LETTERS 

Libraries were a kind of drug for the writer. He had been in many. If he felt uncomfortable in a library he would leave immediately. He had been in small, branch libraries where strange people hung out or kids talked loud. He would leave and say to himself, 'the god that protects readers is in the mood of punishment.' It was not unusual for the writer to enter a library in mid- morning and not exit until 7 or 9pm. He would surround himself with 25 volumes. He felt pretentious but felt alive, too, drilling down through the volumes and linking one subject with another, one style with another. He would read a clot of books on nuclear weapons and a collection of essays on freedom. There was always a spate of political science tomes. Following his last adventure in a library he had suffered terrible cramps. Driving from the library he had to sit up in the seat and half-squat. These cramps increased, subsided, increased, and subsided until the writer was sweating. He emptied it in some anonymous bathroom in a park. It weakened him and when he felt weak he had the habit of chastising himself for all the petty lies he'd told. The lies, as he understood them, represented a gap between personal desire and the social conscience. As long as the gap remained bad things happened. It was not a matter of confessing but a desire for a kind of purification.

The writer was attempting to deal with a common split among democratic people. He connected with an instinct that drove through all other democratic people but, then, started to search the past for some evidence that people had been better or done better things in the past. And it never failed when he thought along these lines that he would drive past a clutch of bureaucratic buildings. 'Ah, they who work there think they are democracy.'

My search is justified!

David Eide
July 21, 1999
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