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{shortcode-429a20a43b31c14ee603587b9f7215faac9b0e1d}ormer Winthrop resident and Spee member John F. Kennedy ’40 put it best: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
I did not go to the moon. But I did go to Lamont Library (which, incidentally, was just as hard to reach as the moon when JFK was at Harvard, given that Lamont didn’t open until 1949), and I stayed there for 24 hours. It was, indeed, “hard.”
Then again, given this publication’s staunch commitment to journalistic integrity, I suppose I must admit that I actually only spent 22 hours in Lamont — though it certainly felt a hell of a lot longer. Perhaps Harvard physicists ought to look into the time-dialating effects of Lamont.
There are, roughly speaking, two possible explanations for why I elected to undertake this rash and unadvisable experiment in the limits of the human psyche. One is that I didn’t think it through. The other is that I’m a masochist. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is correct.
I entered my provisional domicile on Monday, October 13 at 11:01 a.m., jogging awkwardly through the rain from Greenough Hall, laden with gear and a shockingly naïve romanticized view of Lamont.
What had I brought on my Quixotian expedition? (It would soon become Dostoyevskian, so characterized by suffering as it was.)
Among my meager possessions were: one pair of navy Darn Tough socks; one Osprey hiking backpack; two Cavendish bananas; two cinnamon raisin “bagels” from Annenberg; one large ceramic mug (color: approximately Pantone 155); nine tea bags; one toothbrush; and one tube of Crest toothpaste. I may suffer sleep deprivation, but never a lapse in dental hygiene.
I pitched camp at a desk in the William B. and Inger G. Ginsberg Reading Room. The Ginsbergs, as it happens, didn’t just give money to Harvard; they are also noted for their possession of a considerable collection of Scandinavian maps from the 15th to 18th centuries.
At 11:57 a.m., I encountered my first oversight: the student-run Lamont Library Cafe was closed for the holiday weekend. There would be no over-steamed cappuccinos or stodgy wedges of chocolate cake to make my experience more tolerable. Tea made with the aging 3M water dispensers that dot Lamont would have to suffice.
The Securitas guard at the front desk declined my interview request and I immediately lost what little nerve I’d once possessed to bother the poor souls slaving away in Lamont. To the surprise of few and to the disappointment of one (me), Lamont studiers didn’t seem particularly interested in giving interviews to enterprising reporters. At 12:27 p.m., I finished my second mug of tea (Earl Grey).
On Level B, I leafed through “Knowing One’s Enemies,” a book about pre-World War intelligence gathering (I still don’t know my enemies), and at 1:07 p.m., I completed a full circuit of “the first library in the United States specifically designed for undergraduates.” (If Lamont was really designed with my undergraduate interests in mind, the architects would’ve installed a wine cellar on Level D instead of some boring “Government Documents print collection.”)
***
Much as the 19th-century epidemiologist John Snow applied pioneering investigative methods to explain the occurrence of cholera in Soho, London, I sought to explain what about Lamont leads to the characteristic symptoms of the Lamonster.
Unlike the Ginsbergs, Thomas W. Lamont, Class of 1892, the namesake benefactor of Lamont Library, didn’t collect Norwegian atlases, though he was part of an unenviable cohort of Americans — among them the poet Ezra Pound — who were rather chummy with a certain Benito Mussolini.
Lamont called himself “something like a missionary” for Italian fascism and in 1925, as a partner at J.P. Morgan, helped secure a $100 million loan for Mussolini’s government. (Perhaps our own American Il Duce can do something about that wine cellar.)
The architect tasked with designing Lamont Library, Henry R. Shepley, Class of 1910 (not a “missionary” for fascism, to my knowledge) also helped design, among several other Harvard structures, New Quincy and the Georgian-revivalist Fogg Art Museum.
Lamont is something of an anomaly on Harvard’s campus. The Library is as red-bricked as other Shepley constructions on Harvard’s campus, but a confused modern-day Tocqueville wouldn’t be shocked to learn that Lamont was a mid-century modern library. The same cannot be said of the looming Widener Library.
