(Editor’s note: Every year, Concordia College hosts the National Book Awards on Campus program.  As part of that program, winners and finalists of the National Book Award give a talk to a lunch group of first year students and various faculty on the theme of academic excellence.  This essay was Jaimy Gordon’s talk.)

There have been many profound exegeses of excellence in these halls. Mine will not be one of them. Mine will be all about me, not because I’m excellent, but because I’m not; or rather, I think I can claim, with no false modesty, that I am excellent at not being excellent, and finally made an art of it – that is, my literary art, such as it is, is all about that – not being excellent. Therefore I am going to take the confessional approach here, arriving in the vestibule of excellence via the non-members’ entrance. I’ll speak to excellence through its own bulletproof window, kind of like the window at the police station – at the police station but not inside the police station ‑ where you go to pay your fine.

When it first made its way to me, the subject of this talk had been narrowed down to academic excellence. This was later corrected, but too late: The damage had been done. I had to wonder whether you should take (or I should offer) advice about academic excellence from somebody who wasn’t all that good in school. Was I any good in school? I was uneven. I was never in that line outside the professor’s office, waiting to ask, Why didn’t I get an A in the geography of Siberia? I knew why I didn’t get an A in the geography of Siberia. I would start reading a text on the geography of Siberia and I might come across the word podzol, and then I would waste the next two hours admiring its weirdness and scrutinizing its usages and etymology. By the way, I finally got the word podzol into a book only this year, 45 years later. It’s in Lord of Misrule, page 96.

So I didn’t put the time I should have into learning the geography of Siberia, but I did learn things along the way. The dirty truth is, I worked hard, but only in areas that came easily to me. What were they? English and languages.  At the same time, I was curious about (just for example) evolutionary biology, anthropology, political thought, the sociology of religion, and especially history, but I didn’t much care about getting an A in them. I did enjoy buying the texts and heavily annotating the opening chapters of them – so heavily that, as previously mentioned, I often ran out of time before I got to the assigned reading for the class.

The trouble about excellence is that it invariably requires some non-excellence in the vicinity in order to show. When I was a child, excellence was a trait largely encouraged by grownups, who used it to separate one kind of child from another. I didn’t much care for grownups, and anyway when I did consciously strive for excellence, somebody else usually got there first. I was the second of five kids of the same two parents, an unheard of number of progeny for one family in the Baltimore Reformed Jewish community I grew up in. We were an outlaw band, raffish, wild and loud, our ethos very much us‑against‑the‑world. None of us respected a closed door. No one of us dared to be excellent. Inside this family, for me to be excellent at anything besides ping pong required furtiveness. Already when I was in high school, such writing as I got done, I did at 2:00 or even at 5:00 in the morning. I might carry a quilt and a bunch of pillows into the shower stall, where I could have some privacy. This resulted in poems as dense as iron ingots, tempered in the smoke of alchemists and practitioners of the black arts. I found them excellent, even if no one else read them. But even then I was aware of a certain tension:  Could excellence be for oneself alone? That seemed illogical and unbalanced, like one hand clapping. Wasn’t this early taste for eccentric excellence actually a form of escape from competition?

Maybe outlaw excellence is a contradiction in terms, but that was the route that appealed to me from the start. Competition at school was aggressive and exhausting and generally required me to assert myself at some activity that didn’t come naturally to me, like writing skits for holidays. And besides I would lose at every open competition. When competition was underway, I usually found it better to find my way discreetly back to my shower stall, book in hand. In high school I discovered an abandoned dressing room behind the study hall, which had once been a theater; and there I repaired, to read of course, read a lot, write a little. Reading is associated with self-improvement, and self-improvement is a route to excellence, but at the time, this was a retreat, a falling back to my personal stronghold, or hideout, lined with books, novels in particular. I didn’t associate this action with excelling, just the opposite, and when I got caught there once by a janitor I came within a hair of being ejected from school —  even though you could say that such vice led to a dubious sort of excellence in the end.

Even in college, where I had excellent instruction, I continued to want to carry books off to my lair, my shower stall, and read them in solitude. Exams seemed senseless: Why commit things to memory by a certain date only to forget them again in a week? What I did instead when exam time was approaching was blow my monthly stipend at the bookstore on a stack of novels not assigned in any class. It may sound like bragging now, but at the time I was in despair of myself. During exam week, when everybody else got a sickly cast from lack of sleep, my skin cleared. I was reading Forster and Elizabeth Bowen. I also walked and walked, like a Romantic poet. I can walk, and often still do, with a book in front of my face.

I don’t want you to suppose I didn’t pay a price for this, in self esteem. I love my life but I’ve never been much of a fan of myself. This is not a joke; it’s a central fact of my existence. I believe I have talent. I’ve squandered most of it. I know I’ve been given opportunities which I not only wasted but met with the most fatuous ingratitude. I am 66 years old but haven’t written 66 years’ worth of books, far from it. Still, what I have written has been noticed by at least a few. Shortly after my second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, appeared, I received an award for my fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters. For the ceremony I was seated on stage next to John Updike, which, I later realized, probably meant that he was on the committee that had chosen me for this award. Instead of taking the opportunity to thank him, and tell him that his novel The Centaur – which won the National Book Award in 1964 — had given me the liberty to write showy metaphors and feel for mythic understructure and otherwise had a tremendous influence on me in my youth, I nervously prattled on and on to him about a male colleague of mine in Michigan who claims to consult Updike’s nonfiction as a Bible on how to cope with premature ejaculation. This was rather a conversation stopper, and there went a splendid opportunity. Later I put a question to myself that I’ve had to ask far too many times: What was I thinking of?

If at the age of 66 I compare my oeuvre to Updike’s, I haven’t done much. Four months ago, despite having been well looked after in terms of honors and awards, I felt, for good reason, largely invisible as an artist and otherwise like a seedy old outlaw on the down slope. And I am still that, in this sense: The kind of artist I am (and was always going to be) is never going to write 60 books, never going to write the whole human comedy, with every order of society represented, from highest to lowest. I do summon the rich language I’ve reaped from a life of promiscuous reading (and listening), and then I write for, and about, the low, the homeless, the failure, the outsider, whose relation to excellence, like my own, is always anguished and problematic.

But then four months ago a strange thing happened: my book about damaged old horses and humans on the down slope won the National Book Award. It’s wonderful for me that it did win, of course. But it is still in every particular the art that a life like mine produces, all about desperate efforts on the margins where excellence is a thing that happens far away, and winning is either small and momentary, or recalled, bittersweet, from the past.

