by human secretions that can be found in almost every library in the world. It was next to a window overlooking All Souls. Outside, water was suspended in the air like a science experiment—an experiment that had been going on for thousands of years, and constituted the weather in England. Occasionally a figure or pair of figures dressed in black robes crossed through the inner quadrangle of All Souls, giving me the impression that I was watching the rehearsal of a play from which all the words and most of the stage directions had been erased, leaving only the entrances and exits. These empty comings and goings left me feeling vague and uncertain. I read, among other things, the essays of Paul Virilio—the invention of trains also contained the invention of derailment, that is the sort of thing Virilio liked to write about—but never finished the book. I didn’t wear a watch, and usually I would leave the library whenever I couldn’t stand to be cooped up any longer. On four or five occasions I came out of the library door at exactly the moment that a student passed by wheeling an upright bass along the cobbled street, like someone guiding an overgrown child. Sometimes he had just passed the instant before, and other times he was about to pass. But once I exited the library doors at the exact moment he was passing them, and our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.
I was living in a room on Little Clarendon Street, where I spent most of my time when not in the library. I have always been, but was especially then, a shy and overly self-conscious person who had gotten by with having one or two close friends, even a boyfriend, with whom I spent time when not alone. I figured that eventually I’d meet such a person, or people, at Oxford. In the meantime, I stuck to my room.
Aside from a large carpet remnant lugged home on the bus from the northern end of Banbury Road, an electric kettle, and a flea market set of Victorian cups and saucers, there wasn’t much in it. I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life—a pot, a chair, a lamp—threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. The only exception was books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me. Because of this, I never felt compelled to finish those I didn’t like, or even a pressure to like them at all. But a certain lack of responsibility also left me free to be affected. When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.
I’d majored in English because I loved to read, not because I had any idea of what I wanted to do with my life. And yet during that fall at Oxford, my relationship to books began to change. It happened slowly, almost without my noticing. As the weeks passed, I had less and less of an idea about what I could spend three years writing a dissertation about, and became overwhelmed by the immensity of the task. Anxiety, vague and subterranean, began to encroach on me whenever I was in the library. At first I hardly realized what it was, only aware of a twinge of uneasiness in the pit of my stomach. But day after day it grew stronger, closing in around my neck, as did my sense of aimlessness and futility. I read without absorbing the meaning of the words. I would flip back and begin again at the last place I remembered reading, but after a while the sentences would dissolve again and I would go back to skidding obliviously across the blank pages, like those insects you find on the surface of stagnant water. I felt more and more unnerved and began to dread going to the library. I became anxious about becoming anxious. Entering the library, I began to panic. The fact