Shepley explained his architectural choices at Lamont in a chapter in the Winter 1949 Harvard Library Bulletin, writing that there should be no “monumental vestibules or foyers to traverse before coming to the books” and that while the design was modern, Lamont would “blend with the other buildings in the Yard.” The architect of Widener, Horace Trumbauer, with Gilded Age sensibilities, hardly troubled himself with whether Widener would blend in.
Harvard’s architecture students (if there are any) may lambast my critical analysis, but it strikes me that Frank Lloyd Wright might’ve appreciated the architectural choices of Lamont. In much the same way that Wright concerned himself with Fallingwater’s effect on the Kaufmanns’ interaction with the natural environment, Shepley and Harvard librarian Keyes D. Metcalf concerned themselves with how Lamont would affect undergraduate student interactions with books.
The guiding philosophy of Shepley was one of utilitarian, pragmatic functionality. A 1949 Crimson article wrote that the design “emphasizes ease in reading and accessibility to books” and combined with “the most recent techniques of lighting and interior design to set a new standard in college libraries.”
Another 1949 Crimson article celebrated Lamont’s “special chairs,” designed to “please the spine.” Shepley goes into even more detail about the chairs, designed by the Finn Alvar Aalto and manufactured in Sweden, writing that the simple furniture was “as light in weight as is consistent with comfort and sturdiness.”
I could not determine whether these were the same chairs in Lamont today, but after 24 hours (fine, 22) my aching back suggested otherwise.
***
George Harrison once asked “What is life?” At 2:01 p.m., I asked “What is time?”
A particular hopelessness characterizes the Lamonster. The Lamonster knows they are fated to stay in Lamont late into the night. Those that still have hope that they will again see their dorm before the sun rises, they are not Lamonsters. The Lamonster can check out anytime, but she can never leave.
On another visit to Level A, I studied a passage from a biography of Sergei Rachmaninoff about his Second Piano Concerto, and in a brief spell of studiousness, I read for my Expos 20 class “Good Old Neon,” a David Foster Wallace short story about suicide. A copy of Sartre’s “No Exit” mocked me each time I left my campsite in the William B. and Inger G. Ginsberg reading room.
The air by now had begun to take on a decidedly oppressive edge. I splashed water on my face in the bathroom (and probably contracted an infection), and on my way back, I flipped through a Cary Grant biography and a volume of Keats poems. I read “Ode on Melancholy” and felt sorry for myself.
At 5 p.m. (five mugs of tea in) I purchased an overpriced Chobani yogurt from one of the vending machines in the Lamont Cafe (formerly the reference room) and sat to interview Matthews Hall resident Jerry A. Comar ’29, a self-described Lamonster who gave an especially apt characterization of Lamont as the “basement dungeon gym” of libraries, where “the late night ideas of couple very intelligent college students can grow to change the world.” After musing about cappuccinos, caffeine, and cocaine and having a brief argument about Shakespeare, I returned to my campsite.
On my walk back, I noted my worsening symptoms. My eyes were dry and bloodshot, and my stress was building. What is it that makes a Lamonster? Must one suffer the bite of another Lamonster, or is it predestined, in the Calvinist sense? Could I become a Lamonster?
Intent on completing my metamorphosis, I began a thermodynamics problem from my pset. This, I thought, ought to suffice for hopelessness.
***
I challenge the reader to come up with a more banal statement, but Lamont Library has a lot of books. Some, I was finding, were even interesting. Lamont was designed with the express hope that students would naturally happen across new books. Per Shepley, “once within the Library, the student should find the entire book collection as accessible as possible.” So it came to pass that I found myself flipping through books of critical analysis on Level A that I can’t imagine more than a handful of students have ever read, much less checked out.
At 11:36 p.m., I finished my pset. I’d moved camp first to the Cafe to inhale some dry General Mills Cheerios brought by a sympathetic friend, then to a desk on Level A amidst the weighty magazine archives. I flipped through The New Yorker archives from 1949 (the year Lamont opened) hoping for guidance from FM’s stylistic godparents. I found none.
I found the rumors of noisy freshmen in Lamont to be substantiated. I watched with envy as one group on Level B dined on practically glowing neon-brown Korean fried chicken. Later, as I scarfed down a cold cereal bar from the vending machine, I thought longingly of warm poultry.
