entries marked Lascar, some attached to periodicals, others to donated
Speaker 2: collections of biographies and city council minutes. Only a few
Speaker 2: referenced rooms. One a hand typed card postmark nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: three read Laskar Family periodical's alcove, second floor East. That
Speaker 2: word alcove leaped at me, but the subsequent location didn't
Speaker 2: match the memory. Mapps said, east Wing, not riverside. I
Speaker 2: traced a faded entry dedicated nineteen fifty two, blanched Lascar,
Speaker 2: Its details blurred. The card bent at one corner, as
Speaker 2: if often examined. But nowhere was there a river alcove,
Speaker 2: at least not in the systematic records. I was joined
Speaker 2: by mister Giles, who materialized from behind a column of
Speaker 2: government reports, his familiar navy caps slightly askew. On the hunt,
Speaker 2: He inquired with amused dignity chasing lost rooms, I replied,
Speaker 2: ever work in the Lascar reading room. Giles's eyes narrowed
Speaker 2: in concentration years ago. Yes, but it was as a
Speaker 2: square room, two windows facing the east, Council minutes, magazines,
Speaker 2: sometimes a visiting writer, No nook, no river view. Are
Speaker 2: you sure you're not thinking of the old balcony lounge. Positive,
Speaker 2: I said, this was a different kind of space, rounded,
Speaker 2: colorful glass. It made its own sort of sanctuary. He smiled,
Speaker 2: but his recollection stood immovable as a bollard. All I
Speaker 2: remember of the Lascar connection was civic, dry as dust, documents,
Speaker 2: not sunlit retreats. And if there had been such a
Speaker 2: comfortable nook, I'd have made it my lair. I pushed
Speaker 2: on retracing steps near where the river alcove had stood.
Speaker 2: Should have stood and let my hand drift over painted trim.
Speaker 2: There were physical clues, shy but insistent, a faint curve
Speaker 2: in the walls, molding trim that seemed to ark toward
Speaker 2: nothing before disappearing. On the floor above, I discovered a
Speaker 2: stained glass fixture overlooked in all the maps, with a
Speaker 2: swirling pattern and a dedication tiny script painted in one
Speaker 2: corner to m l whose spirit brightened these halls. In
Speaker 2: the main stacks, three books I'd first encountered in the
Speaker 2: alcove now appeared elsewhere. A battered anthology of Great Lakes Shipping,
Speaker 2: once shelved in non fiction, now under poetry, a city
Speaker 2: found as biography with pages that didn't match my memory.
Speaker 2: New events vanished a notations a children's story collection. Its
Speaker 2: cover almost the same, but the stories subtly altered from
Speaker 2: those I d once shared with my students. Anita, passing
Speaker 2: with her usual whirlwind of text books, paused at my questions,
Speaker 2: you know what's weird? Books? Just my grate in here.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I swear I'll find a mathematics primer in the
Speaker 2: local history section, or pamphlets on French grammar hidden between
Speaker 2: ancient city directories. I figure its students not paying attention.
Speaker 2: Maybe there's a ghost with a sense of humor. The
Speaker 2: more I spoke with people, the more odd descrepcies appeared.
Speaker 2: Cattle dog cards referenced vanished wings Arden room, third floor.
Speaker 2: See also Evening Lectures nineteen seventy one nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 2: dedications to donors whose names did not show up in
Speaker 2: city records, study rooms that defied alignment with any present
Speaker 2: day map. Giles confided he'd once tried to find a
Speaker 2: circular gallery someone had written about in nineteen sixty two
Speaker 2: minutes it had been nowhere, and he'd chalked it up
Speaker 2: to a clerical legend. Each step I took away from
Speaker 2: the original mystery only multiplied the contradictions. The clues layered,
Speaker 2: bricked up doorways, dedications to families. No one now remembered
Speaker 2: stories in books with slight, untraceable changes, and with every
Speaker 2: one the clear logical pattern I sought dissolved a little further.
Speaker 2: But the world outside the city's hum the river walk,
Speaker 2: even the fixed points of communal life, remained solid, consistent.
Speaker 2: It was only within these walls, within the drifting habits
Speaker 2: of memory and record, that space refused to hold steady.
Speaker 2: A lesser mystery might have faded under scrutiny, this one
Speaker 2: only grew the task of untangling it all. Followed me
Speaker 2: home that afternoon, after a lunch cut short by restlessness.
Speaker 2: I sat at the kitchen table and mapped, as best
Speaker 2: I could the way I remembered the library's second floor.
Speaker 2: I drew rectangles for the official reading rooms, then attempted
Speaker 2: to sketch where the river alcove would have fit. It
Speaker 2: refused to settle into the current contours. Its arc extended
Speaker 2: beyond the wall now occupied by atlases, nudging into what
Speaker 2: had clearly become an entirely different space. Overlaying my memory
Speaker 2: with the evidence of the new Laoud, the distortion widened.
Speaker 2: Not only did the room not exist, but placing it
Speaker 2: within to day's architecture created impossibilities. Corridors would overlap, windows
Speaker 2: would puncture, walls never designed for light. I returned next
Speaker 2: library day, drawn by a compounding sense that my uncertainty
Speaker 2: might be shared. I found Ruth and Giles, each leafing
Speaker 2: through different shades of history. Ruth met my questions with
Speaker 2: half resignation, Giles with scholarly skepticism. Let es be honest,
Speaker 2: Ruth said, you aren't the first. Every few years some
Speaker 2: one gets it in their head that a study Carrol
Speaker 2: or little reading knook was hidden away, a memory so specific.