I’ve been oddly comforted to realize that some of the poets and writers most necessary to me have also had small oeuvres, and sometimes lived, as I do, with the sense of what they might have accomplished if they’d had the healthy will and steady industry of an Updike. I was deeply struck by a letter from Baudelaire to his mother, Mme. Aupick – especially because Baudelaire is a writer of supreme importance to me, in his Parnassian alexandrines and nostalgia for the gutter, and I could not bear for him to be different from himself in any way. He has just seen an exhibition of the early papers of Balzac and he reports in despair that not only the prose but even the quality of the ideas progresses, with such regular work and discipline. Some of the other writers whom I thank every day for writing one or two books instead of 60 are Bruno Schulz (who has the excuse that he was not only obstructed by war but destroyed by it); Ralph Ellison and Katherine Anne Porter, who both tried to correct their sparse but brilliant and indispensable midlife output with massive final tomes that no one reads; Samuel Butler, who wrote somewhere that the purpose of life was to get his books into other people’s studies while keeping their books out of his – and he surely wrote 60 books, but now we read only The Way of All Flesh and thank god for it; Richard Hughes, who gave us A High Wind in Jamaica, Darryl Pinckney, who wrote High Cotton, Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, Malcolm Braly, On the Yard, Keith Waldrop, Light While There Is Light, Sybille Bedford, A Legacy, and Jean Rhys, whose three or four novels are all the same book to me.

In the end I both savor and curse this aspect of myself, this outlaw excellence, one name for a mocking Doppelgänger that has dogged me all my life.

I may even have some genetic claim on it, or some genes at cross purposes may have had their claim on me. More than I was allowed to know when I was a girl, I am the product of two usually warring ways of looking at the world – and so, I think, is my novel, Lord of Misrule.

Both my parents were Jewish, the children of immigrants who arrived in America shortly before the turn of the century, but my father was prep school, military school and Ivy educated. His mother, having made a fortune from two elegant hat shops by the time she was thirty, left filthy trade behind her and never worked again, went to lectures and concerts and museums and so at least mimicked the life of the cultured upper class in New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life. She obliterated all trace of a Yiddish accent, if she ever had one. She was literary (in accordance with her will, her funeral consisted of a reading of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”), indomitably formal, a kind of nun of aesthetic aspiration and a Germanophile. She got rid of her husband early.

My mother’s mother was a garment worker who, like my father’s mother, made hats, but on the factory end, not management. She too parted from her husband early. (She later remarried an alcoholic with a flourishing window-washing business that landed many contracts with the city – a sure sign of corruption, though that never occurred to me when I was young.) My mother was raised by her grandparents on Patterson Park Avenue in East Baltimore, among seven aunts and uncles, none of whom, as far as I know, ever read a book, in a horseplaying household where shabbos ended in a poker game and a number of shady enterprises were tolerated, so that two uncles went to jail and one was eventually murdered. My mother put all this behind her and graduated from Goucher College in 1941, already married to my father who had gone to Hopkins and then Columbia Law. We didn’t see much of her family, except at an occasional seder or bar mitzvah.

I had an excellent education, and never wanted to be anything but a writer. All the same, I was drawn to a wild-eyed horsetrainer and the racetrack where he ran his horses, in Charles Town, West Virginia, in my twenties. Lord of Misrule is a novel about the seediest possible racetrack, created by a writer who has the highest possible literary aspirations, and my language surely shows it. The characters in Lord of Misrule (especially the loan shark Two‑Tie) talk like my Baltimore uncles, except for the ancient groom Medicine Ed, who, being from South Carolina like most poor black folk I knew in Baltimore when I was growing up, talks like my great‑grandparents’ neighbors on Patterson Park Avenue in the fifties, after most white families had departed.

In the end like most people I am not so much true to myself as stuck with myself, but as a writer I find myself in surprisingly good company – for art is so comprehensive and forgiving that even such troubled relations with excellence as my own can make a book – maybe even an excellent book.

 

Today’s essay follows on a paper I delivered late last year at the American Bookworm Society entitled, “Number Our Books: A Socio-Ethnographic Approach,” which was based on the pioneering work of Barbara Myerhoff, and a talk I gave earlier in the year at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Buchhändlunggesellschaft, called “Lesen, damit: U.S. Reading Patterns in the New Millennium,” the title of which an overenthusiastic undergraduate later infelicitously translated as “Read, Damn It” and published in an on-line journal last January.

It may seem a bit too obvious to begin by noting that the American literary and book retail environment is undergoing a period of great uncertainty but I think a brief history of the often jangled nerves in the book-selling and book-consuming business will set the current state of the obsessive reader in context of this larger habitat.

The current wave of anxiety began about thirty years ago. Until then for a couple of hundred years small retail bookstores had acted like fortresses on an American cultural frontier, purposed to defend high culture from a home-grown booboisie. Then in about 1980 these shops came under the scrutiny and control of ambitious efficiency-experts, and commercial interests pressured them to produce more financial capital than cultural capital. The widely vilified villains in this slippery-slope are the brothers Borders and Riggio, as in Borders Books and Barnes & Noble. The until-then typical bookstore was transformed into a “superstore”. Inventory on-hand went from 15,000 or 20,000 titles to 150,000 titles. These larger stores offered a wider selection and lower prices for the same product. They took lower margins, and made up what they lost in the profit from the sale of a single-book by increasing the number of unit sales. Because of their size, they were also able to force publishers and book distributors to grant them volume discounts at the wholesale level and to require publishers to pony up for in-store placement and advertising money known as “co-op fees.” Understandably upset about different wholesale pricing for small and large bookstores, a group of smaller bookstores went to court and sued the larger ones. Also understandably, Barnes & Noble withdrew from the retail book trade group, the American Booksellers Association, and its training programs for bookstore employees. Many, many small bookstores, unable to compete, or rather unwilling to change their culture to compete, went out of business.

The reaction to this major change depended on what type and quality of interaction an individual wanted to take away from a visit to a physical bookstore. To a great extent, as the number of superstores grew, consumers benefited from immediate access to many more titles and lower prices. On the other hand, to many people the disappearance of small bookstores undermined the very fabric of a public culture of book-reading, which depended on regular, or at least intermittent, physical presence in a place in which many books were also present and where professional retailers who were interested in their own wares seem to share the customer’s interest and experience.

Uncertainty produces anxiety, and anxiety often produces anger. As the number of independent bookstores decreased, literary writers and readers championed the need for community-based bookshops, even though the odds against their survival, were, and still are, astronomical. As part of their efforts, they demonized the chains, or the “national accounts,” as they are known in the book business. (As an aside, in Europe this did not happen. Both France and Germany do not allow discounting on books, so superstores lose the major advantage of lower profit margins with higher volume. Small booksellers there are protected by law.)  The shrill manner in which the participants respond to one another is not untypical of the literary world, which has always cherished tension of some sort or another.

Then in 1995, the next step in the evolution of book-as-commodity took place with the establishment of efficient on-line ordering and delivery for individual book-buyers. It, too, created uncertainty in the traditional bookselling business. Founded the previous year, in order to turn a profit, Amazon.com would have to acquire about 10% of the retail bookselling market, which would spell the end for many more small bookstores. Amazon, too, offered extraordinary service and access to the book-buyer. Amazon, too, was able to pressure publishers to lower their prices, which elated book consumers. And the results of Amazon’s growth, too, forced some small booksellers out of business, as it tapped capital markets—some private, some public—that for the most part were unavailable to small bookstores unless they again were willing to change their cultures. Amazon, too, has often been demonized, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly.

