The Sanctity of the Rose Reading Room
Each patron is exalted as a temporary exhibit featuring the books in their head.
*Last revised on January 24, 2024 (in the Rose Reading Room)
There's no silence in the city. Within a minute in New York, you might hear a busking percussionist, a couple's wistful conversation, and kids playing; or an unsolicited elevator pitch, ungodly subway squeaks, and an aggressive street-corner monologue. Whether you find the noise irritating or intoxicating, you can't escape it. But today, I did.
My ritual begins as I ascend the grand-banistered staircase to the third floor, which sounds like I'm slowly closing the door of an air-tight recording studio. With each step, I dampen and distance the city-noise. Up the slope of the last flight, I see the massive ceiling-mural of Prometheus giving fire to the first men. But the subject of the piece is neither the men nor the god; it's what Prometheus brings: the spark of consciousness, the light of knowledge. Just as a crucifix reminds Catholics of Jesus's sacrifice, the third-floor mural reminds NYPL patrons of the object of value here: knowledge.
I'm on my way to the Rose Reading Room, on the the third floor of the New York Public Library in Midtown. This place is a sanctuary — a dream-reprieve from the reality of NYC. At the entrance is a guard. Let's call him Peter. He isn't there to turn me away, just to remind me of the ritual. "Are you here for quiet study?" he asks. I nod. And with a wave, Peter opens the pearly gates.
I'm silent as I search for a seat. From my other visits here, I recall how people would scoot their heavy, wooden chairs across the tile floor. Each sounded like a sustained note from an out-of-tune oboe. So as I go to sit, I lift my chair to maintain the silence. By sitting down, I join a community of knowledge-seekers who have come here for the past 125 years to work on what they find meaningful.
This place has no religious affiliation, yet it isn’t secular. It’s somewhere in between. Its grandeur, its art, its customs suggest a reverence for something sacred.
In the center of the ceiling, which is at least five stories high, is a paining of the sky. The border is dark and foreboding, but the clouds soften and part along the middle to reveal a clear blue. It’s as if our presence here is why there is anything besides dense, dark storm-clouds above. The ceiling of the Rose Reading Room repeats the imagery established by the Prometheus mural in the rotunda. It's another reminder of what we value here.
When I return from the ceiling, I notice that every seat is numbered with a painted label on the table. Today, I’m in seat 193. In another place, such categorization would be a way to attribute units of output to an employee ID. "I work in cubicle 43." But it's different here; these numbers are humanizing rather than objectifying. The Rose Reading Room is concerned with inputs, not outputs. That's the ritual, after all: "quiet study."
Stored on the shelves of our psyches are anthologies of ideas, encyclopedias of experiences, fantasy and sci-fi dreamworlds, and fictions we assign to our pasts and futures. In the Rose Reading Room, every seat becomes an exhibition space, indexed in the library by date, time, and seat number like a version of the Dewey Decimal System. And the tables become extensions of the bookshelves that wrap the room, featuring catalogues of us. In the Rose Reading Room, each patron is exalted as a temporary exhibit featuring the books in their head.
I have no way of knowing what my peers are working on or what they have experienced, but I feel that it is all worthwhile. I feel the variety of interests, the complexity of experiences, and the height of the ambitions represented in this room. And I expect myself to do good work beside my mute colleagues. Today, seated in 193, I'm inspired to append this place to the bookshelf of me.