Speaker 2: They'll draw maps or submit written complaints. But when I check,
Speaker 2: the paperwork is blank. It's like the room never existed.
Speaker 2: Giles characteristically wanted evidence. If there ever was a rounded
Speaker 2: river alcove, some one would have written about it. Have
Speaker 2: you found any articles or policies mentioning its demolition, its creation? Anything?
Speaker 2: I admitted I hadn't, And yet Ruth continued. There was
Speaker 2: an assistant librarian in the eighties, Agnes I Think, who
Speaker 2: swore the south stairs led to three different wings. In
Speaker 2: her first summer. She was so persuaded she walked guests
Speaker 2: into a supply closet, expecting a genealogy gallery that no
Speaker 2: one else ever found. The implications were unsettling but exhilarating.
Speaker 2: I asked if any one besides me had remembered certain
Speaker 2: vanished spaces. Giles pursed his lips. Most of us learned
Speaker 2: to let go off. The record resists there's always a
Speaker 2: reasonable story, renovations, mistakes, or urban myth. But sometimes yes,
Speaker 2: the details pile up too neatly to dismiss. It was
Speaker 2: at this point that I grasped the scope. The contradiction
Speaker 2: was not just between my memory and present day architecture,
Speaker 2: but between all available memories and the current physical reality.
Speaker 2: I scribbled across my notes. Is the library itself responsible
Speaker 2: for this? Or are we? That's how the question moved,
Speaker 2: not just what had happened to a single space, but
Speaker 2: what system could create such silences. I left my routine,
Speaker 2: appended with a setents that I'd pressed a finger into
Speaker 2: some seam of the library's hidden structure and found it
Speaker 2: flexing back, quietly, resisting my curiosity. The next morning, I
Speaker 2: entered the library with a new sort of vigilance. I
Speaker 2: started at the entrance, tracing my habitual pattern, but now
Speaker 2: keeping an eye for small mismatches edges where architecture or
Speaker 2: catalog betrayed its own unreliability. I began with the main directory,
Speaker 2: then the placriddled corridor beside the administrative office. The display
Speaker 2: was careful, a neat timeline, ending at the most recent expansion,
Speaker 2: A panoply of donors framed just above eye level, and
Speaker 2: to the left a collection of faded photographs depicting ceremonial
Speaker 2: ribbon cuttings, long vanished staff faces, and the steady transformation
Speaker 2: of the library's exterior. None referenced the river alcove, Yet
Speaker 2: under a Lascar family nineteen fifty two in the donor register,
Speaker 2: a gap appeared. The log named the family, but failed
Speaker 2: to to append a room or visible donation description. Other
Speaker 2: donors had exact attributions children's wings sofas circulation desk needs
Speaker 2: funded by this or that. The Lascar entry floated oddly unattached.
Speaker 2: I proceeded to the staff's map closet, a low cabinet
Speaker 2: at the rear of the reference desk. No one stopped me.
Speaker 2: Among the various blueprints marked with both pencil and read
Speaker 2: ink notations was a folder labeled obsolete layouts. I spread
Speaker 2: them out on an empty reference table, ignoring the quick
Speaker 2: glances of passing patrons. Early maps, whathered almost to translucence,
Speaker 2: revealed a patchwork of changing room titles. Several included spaces
Speaker 2: labeled reading Room E or staff Retreat North, but never
Speaker 2: a rounded alcove, matching my visual memory. When annotated alterations
Speaker 2: were simply r M, reassigned or merged with gallery, no
Speaker 2: evidence directly for or against the missing nook, only evidence
Speaker 2: of a constant quiet churn. I felt as if I
Speaker 2: were searching for the shadow, something no longer willing to
Speaker 2: be found. Turning my search outward, I ran into Giles again.
Speaker 2: He too had become energized by the mystery. He squinted
Speaker 2: at the maps. If you look at enough of these,
Speaker 2: you'll find that nearly every corner has changed name, function,
Speaker 2: or both at some point. Maybe what we're chasing is
Speaker 2: a lost nomenclature, a shift in language. Not brick. But then,
Speaker 2: making conversation as much as seeking solace, I took up
Speaker 2: the old card catalog. A dozen entries referenced rooms that
Speaker 2: conflicted with official history Ardent family, wing glass, mezzanine pamphlet archive.
Speaker 2: Each had an attached archiving date, but the physical spaces
Speaker 2: had been replaced, their contents folded into unfamiliar areas of
Speaker 2: the collection. Among the stacks, I once again searched for
Speaker 2: the books i'd known best. In the river alcove, I
Speaker 2: found an anthology of river poems, now surprisingly shelved among
Speaker 2: science periodicals. A volume about great lake shipping its dust jacket,
Speaker 2: a variant i'd never seen, now marked as poetry rather
Speaker 2: than history. More intriguing, a biography of our city's founder,
Speaker 2: previously packed with margin notes and sticky tabs when I
Speaker 2: first borrowed it years ago, now had immaculate pages and
Speaker 2: several new chapters covering festivals I did not remember existing.
Speaker 2: I triple checked the author an edition neither matched my
Speaker 2: mental catalog, though the general outline remained familiar. I rescued
Speaker 2: a children's story collection from a donation's shelf, only to
Speaker 2: find that one story which I had told to my
Speaker 2: own daughters, an odd fable about a fox and the
Speaker 2: spring thaw, was now missing altogether, replaced by a piece
Speaker 2: about river barges. At this point, resignation teased at me,
Speaker 2: but fascination won out. The more I hunted, the more
Speaker 2: the contradictions multiplied. Every person I consulted, Anita Giles missus
Speaker 2: Chen had stories of their own found objects that made
Speaker 2: no sense in their context, shifting locations, dedications to donor's
Speaker 2: lost to collective memory. The library, it seemed, had an
Speaker 2: invisible process, a quiet, undramatic mechanism capable of rewriting its
Speaker 2: own reality, leaving behind only slivers of artifact and overlapping recollections.
