During its construction last year, I convinced myself that Sterling was mine. On the other side of doors hidden at the end of white-walled hallways, I discovered obscure reading rooms, explored the book- lined nooks of L&B, and basked in the sun-struck expanses of Starr. I hesitated to tell my friends about the spaces, and half-hoped that Yale might leave the whole library tucked away for me, alone, to explore. I wanted to understand the building, and, with the nave hidden out of view, I grew to love the library and all its pockets of grandeur.
When I returned to Sterling this fall, and the glass-paned inner door swung closed behind me, the sight of grand columns, the high-vaulted ceilings, the carvings etched into the sky opened up before me—I was in awe. But I wanted to see beyond the marble exterior and into the heart of the nave. I wanted to understand this new addition as well as I thought I had known the nooks of last year, to understand the library as a whole.
***
I began to learn its inner workings one night last week. After I’d packed up my books to leave, I walked over to a group of four security guards that stood by the circulation desk. They stopped me before I could even finish what I wanted to say. “Talk to Joe Garibaldi,” one younger guard said, the other three nodding. They pointed to a middle-aged man with a clean gray beard, sitting just out of earshot behind the desk.
When I approached him, Garibaldi straightened up and tightened his belt. He placed both hands at his hips, and greeted me with a question: “What is it you want to know?” Garibaldi, the Evening/Weekend Security Supervisor, has worked in Sterling for ten years, and as he talked he smoothed his hands over the newly finished mahogany of the circulation desk. “All the furniture was pretty much designed along the lines of the existing woodwork that was in the building,” he told me. “They cleaned all the granite, the cracks in the floors.” He spoke clearly and quickly, but once he finished describing the details of the construction—from the new air-conditioning system to the restoration of the painting behind us—he paused.
“Because we looked at [the nave] everyday for the last ten years, we kind of took it for granted. We lost sight of it,” Garibaldi said. “It wasn’t until we were away from it for a whole year, locked in those little tunnels. Now, it’s like a rebirth for us. I’m looking at this and saying, ‘Wow, I never noticed the detail in the wood in the ceiling, the stone, how clean it is, or the stained glass windows.’”
The next morning, I met another guard standing at the desk at the nave’s entrance. Bob Lucibello, like many of the library’s thirty-two security guards, spends his hours rotating through various stations in Sterling and Bass. When I asked to hear about his thoughts on the nave, he peered at me, skeptical and slightly bemused. “You want to talk to me? Now?” he asked, as if I must have been simply mistaken.
He agreed to talk while he checked bags, and looked up at me from under his thinning grey hair while we talked. With a shrug, he told me his favorite part of the restoration: “Well, you know, [now] it looks the way it should look.” Lucibello had worked as a letter carrier for the US Postal Service before assuming his post in Sterling eight years ago. On the difference between his days behind the wheel of the delivery truck versus behind the desk in Sterling’s nave, however, Lucibello had little to say. “Oh, they’re completely different.”
Lucibello did not comment on the ornate chandelier hanging over his head, or the shine of the new granite floors. There was no mention of the resplendent beauty of Sterling, newly infused with twenty million dollars of cleaning and refurbishing, or of the change in his day-to-day job from last year. “Actually, the early morning,” he said, when I asked him his favorite part. “If you get here when the sun’s coming up, that’s the best, I think.”
The following day, I stopped by the nave before my first class. The sun was still peeking through the upper windows, casting shortening shadows across the floor. As I stood, head craned, a few early-risers wandered through the nave, some with heads down, but most who entered looked up at the space, the striped lines of granite, the star-specked ceiling, the stained glass. And I knew that as much as I felt a connection to Sterling, it’s nothing compared to being in the space day in and day out, knowing it for many years longer than it takes us to enter the library as students for the first time and exit for the last. I’ll find no ownership; but only the communal awe that leaves us silent, eyes raised to the star-speckled ceiling.
Illustration by Julia Kittle-Kamp