Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Seven: The Full Library Correspondence

He returned to the city library three more times before the summer.

The first return was in late May — the reference section, which he had not attended to in the six-room visit. The reference section was on the second floor: the room of the standing reader, the person who came to look something up rather than to sit and read. The standing reader's attending was different from the sitting reader's attending — shorter, more directed, the attending of the specific question rather than the attending of the sustained inquiry.

He stood in the reference section and thought about the standing reader's attending. He thought about the directed search — the person who arrived at the reference section with a question and left when the question was answered. He thought about the honest reference section as the room that served the directed attending: not the held space of the reading room, not the enclosure of the study carrel, but the room that gave the directed attending its conditions without requiring the directed attending to become the sustained attending.

He thought: the reference section needs the honest room for the short attending.

He thought about the short attending. He thought about all the rooms he had drawn for the sustained attending — the reading room and the children's corner and the corner of the coastal classroom and the community centre's weight-bearing room. He thought about the honest room for the short attending as a different problem — the room that received the person, gave them what they needed, and released them. Not the held space but the efficient space. Not the corner but the clear path.

He thought: the honest room for the short attending is the room without obstacles between the attending person and what they came for.

He looked at the existing reference section. The shelves arranged in rows from north to south — the rows running toward the windows, the person moving between the shelves in a north-south direction. The windows were at the east wall. The person moving between the shelves moved toward the east light — the morning east light entering the reference section windows, the person's face in the light as they moved through the rows toward the answer.

He thought: the reference section is already oriented correctly. The directed attending moves toward the light.

He thought about the directed attending moving toward the light. He thought about the reference section as the room where the honest condition was already mostly present — the rows oriented toward the light, the person moving in the direction the light came from. He thought about the existing reference section as the room that needed fewer corrections than the reading room — the honest orientation already there, the direct path between the attending person and the resource already clear.

He thought: the honest condition is present in the reference section's orientation. The correction is small.

He walked the rows. He found the correction at the end of the rows — the dead ends where the rows met the north and south walls, the places where the direct path stopped. He thought about the dead end as the wrong condition for the short attending — the person who arrived at the dead end and turned back, the attending interrupted by the reversal. He thought about the correction: not a wall at the end of the rows but a window, the directed attending given a destination rather than a wall, the person moving toward the east light and finding at the far end of each row not the reversal but the opening.

He thought: the honest reference section gives the directed attending a destination at both ends.

He wrote in the pocket notebook: reference section — the standing reader's short attending. Already correctly oriented: the rows run toward the east light. The correction is at the row ends — the dead end walls replaced by openings, the directed attending given a destination in both directions. The honest room for the short attending has no obstacles and no dead ends.

The second return was in June — the large general reading area on the ground floor. The room he had deliberately left until last because it was the most complex: the room that held all the attending conditions simultaneously, the library's equivalent of the village hall. The large room for the full range of the library's attending.

He attended to the large general reading area on a Tuesday afternoon. The room in its inhabited condition — forty or fifty people, the full range of the library's attending people. He stood inside the entrance and counted the conditions: the people with laptops at the tables near the power points, the person asleep in the armchair by the radiator, the mother with a toddler at the picture book shelves, the man standing at the catalogue terminal, the group of students at the long table working together, the single older woman reading a newspaper at the table by the window.

He stood and looked at all of them. He thought about the village hall and Catherine's list — the polling station and the funeral reception and the toddler group and the amateur dramatics. He thought about the large general reading area as the library's version of Catherine's list — the laptop worker and the sleeping person and the mother and the toddler and the catalogue user and the students and the newspaper reader, all present simultaneously, all requiring different attending conditions, all in the same room.

He thought: the large general reading area is the library's village hall.

He thought about the difference between the village hall's uses and the library's uses. He thought about the village hall as the room that held the village across sequential conditions — the toddler group in the morning and the funeral reception in the afternoon and the polling station on election day. He thought about the large general reading area as the room that held all the conditions simultaneously — the sleeping person and the mother and the toddler and the students all present at the same time, the attending conditions coexisting rather than following each other.

He thought: the village hall holds its conditions in sequence. The large library room holds them simultaneously. The honest room for the simultaneous conditions is the harder problem.

He walked the large room. He attended to the zones the attending people had created — not the zones the library had designed, the zones the attending people had made by their choices. The laptop workers near the power points in the south corner. The sleeper by the radiator in the north. The mother and toddler at the picture books in the east. The students at the long central table. The newspaper reader at the west window. He thought about the zones as the attending people's section — the room divided by use into its actual conditions, the honest conditions declared by the bodies that inhabited them.

He thought: the attending people have drawn the honest section of the large room in their daily choices.

He noted where the zones conflicted — the students at the long table whose voices reached the sleeper by the radiator, the toddler's sounds carrying to the laptop workers. He noted where the zones were comfortable together — the newspaper reader and the catalogue terminal in the same western half, both short attendings, neither disturbing the other. He thought about the honest large room as the room that separated the conflicting conditions and allowed the compatible ones proximity.

He wrote in the pocket notebook: large general reading area — the simultaneous conditions. The attending people have drawn the honest section in their daily choices. The zones: laptop workers south, sleeper north, mother and toddler east, students central, newspaper reader west. Conflicts: students to sleeper, toddler to laptop workers. Compatibilities: newspaper reader and catalogue terminal, both short attendings. The correction: acoustic separation for the conflicting zones, nothing more. The compatible zones do not need correction. The honest large room separates what conflicts and leaves alone what does not.

He spent the remainder of June writing the full library correspondence — all six rooms plus the reading room, the pencil studies for each, the notes and the observations and the corrections. He pinned them all above the drawing board and stood back and looked at the full correspondence.

Seven rooms. Seven different attending conditions. Seven different corrections, each specific to the room, none repeated. The reading room's diffusing west glazing and the children's corner's three intentional heights and the periodicals room's internal window made permanent and the study carrels' fourth wall and the local history room's courtyard light protected and the reference section's dead ends opened and the large room's conflicting zones acoustically separated.

He thought: the city library is the practice's most complete single correspondence.

He wrote to Thomas: I have attended to all seven rooms. Seven corrections. None of them the same correction. Each room has its own honest condition and its own correction. I will draw the sections this summer. By September I will have seven sections. The full library correspondence.

He was glad.

End of Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Seven