Speaker 2: I brought this growing hypothesis to missus Chen, who, in
Speaker 2: her own precise way, recounted finding periodicals in an old
Speaker 2: mezzanine now walled over, and claimed that in her youth
Speaker 2: there had been an upstairs window seat with a view
Speaker 2: of the South Bridge, lost with no notice. Anita, more agitated,
Speaker 2: vented about how a year old French primer she d
Speaker 2: used in a translation contest had turned up deep within
Speaker 2: the genealogy section, tucked behind an engineering manual. It's almost
Speaker 2: like the books themselves. Elves move or are moved according
Speaker 2: to whims, or maybe I don't know, according to the
Speaker 2: building's own memory. I noted how the discrepancies expanded beyond books,
Speaker 2: architectural details, door jams that curved into nothing, a banister
Speaker 2: stub ending abruptly in madeia a glass lamp with initials
Speaker 2: that defied any match in city records. There was a
Speaker 2: stained glass fixture upstairs, High and Proud, whose dedication to
Speaker 2: m L no one could properly recall. Talking it through
Speaker 2: with Giles and Ruth, I learned that more than a
Speaker 2: handful of patrons over the decades had made similar complaints,
Speaker 2: memorialized in stray entries in the library suggestion box or
Speaker 2: referenced in staff meeting summaries. Room requested does not exist,
Speaker 2: Perhaps confusion with nineteen seventy five South Gallery patron recalls
Speaker 2: windowed study not found, inquiry about vanished staff lounge, no
Speaker 2: record each time the claimed evidence was missing or contradicted.
Speaker 2: Rue though bemused allowed her tone to drift towards speculation.
Speaker 2: Maybe we should admit that every library is a kind
Speaker 2: of living organism. It needs to forget what's not useful
Speaker 2: in order to keep functioning. Maybe your river alcoves just
Speaker 2: another old cell shared in the process. I held to
Speaker 2: my line. But then, why the traces, Why not just
Speaker 2: a total erasure? Giles leaned in, because even palimpsests leak,
Speaker 2: you can scratch away as much as you like, but
Speaker 2: some lines always show through. That night, at home, I
Speaker 2: tried to make peace with uncertainty, Yet I could not.
Speaker 2: I found myself at the kitchen table, drawing again, layering
Speaker 2: my memory full of curves and colored glass over the
Speaker 2: bland present of the current blueprint. Nothing matched across dimensions
Speaker 2: and time, rooms collided, blended, vanished. The pattern began to emerge,
Speaker 2: not just as a dispute over one lost room, but
Speaker 2: as a kind of principle. The libraries contradictions were never
Speaker 2: just spatial but mnemonic. The remembered building alive in the
Speaker 2: minds of those who had used it, diverged from the
Speaker 2: physical institution mapped in blueprints and policy files. I tested assumptions.
Speaker 2: What if the loss was not architectural but institutional, a
Speaker 2: kind of editing, intentional or organic, by which the library
Speaker 2: forgot not only place but detail itself. After all, cities change,
Speaker 2: river's shift, course, buildings adapt, Why shouldn't memory itself be
Speaker 2: subject to change? On my next visit, I cornered Miriam,
Speaker 2: just as she finished archiving a recent collection. Is there
Speaker 2: a record of everything that's ever been in the library,
Speaker 2: not just books, but rooms, plaques, objects. She pursed, her
Speaker 2: lips lighting up. That's an impossible dream, isn't it? But wait,
Speaker 2: there is an unsorted collection of old borrowing slips, plaques
Speaker 2: from defunct wings, and random floor plans. They never made
Speaker 2: it into the Central Archives. We call it the cemetery
Speaker 2: because it's mostly for things that don't fit anywhere else.
Speaker 2: She agreed to let me look. The collection was no
Speaker 2: larger than two file drawers, the detritus of forgotten renovations,
Speaker 2: cracked plaques, ink smudged slips, miscellaneous keys to doors that
Speaker 2: no longer existed. At the very back, beneath a tangle
Speaker 2: of faded ribbons, was a small plaque River Alcove in
Speaker 2: memory of Blanche Laskar, nineteen fifty two. It was brass,
Speaker 2: delicately engraved, the letters still catching lamplight. Taped beside it
Speaker 2: a black and white photograph of a woman in gloves
Speaker 2: and pearls, smiling against the backdrop of a rounded window
Speaker 2: dripping with colored glass. The photo showed a curved nook
Speaker 2: just as I remembered, with chairs and a river bank beyond.
Speaker 2: A quick search for Blanche Lascar in both library donor
Speaker 2: records and city genealogies turned up nothing. She lived only here.
Speaker 2: A trace echo, a bundle of old borrowing slips was
Speaker 2: chained to the plaque. The slips were stamped with lascar
Speaker 2: alcove and bore the signatures of a dozen hands, many
Speaker 2: names familiar, some impossibly written in my own careful cursive.
Speaker 2: Each listed a book, some that made sense, others completely
Speaker 2: unknown to me. Ships of our River, the Arden letters,
Speaker 2: and one glass sunlight with a return slip marked unreadable.
