I asked a group of my adult students yesterday about what they do when they want to read a book in public, and they all seemed nonplussed by this idea, not having gotten much into the idea of coffee shopping. I didn’t either, until a friend suggested it so many times that it seemed like he must be on to something, and I noticed how much more stimulating it was being intelligent in public. It’s easier to feel as though you are in a thriving center of thought when you sit among a bunch of other people quietly polishing some thought or trying to suck up some idea.
But people don’t do that here, at least not in cafés. You can find people in the local bar reading newspapers, but, as one of my students explained, this is just a way to pass the time, and you can’t just replace the newspaper with a book, because a book takes real concentration. As for laptops, I’ve never seen one in a café here.
For that kind of serious public concentration, you need to go to the public library. The Biblioteca Pública de Zaragoza is the kind of building where you can tell that, when they were designing it, somebody mentioned at some point a concern about “using the space”. The big room with arched ceilings is broken into two levels: the lounge area, where the chairs are designed for semi-inclined napping, and the reading room, where ample light is provided and people look serious about the rules forbidding noise.
I went in the reading room this evening for the first time, just to check if the silence wasn’t just a product of my imagination, but when I opened the door, the fear crossed my mind that everybody would know that I was entering with nefarious purposes, to observe people reading rather than actually get work done myself. I briefly strode up the aisle and made cursory glances at books to present the illusion that I was there in the sacred room on legitimate business, but people looked up from their reading anyway, they looked right at me, and I wondered if they had pierced my illusion or they were simply bored. David Foster Wallace, in an essay about the problem of being a fiction writer, “E Unibus Plurum”, has a dim view of the writer:
Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow.
I don’t do fiction, but I know the feeling.
(A note: the hemeroteca in a library in Spain is not, in fact, the homoerotica section, as some (me) had speculated, but the newspaper archives.)
