like the Beast's

This library is like the Beast's (but bigger, and older, and real), and I feel like Belle when I ascend the stairs and she opens her eyes. History has a weight to itself here -- you can smell it on the air, feel it in the space around you. I head to the guard, show my pass and am pointed to a door at the end of the Long Room. It's marked "For Manuscripts Only" and waits behind one of the ropes they use to herd people into lines at the cinema. I unhook it, rehook it behind myself and open the door. Up an old staircase and into a tiny lift, abandoned in a corner filled with unsorted manuscripts and cleaning supplies. And then I stand before the door to the Manuscripts office. I take a moment to grin before opening it. I am informed of how to order material, and left in respectful peace as I search out the prison diary. I read Alice Sebold as I wait for the material to arrive, feeling like I should respect this place with a book as old as it is, but too interested in this story to put it down. I glance out the window now and then, watching the Dublin rooftops, reminded forcibly of the Citadel library and the time spent researching there. And then it's here, this diary that Cecilia Saunders wrote in Kilmainham jail in 1923. I am told to touch it as little as possible, and I revel in laying the weighted bookmarks on the pages to hold them as I read. Her voice is more modern than Maud's, and I feel a little warm glow as I read the addendums in the margins, as I recognize that she, too, adds sentence fragments after the fact and leads the reader to them with hastily drawn and circled stars. I read, and take notes, and feel the familiar restlessness that sets in after hours spent in research (which I push aside to finish the diary, and skim the letters her incarcerated husband wrote her about his hunger strike. I cannot focus on these, though, because his writing is too small and scrawled and I am impatient). And then I am exiting the way I came, down the lift and staircase and past the same guard. We joke about how I must feel smarter, after the hours spent researching, and how I am off to get some food. Which I am, bidding goodbye to the books and their history in this library that is older than my own country.
Off to a muffin and macchiato go I.
And then here is the National Library, where I have already obtained a reader's ticket and now happily ascend the staircase to find microfilmed copies of an early 20th century newspaper. I read a play Maud wrote, recognize names and articles as I scroll past them. Place my hand briefly against the pages of an original volume published in 1900 (ignoring my mind that says your oils will affect these pages in favour of my body that says feel this).
And then it is time to go home, to climb onto the bus and settle in, laptop and notebook a little fuller and spirit a little wider after the brush with history and its stories.

LOVE.