Speaker 2: I presented the evidence to Ruth and Giles. Ruth, holding
Speaker 2: the plaque, admitted, I have no memory of this. If
Speaker 2: it wasn't in the official file, it didn't exist as
Speaker 2: far as the library's narrative is concerned. Giles, unusually subdued,
Speaker 2: stared for a long time at the photograph. I used
Speaker 2: to work in a sunlit rounded room at university, but
Speaker 2: here I just can't say though, that's my signature on
Speaker 2: the fourth slip. For Ruth, it was an unsettling confirmation
Speaker 2: that more had been lost than any one had realized.
Speaker 2: Yet she shrugged lightly, as if to say, so it
Speaker 2: is so, it always will be. At the bottom of
Speaker 2: the cemetery drawer were other fragments, an ornate lamp labeled
Speaker 2: Arden Wing, a photo of a carved banister, Scraps of
Speaker 2: correspondence referencing rooms never in any building summary. Each was
Speaker 2: unremarked in the surviving archives, their names absent from the
Speaker 2: grand official arc of city history. At this point, even
Speaker 2: Kevin the Guard lent his teasing skepticism. Maybe the library
Speaker 2: is like some big old turtle. It forgets its own
Speaker 2: shell every so often so that it won't get too heavy.
Speaker 2: All those missing bits, maybe they just fell away into
Speaker 2: the river along with the old festival tents. For me,
Speaker 2: the artifacts were something more tangible, confirmation of a process
Speaker 2: both systemic and selective. This was not just the slow
Speaker 2: creep of renovation, nor a solitary memory era. The evidence
Speaker 2: suggested a physical institutional forgetting that left objects and records
Speaker 2: as cast off whichnesses even as memory itself buckled. What
Speaker 2: was truly at stake I suspected had less to do
Speaker 2: with structural history and more to do with the way
Speaker 2: institutions survived, how they shed, adapt, reinvent, and occasionally surrender
Speaker 2: pieces of their own passed to the currents of time.
Speaker 2: The answer did not feel complete or final, but it
Speaker 2: was more than I had started with. It shifted the
Speaker 2: boundaries of what I thought possible within these four walls.
Speaker 2: Looking around the ever familiar, ever in constant library that afternoon,
Speaker 2: at the people whose memories both mirrored and contradicted mine,
Speaker 2: at the traces of vanished rooms and reappearing names, I
Speaker 2: felt not lost, but more awake. Curiosity no longer about
Speaker 2: a single space, but about the pattern itself took deeper hold.
Speaker 2: That evening, I sat in my small apartment, the river
Speaker 2: alcove plaque on the table beside me. The sun slipped west,
Speaker 2: and I considered that the river's course was never quite
Speaker 2: as stable as the old maps claimed. Each year its
Speaker 2: shaped new channels shed old sand bars. Why shouldn't a
Speaker 2: library or a memory do the same? I realized midway
Speaker 2: through cataloging my notes and artifacts that the question had
Speaker 2: now grown beyond reclaiming a vanished room. What if memory
Speaker 2: was not just unreliable but also responsive, shaped by institutional
Speaker 2: needs and forgotten by collective intention. How many unremembered corners
Speaker 2: dotted the buildings we trusted most quietly, were written for
Speaker 2: unguessable reasons. My answer, fragmentary still, was this, the library,
Speaker 2: seen as both building and institution, was not so much
Speaker 2: losing things as actively editing itself and us in ways
Speaker 2: more marvelous and mysterious than any one could deliberately achieve.
Speaker 2: To morrow, I would gather the regulars, those whose curiosity
Speaker 2: now echoed my own, and propose an experiment. Could we,
Speaker 2: as a group document every odd echo, every vanished wing,
Speaker 2: every impossible memory. Would that act hold the process at bay,
Speaker 2: or merely force us to marvel at the shifting boundary
Speaker 2: between what had been, what still was, and what can
Speaker 2: never be known? For shore outside a spring festival unspooled
Speaker 2: along the river bank, music drifting up the world continuing,
Speaker 2: but within those peculiar, ever shifting walls, something quiet and
Speaker 2: profound was being questioned. I arranged the meeting for a
Speaker 2: mild Monday, when the library was least likely to mind
Speaker 2: a handful of retarease students and stray staff claiming a
Speaker 2: public study room. After Ruth waved us through with the
Speaker 2: faintest conspiratorial wink, our mismatched group gathered at a battered
Speaker 2: oak table under the disengaged eyes of a ruined taxidermy owl,
Speaker 2: A veteran of twenty autumn nature literacy displays. Giles arrived
Speaker 2: first with two folders and a map rolled tight. Anita,
Speaker 2: preoccupied with her phone, but y brating with anticipation, arrived next.
Speaker 2: Missus Chen entered with hearing aids and a blue shopping
Speaker 2: bag full of folders, while Kevin, who'd initially scoffed at
Speaker 2: the whole enterprise, slipped in late, greeting us with the
Speaker 2: bravado of some one who expects, one way or another
Speaker 2: to be entertained. I watched our little circle take shape.
Speaker 2: It was not a task force of experts, nor quite
Speaker 2: a club of conspirators, but a brief coalition of those
Speaker 2: oddest of city creatures, people who'd noticed contradiction and decided
Speaker 2: to ask what it meant. We set about sharing our evidence, memories, objects,
Speaker 2: things that stuck in the mind because they did not fit.