And now in the past few years even that tension has ceded its central position to a new, shifting arena, where a new technology has changed both the buying process and the reading process. It’s called the digital reader.

The epoch of the consumer e-reader, lest we forget, began only about three years ago, but it seems to dominate all the commercial discussions in publishing and bookselling these days. Its invention, advent and proliferation is accompanied by a fascinating re-assessment of reading as a pastime, reading as a method of gathering information, and reading as a conduit for critical thinking and its by-product, humanistic wisdom.

In the midst of all this agitation, the reader’s experience, though not lost, is certainly, and perhaps temporarily, pushed to the background. Arguably more ink, and certainly more e-ink, has been spent in reporting the breathless excitement of new hard- and software for reading than on the reading content itself. Steve Jobs is more of a rock star than, say, a rock star.

The general or common reader has adapted to these changes very easily. Romance readers, in particular, have adopted the digital reader in spades. One sees hundreds of e-readers on the subway in New York. One assumes that many of these readers do not purchase their books from a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. They may never even enter one anymore after they buy their device, and they may not go into a library either.

But what of the avid reader of heavy-duty fiction and nonfiction, the people who read over a hundred consensus important texts a year or more, the person we often call a bookstore rat. What about the obsessive reader, whose medium is experiencing fantastic shifts in a habitat whose rugs are being pulled out from under them, and whose world is undergoing a sea-change? Where does he or she go for the book-buying experience when the world of bookstores is changing so fast? When it devotes more and more space to stationery, games, and electronic reading devices?

You know who I mean. You have seen him or her before, sallow-complected; bulging, sunken or darting eyeballs. They are usually thin and narrow-chested, their muscles are somewhat flaccid, and they drag the literary streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. They never understand why, why, bookstores—like bodegas and doughnut shops—are not open all nite. I realize that this is a very small subset of readers, but I also believe that the survival of the obsessive, in any subculture, the life of the eccentric individual, gives that subculture much of its cultural interest. In fact, you may be one of us.

The readers to which I refer have actually been identified and classified in various intellectual and scientific forums. Their syndrome is known as the Overactive Lector, which is generally acronymed as the OL. It was first identified and named in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Alphonse Daudet’s alienist, Jean-Martin Charcot, who carried out much of his research in the clinic at Salpêtrière, where the mentally ill shared space with thousands of rats. The Overactive Lector has assumed various shapes and forms over the years. That form often depends on nationality, place, and intellectual currency. The OL was not, however, what the Victorians called a “literarian.” The literarian was a compulsive amateur whose interests were akin to the Overactive Lector. But the literarian generally developed his or her own outlets for expression through various print media such as newspapers and journals to the extent that he or she would publish appreciations of such vitality that they would almost rival such public critics as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. George Eliot, who through her marriage to George Lewes, had encountered many such people, and relied on her meetings with them to formulate the character of Edward Causaubon in her novel Middlemarch.

In our own country and in our own era, the American Overactive Lector, or AOL, is known by several identifying characteristics. Speech patterns are a particularly insistent marker. Both aspirated and non-aspirated consonants are exaggerated. Vowels are twisted and tortured to such an extent that they grow faint from the stress. Eye contact is rare and an interlocutor senses a modicum of personal absence even when the Overactive Lector is physically present. This AOL subset also takes various forms. Some are obsessed with a single book. They read it again and again and find in it a basis for every and all manifestation of social interaction, so much so that the Lector’s insistence begins to feed on itself. This person is known as Cannibal Lector, who was identified in a fairly recent long-form piece by Thomas Harris. Another interesting sub-group has been identified as those who, in childhood, generally between the ages of five and seventeen, felt alienated from the larger social group to the extent that to supplement their reading they would make up imaginary friends or even invent full-languages, with grammars closely derived from English but with variations based on hysterical fantasy. These are called Invented Language Lectors, or ILL.

The AOL can be contrasted to the British model. The latter tend to congregate in London and are often known as the London Overactive Lector, or LOL. In France, where the Overactive Lector tends to have a privileged place in the larger community, even appearing on television in small, displaying groups called pivots, they generally congregate in Paris, and are known in the English therapeutic literature as Paris Overactive Lectors, or POLs. French scientists have described their typical behavior as braiment, a term borrowed from similar behaviors found among African penguins, such as mutual ecstatic display and the sideways stare.

The invention and usage of the e-reader has caused significant unease to the Overactive Lector, who came of age constantly having been told that “he always has his nose in a book” or the more common “get your nose out of that book.” But with a single-screen, tablet e-reader, there is no “in” or “out”, so several alternatives have been suggested, including “he always points his nose at a book”. However, when it was shown that the e-reader is technically not a physical book, the phrase became “he always points his nose at an e-reader” and “stop pointing your nose at that e-reader.” Overactive Lectors themselves have lamented, digitally, in blogs and particularly in the comments sections of electronic magazines and news digests, that the loss of such terms is particularly unnerving.

So what are the encounters, therapies, and potential outcomes with the Overactive Lector?

It has become obvious during the past decade or so that the Overactive Lector is in crisis. Since behavior has been, for the most part, passive and benign until now, with supportive social environments readily available, pathologies have remained relatively inert. However, external influences have undermined continued subject health and need to be addressed for both individuals and group well-being.

The first question is whether the Overactive Lector’s behavior is caused by chemical or societal influence, that is, etiological or epidemiological. To my knowledge, no controlled study has been made of the former, or indeed, the latter, other than anecdotal. The sociologist Nicholas Basbanes has indeed studied the Overactive Collector, but physical obsession is very different from informational or experiential and Basbanes’ observations cannot be applied to the Overactive Lector.

In the early part of this century, the marketing department of the national chain Starbucks performed a few but limited studies of the effect of caffeine on the Overactive Lector, in turn by withholding and then providing caffeine solutions, but these studies were abandoned when it was  found that Overactive Lectors were not buying the inspirational books offered for sale in Starbucks point-of-purchase displays and even evidenced hostile behavior to cashiers and baristas when possible acquisition was presented to them in a purposeful but non-threatening manner.

A second question refers to loss of habitat and the resulting feelings of isolation. In 1965, according to the American Booksellers Association, there were 4,500 independent bookstores in the United States. In 2010, there were 1,500 independent bookstores and 1,500 book superstores, in addition to book sections of large multi-purpose stores such as Costco and WalMart. Although the actual number of books offered for sale in these stores and perhaps the square footage devoted to books may have remained constant and indeed the number of titles published has tripled in the past ten years alone, the Overactive Lector, when faced with the change, has been observed to become anxious and protective, and has been unable to adapt. Similar observations have been made regarding environmental shrinkage among the giant panda, who also exhibits limited ability to adapt to a changing ecology. Although it is far from clear, it seems that the Overactive Lector’s environmental need consists of a combination of physical space and nutritive diversity. Books oriented toward non-obsessive readers and efficient lighting both seem to frighten the Overactive Lector, who prefers a narrow, uncomfortable environment conducive to whining. Socializing also seems to be an increasingly important factor. Isolated book-buying through the internet does not seem to satisfy the social need to browse in a public place. There also seems to  be a further, more complex need in that the Overactive Lector wants to observe others in public isolation while he or she is being observed in that same public isolation. This is called passive display behavior. Active display behavior often takes the form of boring the sales cashiers with one-way discussions of ridiculously uninteresting publication history. This reduces social prestige among the larger group of general readers who observe such behavior while they are trying to pay for their damn books.

