The following Rock memory was anonymously submitted:
The views of the Quiet green, the city, and the stacks…g-chatting a friend across the table…snacks…spilled tea…spilled stories…the isolation in the isolation room…and the glory of finding a table with an outlet nearby.
The above quote is from Nathan Deuel (Class of 2003). He shared the following Rock memories:
I came to Brown as a transfer and maybe found something a little too gorgeous in all the brick, the ivy, the history. Three places on campus made me feel more at home: Grad Center, that forbidding labyrinth of a dorm, where I did pull-ups and smoked 1,000 cigarettes to get through my first semester; Loui’s, where a pitcher of beer always seemed like a fine idea; and the Rock, that somewhat cruel, mostly stunning building on College Street. Slowly, as I gained a foothold among my peers — speaking more confidently in class, writing stories, getting a sense I might find a way to be a real Brunonian, however brief my stay — I found myself spending more and more time in the library. Sure, I needed to use the computers and the printer and to find my place among all those books. In the endless stacks, at the immaculate carrells, I often felt like there was more important work being done. Feeling out-classed, I would take refuge among the various green spaces surrounding the building, where a body could sit and smoke a hand-roll. After a lit class one day, somewhere in that dank old English building since torn down, I remember poking my head into a closet. In a trash can was a treasure trove of old press-board desktops, which had been pried from where I couldn’t tell. Had Brown students done all that writing? It blew my mind; engraved into the surface of each, with knives and pens and pencils, were words like K I S S and S L A Y E R and Buddy Luvs Tammy and TEAR THE SYSTEM DOWN and DOSTOEVESKY RULZ and all manner of speech I never would have imagined seeing on such a fancy campus. Greedily, getting ideas for the kind of writer I might yet become (and the way Brown might let me do it) I slung a half-dozen desktops under my armpit, late for my next class. Thinking fast, with ideas of what I might do later, I hid the stash in the bushes beside the Rock. Days went by, then weeks, and as the semester flew by and my girlfriend moved to New York and I with her, I forget the pieces…Are they still there? Did someone find them? Are they contributing in any meaningful way to someone’s life? I’m not sure, but I’ll never forgot the experience of finding another way we could use a library, and for that I’ll never forget the Rock.
The above quote is from Mary Caponegro (Creative Writing AM Class of 1983). She shared the following Rock memories:
Stacks and stacks to wander, the glory of open stacks: an expansiveness within narrow aisles and vertical towers. What could be more fertile for a writer? This vision is all the more evocative for me thirty years after the fact, when the shelf life of physical books on shelves seems so clearly destined for expiration.
To have the Rock side by side with the John Hay, the latter with its closed-format specialty collections, was to have the best of both worlds if you were a graduate student. I spent many rewarding hours in both, and enjoyed them much more than the graveyard-shift hours I logged in at the computer mainframe at the base of the Science Library, learning to format my MFA thesis via computer the way Robert Coover, czar of hypertext, wanted us to.
On the Rock’s upper floors, there were wonderful nooks and crannies in which to secret oneself when standing or crouching in the stacks themselves became fatiguing. One could sit unmolested with one’s loot and keep browsing or take notes, as if in a grotto: an entirely different environment than the rooms designed to accommodate larger concentrations of readers at the base of the Rock. Those stacks served me well, whether I was researching term papers on Buddhism or Marxism, or finding out everything I could about ancient Chinese culture when the uncannily intuitive John Hawkes assigned me the exercise of composing one hundred Chinese fairy tales.
Though I also discovered and borrowed works of fiction from the Rock, my home genre tended to bring out the capitalist in me, so the marvelous Brown Bookstore and College Hill were my principal sources for works of imagination. And yet, one could not, despite several comfy chairs, burrow in quite as deeply at a place of commerce as at the Rock. There was something that felt deliciously clandestine about scanning the stacks and perusing the loot, none of which would ever be your property and yet all of which, implicitly, was yours for the taking, courtesy of your Ivy League I.D. card.
