On reading aimlessly at the Library of Congress.
Not long after I moved to Washington, I found myself working part-time for a publicist with a tiny, windowless office on Capitol Hill. He’d fallen on hard times — we often received calls from debt collectors — and with only a smattering of clients, he couldn’t afford to pay me. He somehow did, though, for he required my help to operate his business, such as it was. With an excess of nervous energy, he was all but incapable of sitting still and writing the press releases and articles his clients demanded.
My stint there was one of those laughably wretched little jobs one endures when young, but I remember the time fondly, for it was then that I began to frequent the main reading room at the Library of Congress, which was just across the street. I’d go there after work and spend long hours reading and writing. In those months, I was working on a manuscript I would eventually come to dislike (it will never see the light of day). To amuse and distract myself from it, I often devoted time to more fanciful interests.
Is there a better place on earth for the pursuit of fanciful interests than the main reading room at the Library of Congress? I’ve yet to come upon one. You can find in the LoC catalog volume upon volume on any subject that might enchant you. I wasn’t shy about pestering the clerks at the big dais in the center of the room with my paper-slip requests. I recall consulting books on the history of ink, turn-of-the-century bookmaking, woodblock prints, the Cossacks, horses, herbal medicine, and the cultural history of the Baltics.
Most of this research, if research you could call it, was purposeless. If you’d asked me why I needed to read, say, an obscure 19th-century account of a Victorian gentleman’s journey to Lithuania, I couldn’t have given you a sensible answer. All I knew was that I had a mind to one day write something about the ordeal of moving from that country to this one.
I’d just made the journey myself: I spent nearly two years in Vilnius on a Fulbright and then moved to DC. While living in Lithuania, I’d become curious about the voyage my own great-grandparents made from that country to New York over a century ago.
Many years would pass, however, before I began the manuscript that became The Atlas of Remedies. Whatever impressions I’d gleaned from the dusty tomes in the LoC would descend like silt in a riverbed, commingling with innumerable other impressions in a substratum of my imagination. When I began to write the story, I required no detailed knowledge of the history of ink or the art of bookmaking. Nor had I a need to consult whatever notes I may have taken. But those hours in the library, all that seemingly aimless research, would stimulate something like desire — a desire to create a world of story commensurate with the sense of possibility kindled as much by my reading as by my travels.
For me to successfully pull off a book, I must first feel its atmosphere inside me, and reading has always been essential to that atmosphere’s quickening. It is as illusory as it is flattering to believe that one’s novel can create its own weather. The air moving through any tale is infused with the climate of the innumerable books that precede it in the teller’s past.
These days, many of the Library of Congress’ holdings have surely been digitized and made accessible from anywhere. I still prefer, though, to encounter the materials in their physical form and consider myself fortunate to live near so vast a resource. I look forward to returning soon for more hours of aimless browsing.
[Editor’s note: This piece is in support of the Inner Loop’s “Author’s Corner,” a monthly campaign that spotlights a DC-area writer and their recently published work from a small to medium-sized publisher. The Inner Loop connects talented local authors to lit lovers in the community through live readings, author interviews, featured book sales at Potter’s House, and through Eat.Drink.Read., a collaboration with restaurant partners Pie Shop, Shaw’s Tavern, and Reveler’s Hour to promote the author through special events and menu and takeout inserts.]
Paul Jaskunas is the author of two works of fiction: The Atlas of Remedies (Stillhouse Press) and Hidden (Free Press), which won the Friends of American Writers Award. Mother Ship, a chapbook of his poems, is forthcoming this fall (Finishing Line), as is Drawing Lessons, a volume of ekphrastic poetry in conversation with the art of Warren Linn (Spuyten Duyvil). Since 2008, he has served on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he edits Full Bleed, an annual journal at the intersection of the visual and literary arts.
