The Spyglass Tree Read Online Free PDF

year. And then in a few weeks it was November and most of the trees were beginning to be bare and the thermometer outside had begun to drop below fifty degrees and then below forty, and inside it was as if you could smell the warmth from the radiators along the walls, but it was really the furniture polish and the liquid floor wax and there was also that trace of stamp-pad ink and binding glue and cataloging-room shellac that almost always used to be there when you used library books.
    But before all of that and also before the gauze-thin tree whispering showers beyond the soft steady rattle of the drain pipes, there were those bright days during the first weeks of that September when all of the windows were open and along with the maps and illustrations spread out on the table in front of me there was a spicy smell of recently cut hedges and lawn grass and you could also hear the tennis balls being plipped and plopped and the voices of the referees and sometimes also a smattering of applause.
    Then one afternoon I realized that for some time what I had been hearing was only a very casual plipping and plopping, plipping and plopping of fewer and fewer balls back and forth with no referee calls and no applause, because that many weeks of fall-term class sessions had come and gone along with that many social events including the first two home football games and also that much time hanging out on the Strip and in the radio lounge off the main stem, and I also realized that I already knew why I felt the way I felt about being where I was.
    In the classroom you were a student among other students and you did what you did among them and along with them and sometimes together with them, not only as in roundtable discussions, seminars, and laboratory and workshop exercises, but even when you were responding to a direct questionfrom the instructor, you were participating in a group session and as such you were also always reacting to and interacting with other members of the class
.
    But as soon as you came into the library it was almost always as if you were all alone and on your own again, not that you were ever really unaware that you were still actually surrounded by that many other students, faculty, and staff, and also visitors and sightseers. But even so it was very much as if everybody else was there to be an incidental part of what a college campus and a college library were really supposed to be
.
    Not only that, but what with the biggest globe (revolving on a tilted axis) I had ever seen, and what with all of the maps and atlases and mileage charts along with all of the books and documents and pictures and relics and artifacts only that many short steps away, it was also almost as if you had a sand table of the whole world always all to yourself
.
    My roommate went to the library mainly to browse through the current newspapers and magazines every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, mostly during free time in the midafternoon; and sometimes he would also go back again for a while on Saturday morning.
    In those days the periodicals room was on your left as you came into the main lobby and you could usually find him by himself at the same table in the corner near the shelves where the technical journals were, but he always began with the big city newspapers. Then he would go through the
Saturday Review of Literature
and then the weekly news magazines and then the monthly and quarterly reviews.
    When you saw him up in the main reading room, which was not often and never for very long, sometimes he would be in the open reference section making notebook entries at one of the wall tables where the high chairs were. But usually he went straight to the card catalog section at the main circulation counter, and whenhe found what he wanted he checked it out and did all of his reading back in 359, sometimes sitting with his leg folded under him in the sea captain’s chair that he had picked up from somebody in the furniture repair shop in