{"id":45703,"date":"2013-01-29T11:25:31","date_gmt":"2013-01-29T16:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=45703"},"modified":"2013-01-29T14:02:03","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T19:02:03","slug":"back-on-the-shelf-at-the-seminary-co-op","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/29\/back-on-the-shelf-at-the-seminary-co-op\/","title":{"rendered":"Back on the Shelf: At the Seminary Co-op"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Brian Koprowski, Chicago Theological Seminary, University of Chicago<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nostalgia is a dangerous feeling to indulge. It transforms other people, including old versions of one\u2019s self, into figures whose lone purpose is to lend texture and credence to a diorama of the past. And just as an elementary-school diorama of, say, a Roman frontier fortress, no matter how meticulously researched and constructed, can never convey the totality of what it would have been like to stand sentry in Germania circa 70 A.D., so the version of the past constructed by nostalgia is a distortion, albeit one that relies upon memory (itself a kind of distortion, as neuroscience tells us) and experience to weave what is in essence a fairy tale.<\/p>\n

Nostalgia\u2019s refractions aren\u2019t limited to people, of course. Its influence extends to places, too, refusing to acknowledge that places have presents and futures\u2014presents and futures that often don\u2019t involve one\u2019s self, hence the willingness to ignore them\u2014but only pasts: your pasts. Whenever I visit the University of Chicago, for instance, Hutch Courtyard is never Hutch Courtyard, a pleasant flagstone enclave that\u2019s served as a favored warm-weather gathering spot for generations of undergraduates, but instead the place where I sat reading Moby-Dick<\/em> when I learned that my grandmother had died. That\u2019s it. All of the hopes and dreams, joys and fears toted through that spot by millions of human beings for more than a century, brushed aside by my solipsistic longing for a past that wasn\u2019t nearly as honey colored in the living as it is in the remembering. I recall seeing a picture of Prince Charles passing through Hutch Courtyard during a 1977 visit and thinking, There\u2019s Prince Charles walking right by the spot where I was when I heard that Grandma died. Nostalgia, which presents the past as a meadow of boundless possibility, is actually quite constricting. <\/p>\n

Hutch Courtyard is one of a dozen sites of its kind at the University of Chicago, the ground zero of my nostalgia. My decision to transfer from there after my second year\u2014a decision I was wrestling with as I sat reading about Queequeg and Ishmael that spring\u2014is the fork in time\u2019s road that I revisit every day, peering down the path not taken as if it remained open. It\u2019s been three years since I left, and the constant second-guessing, fueled largely by nostalgia, has long since grown wearisome, both for me and for the friends I often drag into my endless analyses, vexed by my inability to let the past alone. They try to be helpful. When I told my friend Ricky recently that I felt like I\u2019d navigated college poorly, he replied with exclamatory glee, much like Charlie Brown after Lucy suggests that he suffers from pantophobia: \u201cThat\u2019s it!\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of it! Everyone<\/em> feels like they did college wrong, except for the assholes that you and I don\u2019t want to associate with!\u201d I laughed and felt better for a while, and knew that Ricky was right, and then went back to doubting the decisions of my twenty-year-old self.<\/p>\n

And so last weekend I went back, stepping across the yellow tape my better impulses have strung around the campus and venturing toward the radioactive core of my regret. Ostensibly, I was there to visit friends I hadn\u2019t seen in a while, but the visit was as much about laying my nostalgia to rest, though I hardly articulated this purpose to myself. In any event, it seemed I was doomed to fight the same old losing battle from my first glimpse of the moonlit campus. My war against nostalgia often plays out as a kind of internal counterinsurgency operation, nostalgia brazenly showing its face in the countryside of my heart, my superego ruthlessly deploying against it, trying to destroy the village to save it. But nostalgia is a wheedler, a bargainer, and not altogether unpleasant\u2014in fact, it is more often quite pleasant\u2014and as I passed each familiar building, memories and associations began piling up, overwhelming my defenses. I\u2019d been prepared to feel this way, but no matter: sentimentality is too often my default emotional response. I\u2019d been in Chicago for twenty-four hours, and I was already exhausted.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Luckily, as I discovered the next morning, the local populace was cooperating with my counterrevolutionary forces, in the form of the relocated Seminary Co-op Bookstore. For years, the Co-op had colonized the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary. Its shelves wound among pipes and boilers; its ceiling was low enough to require a permanent half crouch by anyone taller than five feet. Thirty dollars bought three shares in the Co-op, shares that entitled you to a small discount but which had supposedly never paid a dividend at fiscal year\u2019s end. At the beginning of each term, I would descend into the warren of shelves, head towards the rear, and find my class listings, taking a copy of The Wealth of Nations<\/em> or The Division of Labor in Society<\/em> from a huge stack of identical editions as if it were a slice of wedding cake. The Co-op was my refuge in depressed days and hours, the days and hours\u2014of which there were plenty\u2014that my nostalgia erases when reconstructing my Chicago years.<\/p>\n

But the Co-op has moved, eight feet up and one block east to the first floor of a building next to Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s splendid Robie House, displaced by the university\u2019s forthcoming Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. I wouldn\u2019t have a chance to linger among my ambered memories underground, but would instead have to confront the new reality of a clean, well-lighted Co-op. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty confusing,\u201d my old friend Nausicaa had warned me. She was referring to the store\u2019s layout, which is indeed a bit perplexing, relying on pods of shelves that require a browser to constantly reorient his location in the alphabet of authors\u2019 last names. But in all the ways that counted, the store made perfect sense to me.<\/p>\n

The Co-op still offered an incredible bounty in a time of literary scarcity: no less than eight different versions of War and Peace<\/em> (Penguin Classics, Penguin Classics Deluxe, Oxford, Norton\u2026); obscure titles from deep within authors\u2019 oeuvres; robust shelves of literary theory and continental philosophy. But aside from its rich selection, the Co-op bore little relation to the store I had known: a sense of well-spaced order had replaced the atmosphere of overstuffed clutter; beautiful big windows let in plenty of sunlight; plush new carpeting had replaced bare concrete; tables and chairs had usurped footstools as the primary seating option.<\/p>\n

In all that unfamiliarity, I found freedom, a gleeful severing of a link to a past that I had been massaging and worrying until it bore little in the way of truth. The old Seminary Co-op had been an enchanted place, it\u2019s true, a holdover from an older world, but its time had come. So long as the books remain, who cares? Let the university turn the old space into a laboratory of infernal economics, let the Seminary Co-op Documentary Project<\/a> preserve the space in memory, but let the past be past. Wandering among the shelves, a slow transformation took place, my memories ceasing to appear like portals to a magical past and starting to look like themselves\u2014like pictures of a time that, like most times in life, was complicated in its mixture of emotions. I browsed for a while, bought a copy of Miami and the Siege of Chicago<\/em>, and left in high spirits, glad to see the Co-op doing so well, and glad to no longer think of it as mine.<\/p>\n

James Santel lives, writes, and teaches in St. Louis. His writing has appeared in <\/em>The Believer, the <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, <\/em>The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals, and <\/em>The Millions, and is forthcoming in <\/em>The American Scholar. He blogs at jsantel.blogspot.com<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nostalgia is a dangerous feeling to indulge. It transforms other people, including old versions of one\u2019s self, into figures whose lone purpose is to lend texture and credence to a diorama of the past. 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