Speaker 2: My plaque and photograph River Alcove in memory of Blanche
Speaker 2: Lascar nineteen hundred and fifty two, anchored the display. Missus
Speaker 2: Chen began her speech, slow but exact. There was once
Speaker 2: a mezzanine above periodicals, open to the river, with iron
Speaker 2: railings and glass showing sunrise. I remember reading the Paris
Speaker 2: papers there before they were boxed up. Now there is
Speaker 2: only wall and no light. She produced a notebook, where
Speaker 2: page after page she listed long defunct magazine titles crossed
Speaker 2: out in different inks as their shelving vanished. Once you
Speaker 2: cannot find a room, the journals inside also are never
Speaker 2: spoken of, she concluded with a plangent shrug. Anita contributed
Speaker 2: with the vigor of someone staking a claim. Last year,
Speaker 2: there was a locked archive labeled pamphlet archive at the
Speaker 2: top of a narrow staircase. I showed it to a
Speaker 2: friend for a student project, but on my next visit
Speaker 2: the staircase ended in a blank panel, like it never existed.
Speaker 2: The catalog lists pamphlet archive relocated nineteen eighty eight, but
Speaker 2: gives no address, and nobody seems to remember it. She
Speaker 2: scrolled her phone searching for a photo. None matched what
Speaker 2: she remembered. Kevin slid a doggyard snapshot onto the table.
Speaker 2: He ten years younger, arms crossed standing by a fire alarm,
Speaker 2: with a doorway opening into shadow behind him. This is
Speaker 2: where the teacher carols are. Now that door isn't there.
Speaker 2: If you walk the corridor today, it's just walls, seamless.
Speaker 2: He grinned, partly in self mockery. Maybe it was a
Speaker 2: service hall. Maybe I'm confusing flaws. Maybe I'm just open
Speaker 2: to suggestions from Giles's folders, emerged city council minutes, donations
Speaker 2: itemized for a glass mezzanine, opening, ceremonies for a children's grotto,
Speaker 2: decades out of living recollection. I tracked every mention of
Speaker 2: Lascar and Arden in these records. He said, rooms built
Speaker 2: and unbuilt without trace. When the council minutes say they
Speaker 2: existed and the current library says they did not, that's
Speaker 2: a contradiction worth noting. At my encouragement, we mapped the
Speaker 2: lost features, rooms, wings, books, dedications, any oddity given to
Speaker 2: one of us, but are raised for the next. It
Speaker 2: made a kind of shadow florpland over the current map,
Speaker 2: rounded alcoves where there should be none, vanished stairwells, even
Speaker 2: books whose trail of borrowing slips led back to rooms
Speaker 2: no longer found. Some had fragmentary evidence, a photo here,
Speaker 2: a misplaced catalog card there. Others only lived in recollection,
Speaker 2: strong enough to make lack of evidence itself suspicious. It
Speaker 2: was not just the vanished places that fascinated, but the
Speaker 2: way our group's memories became fuzzier or sharper in company
Speaker 2: missus chen could recall the color of sunlight in her
Speaker 2: missing mezzanine when Anita described the glass in her archive,
Speaker 2: but the clarity would fade alone. Kevin swore he placed
Speaker 2: ladders in a paint splattered south stairwell that neither blueprints
Speaker 2: nor staff directories admitted to. Giles was the most prosaic,
Speaker 2: always searching for a historical archival misstep. But more than
Speaker 2: once I saw him pause over the impossible and let
Speaker 2: the doubt flicker. We made a pledge to document every oddity, date, place, memory,
Speaker 2: physical evidence if it existed. Giles kept the log Anita,
Speaker 2: digital photos, missus chen Her, and written ledger. The point
Speaker 2: at first was simple recording. If particulars kept slipping, perhaps documentation,
Speaker 2: especially by a group, might retain what individual memory could not. Documenting,
Speaker 2: we learned, could itself disturb the phenomenon. We observed that
Speaker 2: a memory, clear when spoken among us, seemed to erode
Speaker 2: between meetings. A photograph filed one day could appear altered
Speaker 2: or even vanish from the phones gallery the next. Sometimes
Speaker 2: a book with an anomalous stamp would move shelves overnight,
Speaker 2: or a plaque pin to a cork board would be
Speaker 2: replaced by a new, carefully neutral sign quiet please. But
Speaker 2: together our constellation of evidence grew enough room for contradiction,
Speaker 2: enough for intrigue. A study room became a workspace for
Speaker 2: this pursuit. We met twice weekly, often for just an hour,
Speaker 2: sometimes in secret if a new staffer was fussing about
Speaker 2: non official events. We kept a collective shadow map lost features,
Speaker 2: odd books, mismatched cattle, log entries, dedications, and stairways only
Speaker 2: traceable by memory or photograph or imagination. Perhaps, but the
Speaker 2: line was not always clear. We agreed that each participant
Speaker 2: was to question their own assumptions, but trust the process
Speaker 2: of comparison. At first, pattern eluded us, but as we
Speaker 2: pooled notes, names recurred. Arden Laskar, mL, each associated with
Speaker 2: spaces dedicated to some element of communal life. A reading
Speaker 2: wing for city council records, a grotto for children's programming,
Speaker 2: the river alcove itself for solitary reflection. Features reappeared, rounded alcoves,
Speaker 2: colored windows, brass fixtures, always linked to periods of civic
Speaker 2: activity or shifting populations. These vanished with barely a public mention,
Speaker 2: while more utilitarian spaces, storage, bathrooms, main halls remained stubbornly consistent,
Speaker 2: Giles brought in more city records, discovering council notes discussing
Speaker 2: the glass mezzanine and poem composed for its ceremonial opening
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty seven. Yet not a single photo in
Speaker 2: the library archives preserved it, nor in any newspaper account,
Speaker 2: Since it was as if the lair had been peeled away,
Speaker 2: leaving only thin memories and ghost records. Artifacts kept cropping up.