What should you do if you encounter an Overactive Lector in a bookstore? First, never make eye-contact. They will treat this as both a challenge and an invitation. If you are accosted, try backing away slowly. Most importantly, never ask a question that the Overactive Lector cannot answer. They will get agitated. If this occurs, take a half-step back. Pronate your palms and forearms to face downward. This will calm them down. Then gently ask, “So what do you think of the 1986 publication of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ edited in Germany?” After listening to the response for about ten minutes, you should able to excuse yourself and leave the store.

This taxonomy, with all the warnings and the therapeutics, is really just a slightly fantastical prelude to a real discussion of the book as an object of hegemonistic power. Obviously, I’m not the first to describe signs, signifiers, and cultural results of the physical book’s social changes. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” really began the wave of looking at cultural products in a social environment and Roland Barthes picked it up and ran with it. (He, by the way, was hit by a laundry truck after giving an address to an audience of Overactive Lectors, ‘though that’s another story, more semiotic than semantic.)

Though we as obsessive readers may lament the fate of the codex book, we are, in a way, privileged to witness its slow descent of influence. For so long, the book has enjoyed a type of eminent fascism, and observations of this currently decreasing power have of course included some Schadenfreude. There are those of us who believe the words Plato gave to Socrates in the Phaedrus, which hundreds of contemporary writers have used as support for their arguments to the point that one cannot read an article on the subject without its being quoted, that the book would hinder the development of critical thinking. Our western culture has experienced the book’s cultural and political democratization in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, its economic democratization in the eighteenth century, its proliferation in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and its inundation in the past twenty years, as the number of titles published each year has tripled in two decades. We are experiencing, to bowdlerize Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Book-as-Empire (I reiterate, it is the codex book’s decline, not the long-form content). If you live in the eastern United States, you might also say that we are witnessing the digital barbarians looming in the west. If you live in the western United States, you might say that we are seeing the greatest cultural liberation of modern times, a struggle between the vying armies of democratization. A promised Utopia in the west trumps a corrupted past in the east.

We can’t really stop the friction between the two. Because the codex book has accumulated so much cultural baggage over the centuries, it has become a supply train overloaded with expectations. How and what you read is a marker, how many volumes you accumulate is a marker. How often have you heard people brag about how many books they have? Colleges recruit students with the number of books in their library. Where will all that need go? Can you imagine telling an eighteen-year-old, “study here because we have 1.3 million long-form digital files on our server?” Probably not, but that’s not how we will mark ourselves in the future. That’s a remnant of the past. Unit numbers will fade as markers of prestige. Instead of possession, we will value access, and its pathways to infinity.

As the army of digitization marches on, the vast psychic gulf between possession and access becomes clearer. A single book, as the French mediologist Régis Debray has written, is a limited object, so taking possession of it is an act of limitation. Owning many books multiplies the limitation, but doesn’t triumph over it. As the comedian Stephen Wright has said, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” How many books do you have? 3,000? 5,000? 10,000? 20,000? Even a million books in a library implies limitation. Numbers allow containment and control. They coax a stable identity out of us.

A codex book is static and unchanging; to write with publication of your work with codex form in mind is an attempt to restrict nature and the passage of time. In contrast, when you read on an e-reader, you engage in a formal obliteration of stopped time by allowing your personal reading experience to rescind stopped time and participate in the infinite. You have transferred the reading experience from the physical nature of a talisman to the ineffable nature of experience, and that experience moves from the outside-timeness of the codex book—what lives on immutably as an object—to the inside-timeness of experience, which changes continually. A relentless, human passingness results, ordered only by individual experience. You render the reading experience infinite and recalcitrant, as if a bridge were disintegrating behind you as you race for the bilious edge of an unknown headland.

Entering a room full of books is like coming upon a gathering of souls in a forest. For a book person, possession, even when it is temporary, is anthropomorphic. It’s animistic, it’s delimited, it’s finite. It lends itself to personification. On the other hand, access is unlimited, it’s spiritistic, it’s diffuse, it’s infinite, and it has no face. Possession is closed and isolated while access is open and shared. They are different, but I can’t yet see if one is better than the other, only that I am more comfortable with the former. And even that level of comfort is based on the codex books as a sort of a stoppage of time, like a snapshot composed of frozen comforts. I have seen many, many debates over what we lose when we move from printed codex books to digital e-readers and none of them convince me that one is better than the other, only that some personal and neurotic sensibility drives both arguments.

The end of possession and the coming of access must make the Overactive Lector shiver. To face what now seems like an inevitability must be like confronting the exact opposite of what he has tried to control. It’s an encounter with diffusion, with a googleplex of time and space. If books as single, delimited objects, because they are objects in which one can invest immanence, once represented access to the infinity of introspective space, digital books now suggest access to the infinity of external space. And that’s scary. To the neurotic sensibility, that’s a frighteningly huge maw. It’s the guiding intelligence of a Stephen King novel wrought larger and larger as it goes on. This is what scares the critics who decry the coming world of reading without codex books. They believe that deep thought will disappear.

As the director of the National Book Foundation, I am, in essence, a book marketer. My job, each year, is to take twenty golden books called National Book Award Finalists and transform them into cultural currency, no matter what technology you might use to imbibe them. But I’m also one of the people I have been describing, the Overactive Lector, the Obsessive Reader. I wear t-shirts with pictures of writers on them. I drink martinis from a glass into which a John Steinbeck quotation about the drinking of martinis has been etched. Our breed turns limitation into a cultural capital of the margin. We form a tradition, and we reach back, I believe, not to those who painted on the walls of a cave, but those who were awed by those painters and paintings. It’s a literary symbiosis. And in fact, the faster the digital age arrives perhaps the happier we should be. Staying behind liberates us from the growing horde of conformist e-readers. Even as we move forward into a shared future, we can revel in our backwardness, if we so choose, and we can give it a hip name. We can be “retro,” like eighteen year olds who buy vinyl records. We will move through a cloud of reflected pastness, a nostalgia for a specific type of bygone nostalgia, for an era in when one could better appreciate an earlier era than our own.

I like to make fun of the Overactive Lector, but I do so with great affection. I’m not giving up my printed books and I doubt most of you are either. We are many, and we will survive, despite the major changes in our habitat and our nutrition supply. Paper mills love us. Moving companies hate us. We have our own version of climate change and our own view of the world. Who else would go for a walk in the forest and describe all the trees as “pre-books”? So let’s reject the role of Depressed Overactive Lector and Obsessive Reader, or DOLOR, which the media is forcing on us. Be happy. I bring Good News: There is no looming apocalypse. There are still 10 million books in the Library of Congress that you haven’t read yet. And I do mean “yet.”

