For the last few summers, I’ve spent great chunks of my time shelf-reading at the library. Standing in an aisle, reading call numbers, making sure that 140,000 volumes are all in the order Library of Congress and we have laid out for them. It can certainly be a little tedious, certainly, but it’s rewarding at the end of the summer before all of our patrons stumble back in, to know that, yes, all of these books are here. They are all in order and all locatable in an elegant system.

The job is not without it’s pleasures. I chose the aisles I want to organize. I’m fond of the PSs and the PQs, naturally. The PNs, while often entertaining, don’t hold my attention as well. TR is lovely for a break, but I wouldn’t want to shelf-read there all summer. Though anything is better than the thin-spined musical scores and songbooks of the ML420s, that just might be my least favorite.

It seems, too, every summer since I’ve started work at the library that Rimbaud jumps off the shelves and into my arms when I cross his path high up and sweaty on the third floor. Today, it’s Enid Starkie’s biography, “Arthur Rimbaud”, that has landed itself on my desk. There’s something summery about old Rimbaud. The heat, the sweat—I don’t know just what.

Last summer I passed my time with Un Saison En Enfer, moving slowly and heavily from the verso’s French to the recto’s English. It was hot then, and I lived in a dim second floor apartment on a leafy but busy road. My room jutted out from the rear of the house and so I had windows on three sides, with green leaves pushing in against the screens. It was a perfect was to read Rimbaud, I think, and a more perfect place to romanticize the tragedy of his writing life.

His best (his only) work behind him at the age of 22! It was shocking, then, when I was 22, to think of what life would be if I ceased to write at that moment. I’d only just begun, it felt like. I still feel that way, another year out.

As I continue to write, I continue to read Rimbaud, and perhaps learn a little bit of the alchemy Ms Starkie is telling me he was after.

P.S.

My story, Testimony, is up today at The Drum. Check it out!