It should come as no surprise that library leadership, in moments of dispassionate assessment often augmented by hearing from students who have trouble finding seats during busy periods, would seek to rezone areas occupied by stacks for more individual and group work. Yet it often does come as an unwelcome surprise to many, especially those with a powerful emotional attachment to what libraries should look like and be.
What’s happening here is much more complicated than an imagined zero-sum game between the defenders of books and library futurists. The decline in the use of print books at universities relates to the kinds of books we read for scholarly pursuits rather than pure pleasure, the rise of ebooks and digital articles, and the changing environment of research. And it runs contrary to the experience of public libraries and bookstores, where print continues to thrive.
The cell was the size of a large cupboard. There wasn’t enough room to lie down. I’d come late on a winter afternoon; the light was seeping away. What light there was came through the ‘squint’ – the small window that looked onto the sanctuary. It was a cruciform shape and through it I could see a single candle standing on the altar. I turned on the torch on my phone. In front of the squint was an oak shelf with a dark circle on its edge where the wood had been rubbed smooth. Above it was a notice that read: ‘Please put nothing on the ancient sill. This was the prayer-desk of the anchorites for several centuries.’ I knelt in front of it. If the floor had been at the same height in the medieval period, the desk would have been too high for an anchorite to rest their elbows on. Had the indentation been made by pairs of hands gripping the edge of the ledge? I wondered at those pairs of hands. This cell had been a coffin to its inhabitants – once inside, they were never to come out. They may have been buried beneath my feet, in this tiny anchorhold in the church of St Nicholas in the village of Compton in Surrey.
An anchorite or anchoress permanently encloses themselves in a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation. The word comes from the Greek ἀναχωρεῖν (‘anachorein’) meaning ‘to retire or retreat’. Anchoritism emerged in the late 11th century in tandem with a monastic reform movement and a growth in spiritual enthusiasm that is sometimes referred to as the Medieval Reformation. In the Middle Ages in England, as elsewhere in Europe, the practice was not uncommon – there were around a hundred recluses across the country in the 12th century; over the 13th century, the figure increased to two hundred. Women significantly outnumbered men, by as much as three to one.
“I’ll never retire,” Mr. Gritsipis, 79, said. “If you retire, you’re dead.”
And why should he? “This is my palace,” he said after a recent lunch service at 42nd Street Pizza, the old-school Greek diner on the ground floor of his four-story, white stucco building. People come for pizza by the slice, or choose from the 220-item breakfast-lunch-and-dinner menu.
But Mr. Gritsipis’s kingdom is under siege — from rising expenses, changing tastes and developers who are trying to buy smaller and more unusual lots to assemble enough land for residential and mixed-use projects. His building, near the ultraluxury Hudson Yards development, is surrounded by glassy high-rises occupied by transient renters and owners, few of whom order gyro platters.
If you had been reading Undressing as if it were a novella, you would hunger for the easy narrative satisfaction of a confrontation with the abuser. But Abraham’s decision to keep his head down and hold on to a Christian idea of forgiveness rings truer. And what’s more, his resolve turns out to be a triumphant use of silence.
These poems, drawn to the beauty and power of performance, nevertheless deeply mistrust corrupt forms of “simulation,” like staged border crossings billed as fun outings for wealthy young Mexicans, where, “if you are left behind, a pickup truck / will take you back to your hotel.” It’s a simulation that leaves out the essence of the experience; namely, that you might die. Scenters-Zapico’s poems are never simulations in that demeaned sense. Robert Frost called poetry “play for mortal stakes.” The stakes, in Scenters-Zapico’s poems, are that serious: her astonishing verbal crossings reveal a mind as richly self-divided as any you will find.