Speaker 2: One afternoon, as I reshelved a poetry anthology, I found
Speaker 2: it bore a sticker for the arden wing, another lost space,
Speaker 2: and inside a palimpsest of borrowing slips, each with handwriting
Speaker 2: that shifted subtly, as though written over the years by
Speaker 2: hands that nearly but never quite matched. Ruth joined us
Speaker 2: to contribute pages of old internal memos, directors referencing phasing
Speaker 2: out unused rooms, and a cryptic margin archived see box
Speaker 2: for plaque. But the box and its contents, until I'd
Speaker 2: found them, had never entered public record. We debated cause
Speaker 2: Giles leaned toward bureaucratic neglect and the unreliability of paper records,
Speaker 2: even persisted in a hybrid theory. A little bad labeling
Speaker 2: a lot of institutional amnesia, may be even the unconscious
Speaker 2: erasure that happened when nobody cared for a room or
Speaker 2: a collection anymore. Yet for each rationalization, there seemed always
Speaker 2: one more contradiction. Dedications to people never in the city's
Speaker 2: census books, referencing events that didn't appear in local law,
Speaker 2: spaces whose physical traces arched molding, sun faded flaws remained
Speaker 2: out of phase with official blueprints. The catalog was not immune.
Speaker 2: Ruth and Miriam, the archivists, shared stories of categories sprouting
Speaker 2: and collapsing from the library's digital system, authors who had
Speaker 2: never written the reference titles, entire classifications drifting in and
Speaker 2: out of the database. Periodically, Ruth would find the system
Speaker 2: had promoted a vanished room to the present arden Wing
Speaker 2: see adult fiction, while related references would disappear as soon
Speaker 2: as anybody tried to pin them down. These informatic ghosts
Speaker 2: prompted our group's sharpest questions. Were these anomalies human error,
Speaker 2: Old routines never fully revised, or did the act of memory,
Speaker 2: especially communal memory, itself shape What persisted? Was the library
Speaker 2: enacting a kind of natural selection for spaces and stories,
Speaker 2: retaining what was needed, and allowing all else to fade
Speaker 2: up to and including records themselves. One week, Anita snapped
Speaker 2: in frustration. We'd been searching for a copy of Ships
Speaker 2: of Our River, the book I'd checked out years ago
Speaker 2: in the river alcove, a volume always vivid in my memory.
Speaker 2: She located it in the biography section, but the contents
Speaker 2: were rearranged photographs with dates that did not align to
Speaker 2: any city history. There were margin notes, a few in
Speaker 2: my own cramped hand, but whole sections, ones I was
Speaker 2: sure I had underlined decades before, were simply missing, replaced
Speaker 2: by stories I'd never read it. It doesn't just move books,
Speaker 2: Anita fumed, it changes the story. I swear I read
Speaker 2: a poem about the south Bridge on page forty last summer,
Speaker 2: but now there's only a census graph. Are we making
Speaker 2: up our memories? Or is the library itself reordering what
Speaker 2: can be known? Missus Chen noticed similar migrations. Her favored newspapers,
Speaker 2: once shelved by a sunny window, now relegated to a
Speaker 2: shadowy corner that showed signs patches where sunlight had once
Speaker 2: bleached the wood, of there being windows that no longer
Speaker 2: existed at all, Ruth confided her own doubts. When we digitized,
Speaker 2: categories jumped. Sometimes it felt as though the software couldn't
Speaker 2: agree with the paper trail, or with itself. A book
Speaker 2: might be listed twice in two sections, with different call
Speaker 2: numbers and sometimes different contents. When we followed up, only
Speaker 2: one edition could be found. The other was referenced, but
Speaker 2: never present. Miriam, Ever, the systematist showed us a spreadsheet
Speaker 2: tracking vanished entries, more than a dozen collections never officially deaccessioned,
Speaker 2: whose donor documents remained, but whose physical presence year on
Speaker 2: year could not be located. You'd expect the memory to
Speaker 2: be fuzzy, she mused, but not the catalog unless she
Speaker 2: trailed off, unwilling to drape the process in mystique, but
Speaker 2: the implication hung between us. It was a disquieting realization.
Speaker 2: The forgetting was not isolated. It was not just rooms
Speaker 2: or plaques, but texts and knowledge, sometimes people, always records
Speaker 2: being steadily, quietly overwritten. More than that, the process seemed responsive.
Speaker 2: It moved in accordance with use, attention, or communal narrative.
Speaker 2: What struck me most wasn't the loss itself, but how
Speaker 2: comprehensive yet subtly humane. The process seemed. The old rooms
Speaker 2: didn't just vanish, They ceased to be spoken of, their artifacts,
Speaker 2: phased into unrelated contexts, their dedications retired or recycled. Even
Speaker 2: the stories inside the books, it seemed, adapted, retelling themselves
Speaker 2: according to the needs, patterns, and blind spots of the present.
Speaker 2: We debated explanations late into the evenings. Maybe some technical fault.
Speaker 2: Ruth suggested the digital archives corrupting prior records, a kind
Speaker 2: of slow file decay that carries over into the physical
Speaker 2: Giles counted, you could prove that for one or two cases,
Speaker 2: But how do you explain the architectural traces, the curved flows,
Speaker 2: the sun faded shelves, the mismatched trim. Kevin brought the
Speaker 2: mundane to our feet. Look, city records are a mess.