“Romanian brothers, we are under attack! I repeat: we are under heavy attack! We are being fired upon by unknown hostiles. We need help! Come to the areas of conflict to defend the Revolution, to defend our hard-earned freedoms!”

Many Romanians heard this call in December 1989. The Romanian Revolution was raging, and it was broadcast live on the public TV station. The shooting started the evening of December 22, after Ceausescu fled the capital in a helicopter. Until December 22, we knew he was the one responsible for the bloodshed. Starting with that evening, the so-called “terrorists” were blamed. Twenty years later, still no one knows their identity.

I was on winter break from college in my hometown of Târgoviste, spending the holidays with my family. I was twenty, and my brother was sixteen. We both watched the events in Bucharest on my parents’ old, black and white TV.

“We are free, Romanian brothers, free!” the people shouted in front of the cameras, making victory signs. My brother and I embraced, cried, and jumped for joy.

The Romanian Revolution on national TV was the ultimate reality show. We were glued to the TV screen. For the first time, we saw live, chaotic images of people of various backgrounds crowding the small TV studio, trying to make their way, physically and electronically, to us, the country’s audience. Unscripted, unrehearsed, it was a freedom of speech spectacle.

The television staff apologized for the years of lies and censorship. Victor Rebengiuc, a well-known actor, came into the studio and offered a toilet paper roll, recommending to the news anchors to wipe their mouths before speaking of freedom.

Former members of the nomenclature declared their innocence. Others presented themselves as the new leaders. Dissidents denounced the years of persecution and called for unity and a change of regime. Young men with scruffy beards and wrinkled clothes addressed the cameras in the name of the martyrs already fallen in the street fights. The footage spread quickly across national and continental borders, a live image of the fall of the Communism. Communism was over. We had seen it on TV.

*

Târgoviste was a quiet town, a mix of historic buildings and socialist-gray apartment blocks. But in December 1989, the town suddenly became alive. The central square was the site of an exhilarating celebration. Large crowds demonstrated against the Communist regime in front of the white County’s Party Committee building. People climbed on top of cars and cheered while the drivers drove around, honking. My brother and I mingled with the crowd, happy to be part of this huge tide.

A wave of enthusiastic destruction swept the town. People threw Ceausescu’s portraits out the windows. From building tops, other groups dismantled and tore apart the metal slogans that read “Long live the Romanian Communist Party.” Propaganda materials, banners, and books were gathered in the street and set on fire. Grown people acted like kids, dancing and thrashing away all traces of the Communist past. They even cut out the Communist symbols from the red-yellow-blue flags, leaving big holes in the middle, and waved them high.

“We love you, freedom,/ Either we win you,/ or we die trying” chanted the crowd, followed by “We are not going home/ we are not leaving/until we have won our freedom.” They started singing “Romanians Awake,” a patriotic song banned since 1947. The song gave me chills. It called for action against the tyranny and instantly became the national anthem and a staple of the revolution:

 Awaken, thee, Romanian, shake off the deathly slumber

Into which you’ve been sunk by a barbaric tyranny.

Now or never to a bright horizon climb

That shall to shame put all your enemies.

Night came, lit by fires and songs. That’s when I heard the first gunshots, around the town’s steel plant and the local army base. The rumor machine, which functioned so well during the Communist regime, proved useful again, amplified by frightening reports on TV and radio of thousands of victims of the “terrorists” loyal to Ceausescu.

In Bucharest, attacks were reported at the TV and radio buildings, the central telephone building, the international airport, government buildings, the Ministry of Defense, train stations, and many other locations. The events were grossly exaggerated. Guerilla fighters, dressed in black jumpsuits and wearing night-vision goggles, swarmed the capital in the dark. There were reports of sniper attacks, air strikes, and commandos. The water treatment plants were under attack, they said, so the population shouldn’t drink the water; it might be poisoned. “Stay inside, lights off. Cover your windows with blankets.” It was total chaos.

In Târgoviste, there were rumors that some of the revolutionaries had freed the criminals from the county militia station and that the local army unit, where the Ceausescu couple was being held, was under heavy attack. Anti-air artillery and war ammunition were used against phantom targets. The air was thick with confusion and fear. That’s when the call to arms was given.

“Romanian brothers, we are under attack! We need help! Come to the areas of conflict to defend the Revolution!” Even Ion Iliescu, a second-tier activist who emerged as the revolution’s political leader, went on air and asked the citizens to volunteer in the areas of conflict. A young man with a couple-of-days-old beard and a desperate look in his eyes followed:

“Romanian brothers, students from around the country! Come back to our campuses! Come back to our universities! We need your help to guard the schools against looting and terrorists! We need your help to guard our freedoms!”

I felt as if he said: “Claudia, leave your home and volunteer at your college.” I didn’t know how, or what exactly I was supposed to do, just that I needed to go there.

When I announced to my parents that I had decided to go to Bucharest and help at my school, they were stunned; but they didn’t try to stop me. They just got that worried look in their eyes. They were thinking of the images on TV showing Bucharest as a city at war. But I wasn’t thinking of danger. I was excited and wanted to participate in the most important event of my life. My younger brother was jealous that I got to go and he had to stay at home.

I wanted to leave for Bucharest right away. My mother thought otherwise.

“No one in their right mind would be at school on Christmas day,” she said. “Let’s celebrate Christmas together. After that, you can go.”

*

I don’t remember having a Christmas tree or gifts that year. We spent Christmas afternoon waiting for the broadcast of the trial and execution of the Ceausescu couple. They kept announcing it would be broadcast live in a few moments. The moments turned into minutes, then into half an hour, an hour. Nothing happened.

“We apologize for the delay,” the news anchor kept repeating. “The live broadcast will begin in a few minutes.”

Time flowed in slow motion while we waited on our living room couch, as did everyone else across the country. The news anchor said several more times that the broadcast was about to begin. Then, we found out that the tape of the trial had been flown to Bucharest from Târgoviste and was being edited. For the first time in days, I felt something was not right, that we weren’t being trusted with the truth.

Finally, the broadcast began. The dictator couple was escorted out from an armored military vehicle into a small room with tables and chairs inside the barracks. They looked tired, old, and surprisingly human. Elena Ceausescu wore a coat with a brown fur collar that looked like a dead animal around her neck. Nicolae Ceausescu had a scruffy beard and spoke in a guttural voice. He kept looking at his watch. Was someone supposed to come and save them? He waived his hand and kept saying that he would talk only in front of the National Assembly.

The prosecutor accused them of genocide, of killing 60,000 people, of undermining the national economy and starving an entire nation. Hardly any evidence was presented, but they were swiftly sentenced to death by the military tribunal.

