Intense bass frequencies shake the stacks. The pungent smell of beer-soaked parchment permeates the air. This is a party in Pusey Library, and the party is pumping.
In light of the current social drought on Harvard’s campus, everyone’s favorite student organization, the Undergraduate Council, has entertained a number of possible referenda, one of which includes turning an actual library into a “freshman-oriented” social space. This week, FM is imagining turning up (and turning the pages) in Pusey.
10:30 p.m.
You’re a freshman, new to the college scene, and fully dissatisfied with your social life. But there’s a light―and a library―at the end of the tunnel (specifically, the tunnel on Widener Level D). You’ve got a party to go to tonight. It’s the party in Pusey.
11:00 p.m.
After donning your sexiest pair of reading glasses, you meet your friends and head over to wait in the quickly growing line. This party is the place to be. A group of girls from BU is escorted out of the building by an incredibly disinterested HUPD officer. “We know books here,” they protest. “They’re in the stacks! Jane Eyre, we’ve read Jane Eyre!” It seems as though the whole of Boston is desperate to get in. You and your friends stake a spot in the line, which now snakes all the way from literary criticism on Floor 1 East to South Asian Studies on Floor 5 West.
11:45 p.m.
You just got in. The air is heavy with heat and the lingering stench of dissertation-induced sweat. Someone mops up the spills from a game of beer pong with former University President Charles W. Eliot’s handwritten letters. You aren’t tipsy enough for that yet, so you head further in, passing the geography section, handing now filled with unemployed librarians handing out resumes along with maps of the library’s three floors. Someone tells you that P3 is 21 and up; you know exactly where you’ll be heading.
12:00 a.m.
Here, the thumping bass becomes louder. The doors slide open to sociological texts and a smoke-filled rager. Someone from the crowd shouts something about the Dewey Decimal system. This isn’t some lame bookstore party, after all: This is Pusey.
1:00 a.m.
After a while, you spot one of the UC rep candidates for your Yard, and head over, waving. The rep beckons you over to the restricted collections, and whispers in your ear “Here’s where the really good research materials are.” A grad student from wearing a “Harvard Divinity School” t-shirt offers a hit off a joint rolled with a page from a biography of early 20th-century socialist John Reed. You inhale deeply, then proceed to do three shots of some sort of feminist theory. Some MIT students walk by, whispering about the party in the Phillips Reading Room.
THE NEXT DAY
You wake up at 1:40 p.m. to four Kong containers, all of which are empty, and a history of the Massachusetts prison system open over your face. You don’t even know the name of its author. Your head is pounding, and you can’t remember anything more than a few blurry titles from the last 12 hours. Your roommate is still asleep, so you place the book inconspicuously on your own bookshelf. That Pusey party was intense.
