22 On the Quiet in the Library of Congress Reading Room

In the Library of Congress Main Reading Room we sit in the round, at long, polished wood tables several rows deep and arched to follow the circular room’s curve. The circulation desk sits in the center, busy with librarians helping and bringing books we’ve called up via the system on our laptops. Most of the LoC’s middle rotunda, the room is massive and decorated in America-does-Ancient-Greece: strong, sweeping arches above, marble columns topped with marble women embodying traits of “civilized thought,” bronze men from history below, iron and wood spiral staircases that take you up into the stacks that ring the entire room.

I’m Desk 178. I’m the Reader vainly trying not to cough into the silence supporting such grandeur.

I know the kind of quiet in here would drive some crazy (even if you didn’t need to cough). But I could wrap myself up in it for days. There’s the hum of a scanner—quiet but insistent. The flipping of pages. Pens set down, clicked, taken up, moved across paper. Clicks of notebooks. Clicks of keys. Creaks of chairs. Sighs, sniffs. My own cough—couldn’t stop it— echoes throughout the room before sinking into this quiet cacophony of reading and writing and doing.

This kind of quiet is beautiful. It’s living a daydream—realizing a romanticized hope of working in a place like this, of thinking big thoughts in big spaces. It’s pretty much everything I’d imagined.

It’s a shared quiet—one all the Readers hold together, one that braces against the hum of humanity on the other side of a single locked door with its thin glass panes. The sign on the other side of that door asks tourists to be quiet near the entrance: researchers at work inside. But their silhouettes crowd close at the glass and their hush-and-hum ebb and flow against it. In their persistent tide of noise—in and out—I can hear one child distinctly. One tour guide moving his group away from us only for some stragglers’ muffled, indistinguishable chatter to remain.

I’m a little smug that I’m inside. I’m a lot happy that I took the time to figure out how to get the card that got me in (anyone can do it). And, if you’re like me—a writer, a reader, a dreamer—it’s a bucket-list must to sit in this quiet, to work in it and leave a bit of yourself behind