The short trial was over. The couple was escorted to a non-descript wall in the yard of the military barracks. Gunshots followed, but the tape didn’t show the firing squad, or the couple being shot. We saw only the bullet-ridden wall, the cracked cement pavement, and their bodies with dark stains behind their heads. With their limbs in awkward positions, they looked like rag puppets. We watched as one of the men checked the bodies to make sure they were dead.

*

“How long will you stay?”

“As long as I need, Mom. Most likely, a few days.”

“What will you do there?”

“Help with anything needed. Volunteer at the school.”

“What will you eat?”

“I’ll find something to eat. I’ll buy bread.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“I have the key to the dorm room. I could even sleep in the classroom, on the benches.”

“Be careful if you decide to sleep in the dorm. Strange people might be roaming about.”

She had a worried, inquisitive look in her eyes. I acted as confident as I could.

“I’ll be careful, Mom,” I said. “I won’t be alone. I’ll stay together with the students, with the other girls.”

“If you run into trouble, call home. Father will come to pick you up.”

I embraced her, and she held me tightly in her arms.

*

On December 26, my father drove me to the train station in his white Skoda car. We didn’t talk much. As usual, I was intimidated by his serious face, his piercing eyes.

It had snowed and the air smelled clean and cold. The ground was lightly covered, and there was a thin layer of mud on the sidewalk. My father parked the car in the lot behind the train station. From the nearby park, I could hear the crows. A light breeze moved the treetops and the branches carried what looked like black fruits: black clusters of crows. We went inside to get my ticket.

Târgoviste’s train station is about 100 years old. It’s a red brick building with brown tile floors, a tin roof, and high glass ceilings over the platform, with nooks full of pigeons. The small ticket windows are behind forged iron bars. The waiting room is dark, with wood benches worn smooth and polished by the travelers’ bodies.

A few people were waiting. Two women, dressed completely in black, with head kerchiefs covering their hair, chatted quietly. I thought they might be mothers or relatives of shooting victims, traveling to Bucharest for funerals. Further back, an unshaven man in brown work clothes slept across the benches. A gypsy woman came in, carrying a dirty raffia sack full of empty bottles. She wore a long, flowered skirt and a copper coin necklace. Leaving the sack by the door, she went toward the two women to beg for money.

“Let’s wait outside,” my father said. “The train is leaving soon.”

*

Growing up, I was never close to my father. It was hard to find something to talk about that wouldn’t turn into a lecture on his part, or into embarrassment on my part. I was surprised when he started talking as soon as we got to the train platform.

“Claudia, there is something I want to tell you. Bucharest is an unsafe city now. I hear there are groups of civilians that search the cars and patrol the streets looking for terrorists. They might be armed, but you shouldn’t be afraid.” He stopped, trying to find words that wouldn’t scare me.

“If anyone stops you and asks you for identity papers, show them this.” He handed me a folded sheet, yellowed by time.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a copy of my sentence to political prison,” my father said, pausing. “I didn’t think the day would come to talk to you openly about this,” he continued.

I was stunned. I had known for years he had been imprisoned in his youth for political reasons, but he always avoided talking about it when my brother and I were present. He was afraid we would mention it to friends and someone would report us. Being associated with anyone known as an enemy of the regime was a dangerous thing. Better keep everything secret. Better not to know the truth.

My father even forbade my grandmother to ever mention to us anything that happened in the 1950s. When we were old enough to understand, she told us some of the facts anyway.

I unfolded the paper and glanced at it. My hands were shaking, and I couldn’t read it. All I could see was the official stamp on top that read “People’s Republic of Romania” and, underneath, “The Craiova Military Tribunal.” I felt a claw in my throat.

My father tried to maintain his composure, but his voice was emotional:

“Be careful with it; it’s an important document. It will prove to anyone that your family fought against the Communists.” Another pause. Then, he continued:

“This paper shows your family’s true identity.”

My train to Bucharest was announced over the loudspeakers. We crossed the tracks with wood beams that smelled of petroleum and walked to the second platform, where the train waited. I didn’t know what to say.

“I have to go now, Daddy,” I muttered. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay.”

“Good. You do that,” he answered. We embraced and he kissed my hair.

“I’ll be home for New Year’s Eve,” I said, climbing the car’s steps.

*

The train ride to Bucharest is about an hour long by express and two hours with the local, going south. The local train stops in every village along the way. I like riding the express with its old-fashioned compartments, sliding doors and burgundy vinyl seats. It’s unmistakably romantic to sit by the window and look at the empty fields dotted by lone trees, listening to the noise and cadence of the wheels in full speed.

I turned my eyes to the yellowed paper in my hands.

“Sentence Nr. 297

The public sentencing from July 28, 1958

The Craiova Military Tribunal”

My father was born in September 1939. He was little over 18 years old when he was arrested in January 1958. A young boy, a civilian, judged and sentenced by a military tribunal. His nineteenth birthday would find him in political prison. 19, I thought, a year younger than I was.

He was accused of writing poems hostile to the Communist regime and of reading them to his family, of being a dangerous individual, part of the conspiracy led by my grandfather. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. My grandfather was sentenced to 25. My two other uncles were imprisoned, too. My grandparents’ property, house, and belongings were confiscated. All of this happened because my grandfather didn’t give up his land to the state.

My grandparents’ family was the victim of a widespread wave of violence against the peasants that took place between 1958 and 1962, when the Communist regime forced completion of the collectivization, the nationalization of the land that had started in 1949. Countrywide, tens of thousands were imprisoned for similar reasons, and the private property of middle class peasants shrunk from 44.7% in 1958 to 3.5% in 1962.

Gone are the coffee, oil, and flour,

The wheat is nowhere to be seen,

Poor, dear Romanian country

The Russian People set you free!

My father recited these lines on rare occasions, after drinking too many glasses of homemade wine. It was the poem that sent him to prison. His notebook was found by the secret police when they searched my grandparents’ house. Most of his poems were written while Romania was still under soviet occupation after WWII. The Red Army retreated in 1958, but it left behind a regime at war with its own people.

1958, the year that marked a turning point in my father’s life. 31 years later, another turning point: 1989.

The train had stopped in the field, waiting for a signal. Outside my window, a barren tree stretched its branches, without a single leaf to hold against the cold wind.

*

When I got off, I noticed the soldiers right away, dressed in full combat gear. They were everywhere, patrolling the platforms, individually or in groups, watching the travelers. Heads down, the two women dressed in black passed me, making their way through the crowd on the platform. Side by side, their shoulders seemed to share an invisible weight.

Bucharest’s North Station (Gara de Nord) was busy and bustling. Built by the Strousberg Franchise between 1868 and 1870, the North Station was opened to the public in November 1870. It originally had six lines and a central building guarded by two towers. In 1896, the entrance became The Royal Salon, created for the visits that the King of Austria, Franz Joseph, and the King of Serbia, Alexandru Obrenovici, paid to the King of Romania.

Little was left from these glamorous times. The hallways and waiting rooms were cold and dim, crowded with peasants who carried large sacks filled with bread. In the 1980s, there were severe food shortages in Romania. Bread was rationed everywhere except in the capital. The peasants from the villages surrounding Bucharest commuted often to buy bread for their families and to feed the pigs they raised.