So isolated did I feel that I began browsing the bookshelves around clusters of Level B frosh. On display were such offerings as “The Logic of Social Systems” (there is none), “Sex Drugs, and Body Counts” (interestingly enough, in the statistics section), and “The Inquisition in Hollywood” (nobody expected that).
Past midnight, my mugs of tea had begun to make me nauseous. God (Thomas W. Lamont, I presume) knows the last time those 3M water dispensers were cleaned. Lamont’s stale aura had begun to pervade even my palate. The dust-bound volumes were like so many tea sachets, steeping in the Lamont air and infusing it with an omnipresent staleness. I reluctantly began my math pset.
***
Who really is the Lamonster?
At 1:01 a.m., I ascended to the Third Floor, that most quietest of Lamont’s pillared portals, where one doth not dare to speak for fear of awakening the Wrath of those most Purest of the Lamonsters. Here, alone, do they dwell, ascended above us mere Mortals.
At 1:32 a.m., my math pset was still unfinished. My despair was intense. No life teems up here on Level 3. The Lamonster wants to crawl back home to bed, but the metamorphosis is a point of no return; the creature cannot return home.
Shepley wrote of Lamont, “The interior colors were selected with a view of avoiding sharp contrasts, which would cause eye fatigue.” I posit that these drab colors were in fact designed to suck the life force of youthful scholars. (Is this how consultants are made?)
I felt my spirit draining. My back hurt. I missed my unwashed sheets.
At 1:55 a.m., I brushed my teeth in the bathroom on the Third Floor. At 2:12 a.m., I brought a faded book of Greek mythology to the Henry Weston Farnsworth Room and shrank into an armchair. Of my would-be bedchamber, Shepley wrote that the “natural cherry” finishings had been moved to Lamont from Widener. “The intent has been to make this the most conservative room in the new building.”
I got about halfway through a history of the Mycenaeans before it became clear that I lacked the focus to carry on. I curled up in every which way in the armchair, but my back throbbed no less and my mind resisted sleep. The light in Farnsworth was unrelenting, denying me my rest.
Lighting, too, was something Shepley considered “with the greatest care.” He wrote that “The selection for the reading rooms is the aluminum ceiling troffer type set three feet apart, which gives the required twenty-five foot-candles on the reading plane.” Such lighting kept “eyestrain” to a minimum. Shepley did not, evidently, consider the comfort of one such as myself who hoped to catch at least ten winks of sleep before the sun rose.
By 3:05 a.m., I had moved to the floor, fashioning my backpack and sweatshirt as a pillow. I thought longingly of the bed in my Greenough single.
***
“I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink. I’m so tired, my mind is on the blink. I wonder, should I get up and fix myself a drink? No, no, no.”
Clearly, John Lennon wrote these lyrics as he spent his own 24 hours in Lamont, tired yet unable to sleep and lamenting Lamont’s lack of a wine cellar — hence, no, he couldn't go fix himself a drink. (I understand that before the current war with the Regime, Harvard had planned to renovate Lamont; perhaps they ought, in honor of Lennon, to install a wine cellar. Just a thought.)
I caught exactly zero winks as the night dragged on. At 4 a.m., I gave up trying to fall asleep. I was utterly miserable. I stumbled downstairs to find a book — I chose the fourth book in John Updike's Rabbit series, “Rabbit at Rest,” and I attempted to read. But I quickly lost focus, drifting out of concentration and into a mental ether that offered no respite from my fatigue.
On a visit to the bathroom at 5 a.m., I heard what sounded like a typewriter from within a hidden alcove of books. There, like a lion in his den or a bulldog in Harkness Tower, like a WASP in a final club, I knew resided a Lamonster in his element. I dared not look, for fear of being incinerated by his divine form, as Semele was by Zeus.
My will was breaking.
At 9:00 a.m., it broke. I took a walk of shame back to Greenough and collapsed onto my bed. I had failed in my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad quest to spend 24 hours in Lamont. To paraphrase the ever-erudite Mythbusters (though I’m not quite sure what myth I have busted), please don’t try this at home.
I am scared of Lamont, Harvard’s utilitarian temple of books. I have not been back, nor do I intend to go back.
