Like nearly everything else I write, I have produced this text while sitting in the stacks at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library. I am here nearly every day to work on my dissertation.
The Reg, as it is known, holds more than four million volumes, and is said to be the largest browsable, open-stack collection of any university library in the United States. The building is enormous: It is built on the site of a former Big Ten football stadium, with a footprint two and a half football fields in size. The building itself is a cubish piece of reinforced concrete comprising five floors, a basement, a cell-signal-resistant subbasement filled with moving shelves, and mechanical penthouse, all seemingly formed by one long, continuous pour of material. (I am no expert, but the building appears to be a promising subject for treatment in Structural Concrete, one of 18 periodicals on concrete-based construction held by the library.)
As I peer back from my seat, I see rows of books receding so far into the distance that they nearly have a vanishing point. I am attempting to convey some sense of size because the hugeness of the library, while a book-lover’s dream, also presents some scholarly and psychological difficulties.
A major problem for my work, which draws heavily from existing sources, is identifying what material will adequately reward the time I spend reading it. The mass of scholarship, even in my specialized area of state-level American politics, is inhumanly large, and I can survive only by ignoring much of what has been written. Everybody else here does the same: Estimates from published data suggest that only 20 percent of the library’s holdings will circulate in any five-year period
How does one distinguish this valuable fifth from the other 80 percent? There are, of course, some tricks. I am much more likely to look at a book if I have already heard of it. Certain colophons warn that a book will be a waste of time. A worn spine, my dissertation adviser says, is the sign of a valuable work. But using such techniques will carry me only so far. At some point, no more can be learned without actually reading, and that is why I am here so often. Hard work resolves the scholarly difficulty. Almost any labor pursued with enough diligence can become a dissertation — or so I hope.
The psychological challenges are thornier. I don’t want to simply write a dissertation. I want to believe that the work I do is important. In this belief, I have some props to lean on. The university has seen fit to support my work financially, and though I know better, money can be a comforting measure of significance. Also, after much work and revision, some of my scholarship is finding its way into print; and the topics I study — such as voter-identification laws and interstate conflicts over resources like water — are regularly covered in major media outlets.
Yet I work every day surrounded by suggestive evidence that my labor doesn’t matter much: hundreds of thousands of books, also the work of dedicated writers, which I now consider too uninteresting to read. My immediate goal — a bound dissertation — will not even earn a place on these shelves. It will be stored in a subterranean vault where it can be retrieved by robots in the somewhat unlikely event that anybody wishes to leaf through it.
This feeling of paltriness dogs many young researchers, and a number of strategies exist to protect against it. Judging by the average time required to complete a dissertation, avoidance and denial are fairly popular. Self-importance may serve, too: Some students insist, quietly or loudly, that their work will consign all prior scholarship to the dustbin of history (or, better, the library deaccession sale of history).
The healthier responses, I believe, are faith and passion. It is possible to look at the bulk of what has already been done, reflect honestly that one’s own place is likely to be as modest as the rest, but nonetheless behave as though one’s own exertion may prove to be important — some scholarship is important, after all. The lucky few with a true scholarly vocation, supposing such people actually exist, may be untroubled by these doubts, certain that what they do is worthwhile for its own sake.
For my part, I do best when I surrender to the stacks: Simple curiosity carries me along when I am in doubt, and the stacks, like the tides, reliably yield up some object of fascination.
I produced the draft of this essay on a Sunday morning during a holiday break. Most of the university had other places to be: A brief walk along the main spine of the stacks suggested that I had the entire floor to myself. As a test, I stood in the aisle and shouted “I matter!” My voice disappeared with no echo.