Several times over the years, the station was rebuilt and expanded. The number of lines increased to 16. In 1932, the main entrance was finished in neo-classic style, with exterior columns and three big doors.

 *

I passed through those columns in a river of people that spilled into the surrounding streets paved with cobblestone and crowded by trolleys, taxis, tramcars, luggage, passengers and pigeons.

I smelled smoke in the air. The buildings in the North Station neighborhood had a after-bombardment look: smoldering, disfigured by bullet holes, broken windows, debris everywhere. The people hurried about with worried looks on their faces. Outside the North Station, groups of armed civilians and soldiers stopped the cars to search the trunks and ID the drivers. A couple of young men were distributing free newspapers to the small crowd gathered behind a truck. I took one. The headline said: “They died for our freedom.”

The Polizu Complex is a short walk from the North Station. Built in 1884, it housed The National School of Roads and Bridges before becoming the home of the Polytechnic Institute. From the old Polytechnic, only the School of Industrial Chemistry was left here. All the other schools had been moved to a newer location on the banks of the river Dambovita.

Polizu is a maze of century-old three-story buildings joined by narrow passageways that never see the sunlight. Its impressive architecture always made me feel small and insignificant. By contrast, the skinned-off walls and weed-infested interior yard were a bizarre sight, a cross between Twin Peaks and Jane Eyre. One could get lost in its arches and tight alleys, which is what happened to me the first time I went to find out if I had been admitted to college.

It was 9 p.m. on a July night. My mom and I walked around for hours without finding the entrance. We were tired of circling the dark Polizu neighborhood of crumbling houses. Dogs barked at us from behind fences. We asked some women having tea on a balcony. They didn’t understand what we were looking for, or maybe they were just too old to care or deaf.

Finally, we found our way to a building in the back of the complex. The results were posted on one of the tall windows, behind wrought iron bars. I climbed up, and saw my name among the 400 others who had been accepted for the next student year. I jumped down and embraced my mom.

“Now don’t get married right away, like I did,” she said, lifting me in her arms.

 *

The gates were open, and Polizu looked like a fortress abandoned in a hurry. I walked inside its walls, hoping to see someone I knew. Building A had the door open, but it looked deserted. My steps echoed on the checkerboard floors, and I expected to see someone behind every column. I heard voices and followed them toward the main auditorium.

I was surprised to see fewer students than I had imagined, maybe 12 people. I didn’t know most of them. I joined a small group where I spotted two colleagues who lived in Bucharest. They were glad to see me. I was the only one from outside Bucharest who had showed up. I felt a little embarrassed to explain why I was there:

“I came because I thought you needed help,” I said.

They were talking about the shooting victims they knew: students from our school or from other schools in the city, neighbors, friends, or their parents’ acquaintances. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been shot or hurt.

I knew some details from the media, but to hear my colleagues’ first-hand accounts was shocking. I cried as I heard about the high-school students who died before December 22 and the heavy fighting that took place in the following days and nights in Bucharest’s downtown.

For the first time I learned of a harrowing incident that happened at Bucharest’s international airport, Otopeni, where 48 soldiers sent to defend it were mistaken for terrorists and killed in friendly fire. There were casualties in all the areas of conflict. Few terrorists were captured or killed. Nobody knew who they were, only that they attacked mainly at night.

“How are we gonna guard Polizu against terrorists?” asked Cristina, a red-haired girl with a lot of freckles and a mouth with pouted lips that always seemed to be saying “Oh.”  “Did you guys think about that?”

None of us knew how to answer her question.

“We’ll find a way,” said Crina, the only one among us who was married. “Maybe the soldiers from the North Station will help.”

“Let’s talk to the other guys,” I said, pointing to the group behind us. “We’ll figure it out together.”

More students arrived, some from Bucharest, some from other towns. Now we were over twenty people, including a handful of guys. The door opened, and Stefan entered the room.

He was very tall, with a wide smile and huge hands. He was one of the few men in our class, and he had no trouble getting noticed or being liked, which is why he had been elected as leader of the Communist Students’ Union, the party youth organization into which everyone was automatically enrolled once admitted into college.

Stefan had a talent to congeal any gathering around him. After catching up with the ladies, he looked around and said:

“So, what are we waiting for? Down with Ceausescu!”

From the wall of the auditorium, Ceausescu’s one-ear portrait was looking at us. Stefan and a couple of guys tried to knock it down. Stefan climbed on a chair and used a broomstick to push it. We cheered and laughed as the portrait came crashing down. He jumped on it from the chair and others helped shred it to pieces.

“Let’s search the school for other portraits!” he yelled. “We can make a nice bonfire with them.” He left with a couple of guys. They returned shortly carrying smashed portraits, a red flag, a banner, and some books.

“Burn them! Burn them!” the group shouted.

“No, no, take it outside!” a girl spoke up. “We don’t want to burn down the school!”

“That wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” grinned one guy. In the interior yard, we made a mound of all the propaganda materials, and Crina lit the fire with her lighter.

“Down with Communism!” yelled Stefan, taking out his red Party membership card. He ripped it apart and threw the pieces into the flames. Everyone tossed their Union cards into the fire. The flames reached higher and higher as they burned through the papers. Excitement illuminated our faces. The ritualistic burning of the Communist past was a staple of the new, unknown era that had begun.

I threw my card, too, into the fire. I never liked that picture anyway.

We went back talking all at once. We couldn’t agree what to do next. Someone said: “We need to organize ourselves.”

“Yeah,” said Stefan, “let’s make a new students’ association. Enough with the Communist crap. Let’s make a list of demands, too.” That sounded great, everyone was demanding many things these days.

Back in the auditorium, we made a list of demands of the new students’ association. We wanted radical changes. We asked for the dismissal of the dean and all the teachers who were Communist Party members. We wanted a complete reform of the academic structures and demanded to have a say in the curriculum taught in school. We decided to send our document to the Ministry of Education, maybe even read it live on TV the next day. We wanted to freeze the academic year and not take any exams until our demands were met. All of us signed the petition, and each of us contributed 10 lei to the new students’ fund.

We wanted to elect Stefan as our new leader, but he refused:

“It has to be someone who wouldn’t be associated with the Communists,” he said. I admired him for stepping aside. We finally decided to hold a bigger meeting once the other students were back from vacation and that we’d elect the new leaders then.

“Let’s talk about guarding the school,” said Cristina. “That’s why we came here in the first place.”

“We have to talk to the soldiers at the North Station,” said Crina, “to let them know we’re here to help.”

“Would they give us firearms?” someone asked.

“Let’s go find out,” said Stefan.

He took a small group to talk to any commander he could find. Cristina, Crina and I borrowed some money from the students’ fund and went to buy bread for lunch.

When we got back with the bread, Stefan and the guys had a surprise. He had arranged for a sergeant and some soldiers on duty to guard the campus overnight with us. To the girls’ disappointment, they would give weapons only to the guys who had completed the mandatory military service.

