Conan the Librarian

The world is awash in words, short words and long words, hasty words and well-thought-out words, words that cluster to form books and magazines and all kinds of semi-permanent media. What, then, to read? What teaspoonful to sip at while the tsunami breaks over your head?

Behold Conan the Librarian.

Conan is ready to recommend what you should read next. He is a librarian par excellence but is most brilliant at recommendations. His spectacles sparkle, his mouth moistens as he matchmakes a reader with what ought to be read. He recommends to any who ask, to any who come, cap in hand—or more properly, canvas tote-bag in hand—to the librarian’s desk at the six-story downtown reference library.

He is in the prime of life but was born a wise old soul. He wears cardigans. Argyle socks. He wears rubber-soled hand-tooled Italian leather shoes. His boxers are silk.

He’s been in love seven times. Has sampled each of the cardinal sins. He has loved a lustful woman, who read Rabelais; a glutton, who ate her way through the Michelin Guide; a ten-toed sloth, who couldn’t finish The Four-Hour Workweek; a prideful woman, who sneaked her self-published book into the stacks; a wrathful woman, who self-calmed by reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations; an envious woman, who begged for back issues of People and Better Homes & Gardens; and a greedy woman, who snitched a copy of The Wealthy Barber from the stacks and parlayed it into millions.

He loved them all, but nothing lasting came of any affair. Wedding bells never rang. Things never worked out. But you don’t need to be a lover to love books.

He recommends, especially to those who think they’ve read it all—and maybe they have read extensively. In their area. But Conan sizes them up. He detects their deficiencies, locates their lacunae. He’ll send away the rampant individualist with Franzen’s Corrections and the cunning corporate hack with Klein’s No Logo and the chanting medievalist with Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.

He’s a recommender for readers. The highly literate. People think the new readers, those who’ve just conquered Grade 6-reading level, need him most, but they don’t. Not really. They have study buddies. They have read-a-thons and march-a-thons and annual dragon boat festivals to combat illiteracy. They have trophies and barbecues and IKEA instruction manuals in 12 languages. They have close contact with the pulsating bodies of others who, also, have just discovered the joy of reading. Who say, “Not tonight, dear, I’ve got to see how this one ends.”

Last week Conan recommended books for a professor of English literature. They talked about Derrida and Foucault and Winnie the Pooh. He adores them all, even the ones who have fallen out of fashion.

“I admire the courage of their convictions,” the professor said.

“I want to invite them out for a pint,” Conan said, “and play snooker. Maybe throw some actual darts, and arm-wrestle without subtext or symbolism coloring the exchange.”

The professor smiled in a non-ironic way.

*       *       *

Before that, Conan gave recommendations to a writer of crime fiction. He galvanized her with a copy of Dummies’ Guide to Tarot Cards. She’s now writing the series from major to minor arcana. Before that, Conan recommended books to a hustler, a CEO who never read books, only collected first editions with covers whose colors clashed. Conan found him books clad in chartreuse and hot fuchsia.

Conan was recommending books through the dot-com bubble when the death of reading was proclaimed by Worldcom, AOL, and everyone who shorted Books-A-Million. Was recommending through 9/11 when the only reading was the CNN news crawl and New York Times obituaries.

He was recommending books through the financial crisis of 2008. He visited a disgraced Lehman executive, bringing an armful of books: a cookbook, the Farmer’s Almanac, and a guide to the streets of Barcelona. The executive went to live in Spain and opened a restaurant specializing in organic produce grown on his roof.

The executive later bought a ranch in Pamplona but Conan refused to visit. The bulls he could deal with, but Conan could not stomach the sensation of standing in the middle of a flat arid plain, miles from anywhere.

It was wisdom he’d gained through Octavia.

*       *       *

Octavia was a blond, bronzed cougar worth millions. Her inherited wealth came from Daddy’s patented technology still used today in oil derricks. She took ayahuasca and kept her shaman on speed-dial. She depended on librarians to guide her spiritual development. She needed a man who’d surveyed literature and yet was not sucked into the bloody rotors of the publish-or-perish mill. Someone who could trash-talk Aristotle and demystify Montaigne. Someone who could quote Epictetus as easily as Sontag.

Octavia beheld Conan the Librarian at a fundraiser held in the library where he worked. He was biding his time in the stacks, waiting for the winner of the obscure but lucrative literary prize to be announced and the crowd to disperse. Fatefully, his eye was caught by her radiant form.

She lured him out from the bookshelves with Veuve Clicquot and organic canapés. Slipped her hands under the cardigan and eventually discovered silk. Conan did not disappoint. The next weekend her private Gulfstream flew him to the site of a new library she was planning in Arizona. Her driver picked them up from the airport and she insisted on going to the site even before checking in to their boutique hotel.

The building site was just a spot on a map, was just a geo-location, was a wide-open expanse of sand hard-packed by wind. They dismounted the limo, overhead sun bashing down. The breeze rallied and small puffs of sand whirled around their knees and ankles.

Conan felt the sweatband of his Tilley hat grow tight. He thought of Don Quixote roaming the plains of La Mancha, of the barren landscape of the Holes where Stanley Yelnats stayed. Most of all, he remembered El Camino del Diablo, a dirt road extending through the Sonoran Desert in a non-fiction book by Luis Alberto Urrea. In the chapter describing death by hyperthermia, Urrea wrote that people in the final stages lose rationality and their nerves are damaged. They imagine they can go for a swim in the lake in front of them. They strip off their clothes to cool themselves down as they are slow-roasting under the hot sun. Urrea described the neatly folded piles of clothing with the shoes placed on top.

While Conan meditated on cruel deaths, the heiress retreated to the air-conditioned limo. Standing alone in the Sonoran Desert, he was defenseless, without a single bookshelf to cast shade. He felt he was about to molecularly decompose, each particle zinging off in one direction completely different from any other.

He trembled, he moaned. He flung himself to the ground the better to dissociate.

His palms flattened against the brick-like sand. His right ear scraped on grit and his spectacles rode up on his nose. Fine dust reddened the sclera of his eyeballs. Spread-eagled, he could feel the solidity of Earth. He sensed two high-pitched frequencies that did not harmonize. The noise ran through the desert and carried beyond.

He recalled the past 24 hours. Yesterday he was living in an urban metropolis, toiling in a tall, well-lit building made by others whose construction and electrical knowledge came from books. He’d crossed the country in a plane fabricated and flown by people who’d absorbed aeronautics from books. Now, about to inaugurate a new outpost for knowledge, Conan was but a link in the giant chain connecting old knowledge to new.

In the beginning was the Word.

THE END