I felt simple as a milkmaid yesterday, walking to the library. It was so quaint of me! But the car was blocked in and I wanted to go to the library and get some books. And the library’s not that far. And it wasn’t that hot.

I had my camera with me, so on the way I tried to take pictures, but the truth is I never walk to the library, and there’s nothing meaningful on the way. A couple of dogs with electronic collars on stood at the boundaries of their electronic field and barked, so I took their pictures, which drove them wild. I passed the spot where a house I liked has been torn down and replaced it with something huge and corporate, but how can I take a picture of what’s missing? You’d just see a three-car garage. At the library I found a number of things I wanted to read, including The Sheltering Sky, and sat in a chair facing out the big picture window. I thought about taking a picture of the view there, but it wasn’t a very good view, the big tree was lifeless and there was too much grass and road.

When we lived in the city I worked at a private library that was probably a perfect place. It was old and very pretty and had a large collection, and upstairs there were lockers to keep your computer in and a room with desks where people could write books. If you needed to, you could go into the stacks and look for things, and if you found things you wanted to read you could go down to the big reading room, where there were little writing tables and couches and often an old man, snoring. It was always the same old man, and his snoring would grow loud and quiet again, without him waking up. There were very few bathrooms and only one place to make a phone call, which led to tension, which interested and distracted me. Another old man, not the snorer, used to occupy the ground level toilet from 12:30 to 1, the last solid minute of which was taken up spraying Lysol. I knew this because I could hear it from outside the door, and because when I entered after he left I breathed in great billowing clouds of it, and almost choked to death.

When I couldn’t write my book in a temporary way, I sat at my computer and typed in things about all the other people in the room, including my thoughts on the likelihood that they were sitting at their computers typing things about me. There was one woman who was incredibly sensitive to sound, or very bad at concentrating, or very good at not doing her work. The sound of work being backed up on a floppy disk would drive her absolutely crazy, she would start moving in her seat and breathing dramatically and looking around to make eye contact with other noise haters and finally, if it went on too long, would stand up and ask the person to stop. She didn’t like clicking, either, and typing could upset her. I wondered who was better at not doing her work, her or me as I watched her. Then we had a run-in at the phone booth which ended when she shouted “Shit!” at me and ran down the stairs, and I realized her problems were larger than procrastination. Another woman, whom I idolized for her profound bosom, professorial clothes, and air of extreme competence, was writing about Anne Frank. I don’t remember the men so well, although I could of course check my notes about this. The library was a seventeen-minute walk from my apartment, which was also perfect. In the winter the sunny side of Park was five degrees warmer than any other part of the city.

In The Chateau, William Maxwell writes that people often underestimate the perfect, or at least that’s how I remember it. I can’t find it anywhere in the book.