Stefan found out from the army unit that near North Station there were trucks with foreign aid waiting to be unloaded. He had taken some of the boxes back to the school, to be distributed in the following days. All of us went to help unload the trucks and carry the boxes back to a storage room in our building.

We filled the room with boxes and we started opening them. Happy like kids, we discovered Spam cans, Pepsi, chocolate bars, blankets. Some of us crowded in the small storage room to have lunch; others set up camp in the auditorium.

I was ravenous. I made a big sandwich with fresh bread and slices of Spam. It was one of the tastiest sandwiches I’ve ever eaten and was perfect with Pepsi and some chocolate for desert. As the late afternoon blurred the contours of our faces, we laughed, shared stories, and enjoyed the unexpected food aid gift.

Stefan and other students had brought sleeping bags with them and camped on the auditorium’s wooden floors. I made an improvised bed from cardboard boxes and blankets. We didn’t turn the lights on, for fear the terrorists would see us.

The building didn’t have any heat, and I was cold. Cristina and Crina smoked to keep warm. In the dark, I could see the red tips of their cigarettes, but I couldn’t hear what they talked about.

At 9 p.m., the sergeant and six soldiers showed up. We treated them with Spam sandwiches, Pepsi and chocolate. The soldiers were very young, probably just out of high school. They wore khaki uniforms and were armed with AK47s.

We split up in small teams to cover the two main buildings, and the sergeant set up 4-hour shifts starting at 10 p.m. and ending at 6 a.m. the next morning. The teams would guard the hallways on every floor. I was on the same team as Cristina and Crina, joined by a soldier named Robert. We chose the first shift: from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Robert was skinny, with gray-blond hair cropped too close to the skull—a new recruit’s haircut. His weapon seemed to weigh a ton, and he slouched when he walked. I wasn’t confident he’d be able to fight any terrorist, but none of us looked any more competent.

The noises faded into the night, and an eerie silence surrounded us. The hallway was pitch black. Soon, my eyes got used to the dark, and I could see our silhouettes against the white walls. We weren’t supposed to talk. We listened for suspect noises. Soon, we heard the distinct rat-tat-tat of machine guns. They seemed to come from different directions. Some were far away, others closer.

“The bastards,” said Robert. “Ceausescu is dead, and they are still shooting.”

It was windy. I could hear the rain falling on the roof and through the tin gutters. Outside the tall windows, I could see the dark treetops swaying against the night sky. My eyes started playing tricks, making me see silhouettes at the end of the hallway. The three of us looked like ghosts as we sat on metal chairs and watched the hallway of the deserted building.

I grabbed Cristina’s hand, as she grabbed Crina’s. We didn’t talk, but I was thinking What if someone comes? What will we do? What will Robert do? Cristina squeezed my hand, and I felt reassured.

Suddenly, I heard a noise. It was faint, but I could hear it clearly through the rain.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

We listened. There it was: tap, tap.

“It’s a terrorist,” whispered Cristina, and we laughed nervously. Tap. We heard it again. I felt a chill down my spine.

“Stay here,” Robert said. “I’ll check it out.” He slouched into the darkness.

Robert was gone a long time. We listened carefully but heard only the rain.

“What if he’s not coming back?” I asked. My heart pumped in my throat. The girls didn’t answer.

After what felt like an eternity, we heard steps, and Robert slouched toward us.

“It was an open window on the other side of the floor. I closed it,” he said.

*

After four long hours, we slept on our makeshift beds in the auditorium. The morning found me crouched on the floor next to Crina and Cristina, my back and bones sore from the hard planks. I got up quickly and stretched.

The sergeant and soldiers had orders to go back to their unit in the morning, and they gathered their arms and equipment and left. Later, we found out they had been sent somewhere else and couldn’t come back to be with us another night.

The day was gray and damp, and the revolutionary enthusiasm had washed out with the rain. From our group, people started to leave as well. Stefan announced he’d go back home that morning.

“What will you guys do?” I asked Cristina and Crina.

“We are going to help at the roadblocks,” said Cristina. “They need people to search the cars. What will you do?”

“Go home, I guess,” I answered.

I was a little disappointed that I had to leave, but staying seemed pointless. There was one more thing I wanted to do: light candles and pay my respects to the shooting victims in downtown Bucharest.

The metro was closed, so I took a trolley, a longer ride through dismal neighborhoods where people and buildings alike looked weary. The euphoria from the previous days was replaced by a somber, grieving mood.

I got off at University Square and couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d never seen a war zone before, but this certainly was one: a sight of utter destruction. The buildings were gutted, blackened by fires, and disfigured by bullet holes. The church Coltea was smoldering. The University was still standing, and next to its wall was the vigil site. There were wreaths, photos, and hundreds of burning candles. A wall in the back had in black graffiti: “Here people died for freedom.”

I smelled smoke and burned wax as I made my way through the small crowd that filed in a continuous stream in front of the candles. The candles were sheltered from the light rain by a troita, a small tin awning decorated with icons and flowers. The wall on top read “Peace to you, our dead.”

A few women dressed in black were tending the vigil. They handed out cheap candles, their faces marked by a mute despair, as if they were asking Why did this happen? Why did my child die? I took a candle and waited in line a few minutes until I came closer and could light it from the others. I placed it under the photo of a handsome young man and crossed myself. The wax sizzled and dripped as I stared at the photo of someone I’d never met; someone who died for my freedom. I didn’t know what freedom was, but this guy died for it. I was crying inside.

I left toward the Palace’s Square, where tens of thousands had gathered in previous days. The vast square was empty now, guarded by tanks fanned out in formation in front of the former Royal Palace. The guns on the turrets had flowers in them, red and white carnations. People had offered flowers to the soldiers who came to help them in the fight.

The palace had hosted an art museum, which was now destroyed by bullets and explosions. The historic central library and buildings across from it were in ruins, with collapsed roofs, bombed walls, gaping windows, and mounds of smoldering wood beams and debris. Black smoke billowed over the square. I had spent countless hours at that library, studying for exams, listening to the violin sounds coming from the restaurant Cina across the street. Tears streamed from my eyes, and I didn’t try hiding them anymore.

No one ever found out who the terrorists were. Twenty one years later, the mystery persists, surrounded by conspiracy theories and controversy, similar to the mystery of President Kennedy’s assassination.

December 22, 1989 marked the turning point of the revolution: the day the dictator fled and victory was declared. This date shows its importance in the victims’ numbers, as well. In Bucharest alone, 49 were reported dead and 599 wounded before December 22, victims of the Communist repression, as opposed to 515 dead and 1162 wounded in fighting the so-called “terrorists” after December 22.

On my way back to the North Station, I passed by the school to see if my colleagues were still there. They weren’t. I took a can of Pepsi for my brother and chocolate for my mom to use for the glaze on the New Year’s Eve cake.

Years later, after I moved to New York, I came across a line written by one of my favorite poets, e e cummings: freedom is a breakfastfood. This made me smile and think that, for me, it was—literally. Lunch food, to be exact.