Speaker 2: Nobody keeps files for more than a fiscal year unless
Speaker 2: the board insists. And sometimes an intern relabels a room
Speaker 2: because they misread a map and it sticks. But then
Speaker 2: uncharacteristically subdued, he admitted, But I can't explain my own
Speaker 2: photo or my own handwriting on a log for a
Speaker 2: door you say never existed, as evidence mounted a me
Speaker 2: meetings took on a new atmosphere, a shift from frustration
Speaker 2: toward collective astonishment. Miriam arranged a visit to the Deep Archive,
Speaker 2: where outmoded records and obsolete artifacts were stored in musty boxes,
Speaker 2: under flickering bulbs and the constant groan of ancient HVAC.
Speaker 2: It was there in a climate controlled room ringed by
Speaker 2: exhausted file cabinets that the boundaries strained to breaking point.
Speaker 2: Sifting through a pile marked dedications unsorted, we discovered a
Speaker 2: carved banister piece the name Helen m Arden nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: ornately inlaid, no sign of glue nor nail, nor remaining
Speaker 2: structure to which it could ever belong. A corresponding photograph
Speaker 2: depicted a group of eight faces unfamiliar, standing in a bright,
Speaker 2: curving mezzanine that was in the current building, the site
Speaker 2: of a compact storage closet. Other objects appeared a commemorative
Speaker 2: mug for Arden wing opening library maps annotated in two
Speaker 2: handwritings with alternate room labels that overlapped, as if two
Speaker 2: layouts had existed side by side, each equally impossible. There
Speaker 2: were notes in director's files about phasing out under used
Speaker 2: spaces and archiving rooms via furniture reassignment, yet no corresponding disposals,
Speaker 2: no news, no community notice. I considered Kevin as he
Speaker 2: handled these artifacts, now more introspective than skeptical. If we
Speaker 2: have physical proof but no recall, does it mean the
Speaker 2: evidence is counterfeit, or that memory itself is faulty by design?
Speaker 2: Are we supposed to notice? Ruth? Usually the mediator became philosophical.
Speaker 2: If a room is never spoken of, never needed, it goes.
Speaker 2: The same happens in families, the same on city streets.
Speaker 2: If a business is left to decay, it's gone, and
Speaker 2: the next generation never knows to look for it. But
Speaker 2: she continued, the difference here is that the library seems
Speaker 2: to be doing this even with things that matter, dedications,
Speaker 2: donor names, special rooms. Giles, more shaken than before, thumbed
Speaker 2: the photo evidence and murmured, if people themselves can slip
Speaker 2: from every page, every public ledger, every official memory, does
Speaker 2: that mean losing our place in history is just the
Speaker 2: natural end for us?
Speaker 1: All?
Speaker 2: Our group, never one for melodrama, fell quietly thoughtful. After that,
Speaker 2: I felt my own curiosity, once a matter of proving
Speaker 2: a place or a fact, widen into a kind of Owe,
Speaker 2: The very structure of knowing, even of remembering, was up
Speaker 2: for discussion, if not negotiation. By now, the matter of
Speaker 2: the river Alcove and its vanished kin was no longer
Speaker 2: purely a case to solve. My focus had shifted. Was
Speaker 2: the nature of the libraries forgetting? A flaw, a tragedy,
Speaker 2: or something deeper and fundamentally ordinary. How did memory, architecture
Speaker 2: and function interact to create the space we believed we shared?
Speaker 2: It was at our next, possibly final meeting, in the
Speaker 2: dimmest reading knook, still extant, the conversation turned to synthesis.
Speaker 2: All of us brought what evidence we still held. Giles's maps,
Speaker 2: missus Chen's lists, Ruth's internal memos, my own plaque and photograph,
Speaker 2: even Kevin's archival fote and Anita's phone records, with their
Speaker 2: eerie gaps and altered stories. Everything was arrayed on the table,
Speaker 2: a quiet museum of the half remembered. We allowed ourselves
Speaker 2: a few minutes of silence. I tried to draw our
Speaker 2: conclusions together, careful not to chase certainty out of habit.
Speaker 2: The library's forgetting, I began, is not accidental, nor strictly
Speaker 2: a process of erasure. Carried out by people, nor yet
Speaker 2: a matter of digital error or bureaucratic neglect. It resembles
Speaker 2: something embedded, like a living process. If enough attention is lost,
Speaker 2: enough relevance, then record, architecture, and even memory are quietly,
Speaker 2: efficiently altered. The space remains as it is needed, and
Speaker 2: the rest recedes. But sometimes artifacts remain in the margins, objects, stories,
Speaker 2: even the memories of those who pay attention. Giles nodded,
Speaker 2: not quite conceding, but intrigued. If it's a collective response,
Speaker 2: a mutual editing of both record and room, then failure
Speaker 2: is rare but possible. What remains are only these anomalies,
Speaker 2: these sights of contradiction. Miriam reflective offered. May be it's
Speaker 2: a self correcting system. As demand changes, the library refuses
Speaker 2: to serve as an unmanageable archive of everything, preferring to
Speaker 2: become what the present needs. It's not just rooms or books,
Speaker 2: it's the very shape of what can be known, of
Speaker 2: what is useful or possible to know in this place.
Speaker 2: Kevin more sensitive now to the atmosphere, considered the parallel
Speaker 2: to city life. Are we seeing the same thing that
Speaker 2: happens on the streets the old restaurants lost, the side
Speaker 2: walks laid over, cobbled lanes, the names replaced by businesses
Speaker 2: the next generation wants. Except in here, the process is quicker,
Speaker 2: always just ahead of anyone's certainty. We fell to discussing
Speaker 2: whether what we'd seen could be explained as psychology, the
Speaker 2: mind's tendency to rewrite history to fit present needs, whether personal, institutional,
Speaker 2: or civic. Ruth ever practical demurred, even allowing for unreliable
Speaker 2: memory and redevelopment. There's an intentionality to this. Rooms and
Speaker 2: objects vanish, but only to the extent that no one
Speaker 2: maintains a living relationship to them. And yet the ones
Speaker 2: with just enough attention, like your plaque, your photograph, your stories, survive,
Speaker 2: almost as if the library itself is asking to be
Speaker 2: remembered by effort at length. I found a metaphor that
Speaker 2: seemed right. Maybe history here is like the river outside
Speaker 2: the bank's change. Sandbars form and dissolve, channels shift with
Speaker 2: the seasons. Most maps can keep up, but the river's
Speaker 2: real core is always a matter of partial agreement, partial loss.
Speaker 2: We never stand on the same riverbank twice, no matter
Speaker 2: how familiar it was. Anita filching a stray biscuit from
Speaker 2: missus Chen's tin who distilled the feeling. So you're saying,
Speaker 2: what gets forgotten isn't lost exactly, It's just unneeded. It
Speaker 2: ebbs away, but leaves a trace if you care to look.
Speaker 2: And the act of searching, of asking is what keeps
Speaker 2: anything alive. For a little longer, we let that realization
Speaker 2: settle among us. The room gone brighter as the late
Speaker 2: sun tipped the furthest shelf in gold. Our evidence remained incomplete,
Speaker 2: our understanding provisional. And yet for the first time I
Speaker 2: felt content in not knowing for certain. The library had become,
Speaker 2: in my mind less a monument of preservation, and more
Speaker 2: a living, adaptive entity, one whose memory was neither perfect
Speaker 2: nor tragic, but vital, dynamic, and responsive to the currents
Speaker 2: of communal attention. The plaque, the awkward, miss filed books,
Speaker 2: the warped maps. None of them guaranteed restoration or answer,
Speaker 2: but their presence meant that, for as long as someone noticed,
Speaker 2: the erasure would never be absolute. It made the act
Speaker 2: of searching, of talking, mapping, remembering a kind of quiet
Speaker 2: stewardship more meaningful than any final catalog. That sense of
Speaker 2: collective uncertain Marvel followed me out of that reading nook
Speaker 2: and into my now altered routine library days. I found
Speaker 2: myself not just following old circuits, but scanning for traces,
Speaker 2: a half visible outline in a wall, a catalog entry
Speaker 2: with too many parentheticals, a book misshelved just enough to
Speaker 2: suggest another older order. I became more sociable, inviting conversation
Speaker 2: with staff and strangers, treating every vanished room or shifting
Speaker 2: artifact as an invitation rather than a rebuke. Even on
Speaker 2: days when the answers stalled or memories went thin, a
Speaker 2: gentle humor persisted. A group exchanged sly greetings. Find any
Speaker 2: stairways to day? Kevin teased, and I would reply A
Speaker 2: window and three legends, but nothing you could enter. Giles,
Speaker 2: for all his archivist gravity, seemed to acquire a twinkle
Speaker 2: beneath his scholarly frown, seeing the pattern not as failure
Speaker 2: but as a testament to human persistence in the face
Speaker 2: of inevitable forgetting. Ruth, in her slow retirement, began referring
Speaker 2: patrons to us, ask the history table. I suspect if
Speaker 2: a thing cannot be found, they'll at least tell you
Speaker 2: who once claimed it. Anita spread the legend among other students,
Speaker 2: and missus Chen published a letter in her Overseas Alumni
Speaker 2: Newsletter explaining how in our library even impermanence comes with companionship. Gradually,
Speaker 2: my initial longing to fix the past, to lay claim
Speaker 2: to a vanished room, gave way to a broader view.
Speaker 2: It was not so much about recovering the river Alcove,
Speaker 2: the arden wing, or Blanche Lascar, as about learning how
Speaker 2: communal memory is shaped and reshaped, spurred on by use
Speaker 2: or attention, or the quiet dignity of being needed. Losing
Speaker 2: the certainty of the fixed, permanent archive had brought instead
Speaker 2: a sense of wonder, the odd, hospitable magic of a
Speaker 2: place that lived as flexibly as its inhabitants required. Now,
Speaker 2: when I walk the garden behind the library, I glance
Speaker 2: up at the windows, counting the pattern is always a
Speaker 2: little different. Phantom spaces leave their clues if you know
Speaker 2: what to look for. I feel neither cheated nor out
Speaker 2: of place, but part of a larger flow, an unending
Speaker 2: negotiation between past utility and present belonging. Sometimes, standing in
Speaker 2: the last sunny reading room above the slope of river grass,
Speaker 2: I think of every vanished feature, misplaced book or erased
Speaker 2: dedication as something not lost, but simply poised, waiting somewhere
Speaker 2: out of sight, ready to reappear the next time. Curiosity
Speaker 2: and need a line for every trace revealed, for every
Speaker 2: story half remembered. I'm left marveling at how much of
Speaker 2: our world, our institutions are shared spaces. Our histories are
Speaker 2: alive not by virtue of being recorded, but because someone
Speaker 2: somewhere cares enough to keep asking after what has gone?
Speaker 2: What else? I wonder is shifting gently under foot, the
Speaker 2: silent architecture of memory, nudging itself into another pattern, awaiting
Speaker 2: discovery at the next turn, the next question, the next
Speaker 2: open door. That is the wonder that makes me return
Speaker 2: and look and ask and cherish the shifting mystery hidden
Speaker 2: just behind the certainty of walls and stories and the
Speaker 2: pages we call home.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.