The capacious stacks seemed even more ample and reassuring when I was a nascent instructor. I felt unbearably ignorant when I had the privilege to teach the inaugural first-come-first served beginning fiction workshop for Brown undergraduates, and between each class I would race to the Rock to avail myself of every possible critical perspective on whatever short story I happened to be offering them as a model, gorging on scholars of Flannery O’Conner on Monday and scholars of Joyce on Wednesday and so on. And because thankfully I studied among mentors who didn’t subscribe to the write-what-you-know tenets of creative writing, I kept seeking the Rock to inspire my own fiction, for instance when I wanted to turn a girl into a phoenix, and discovered the opulently illustrated New Dictionary of Birds, the elegant writing of which I envied, and which was supplemented by more arid articles from Scientific American in the periodical section–back when periodicals were obtained the old-fashioned way.
But perhaps the most lasting memory transcends those wondrous books and the extraordinary people who connected me to them. Having gone to a small rural college, I wasn’t used to having to show my credentials to gain admittance to a library, but it was a treat to do so for that man with the beautiful smile. I wish I could recall his name, if I ever knew it. His smile made you feel welcome, made you love books even more intensely than you did the moment before you pulled out your Brown I.D., made you feel infectiously glad to be alive. When somewhere deep into my years at Brown, I actually had a more extensive conversation with him, I learned he had some severely painful physical malady, possibly some spinal deformity, and I felt awe at his ability to transmit such radiance despite profound discomfort, and this memory of him reminds me anew of all I take for granted, well beyond the physicality of books.
Briana McGeough graduated in 2012. She shared this Rock memory:
As a neurotic freshman, I spent my mornings poring over my textbooks and feverishly typing my lab reports well into the night. As a sophomore, I held hands with a boy in the stacks while watching the sunset. I didn’t get the kiss that I wanted, but he did read me some lovely poetry. As a junior, I won a storytelling competition. My prize: leading my class in an activity of filling condoms with shaving cream and enough money to buy a handle of vodka. As a senior, I wandered the aisles in the buff, distributing doughnuts to neurotic freshmen poring over their textbooks and feverishly typing their lab reports well into the night.
Elizabeth Searle graduated class of 1988. She teaches Fiction and Scriptwriting at Stonecoast MFA program (University of Southern Maine) and is the author of four books of fiction and several works of theater. She shared the following memory of the Rock:
I remember clearly—it is as vivid as the gold color of her hair—coming upon Amy Carter, daughter of former president Jimmy Carter, in the cavelike bowels of the Rock. I loved the intense quiet and sense of many minds concentrating that always filled the Rock, especially in its latest hours and lowest levels. I also loved the dim cavelike lighting and the handy snack machines. I spent many happily trancelike hours ‘wandering the stacks’ and pacing the lower levels of the Rock with my notebook at hand. This was in pre-iPhone, pre-laptop days. I remember how my advisor, the late great John Hawkes, was suspicious of computers. He seemed to blame the entire computer revolution on his fellow fiction faculty luminary, Robert Coover, who carried a computer around with him, much to Hawkes’ horror. But most of us lowly students wrote on paper back then. So, alas, I had no cellphone in hand when—amidst a late-night pacing session at the Rock—I happened to stumble upon the former president’s casually dressed golden-haired daughter, Amy. Amy Carter was seated at a table near the ever-popular snack machine, absorbed in quietly reading, looking utterly at home in the late-night deeply silenced Rock atmosphere. I stood in the doorway of the snack area, staring, unseen. Then pretending not to stare as other students slipped in to quietly purchase snacks. Amy turned a page. I come from a wildly political family and my father was perhaps one of President Jimmy Carter’s biggest fans. I thought of telling Amy Carter this, but did not want break her own magical stone-deep lowest-level Rock concentration. Amy did not raise her eyes but her skin had a rosy glow and her face a contented calm. Just as well that I had no cellphone, as I might have been tempted to steal a quick shot. As it was, I took a long look instead, then stole away.
Bob Arellano graduated class of 1991. He returned and got an MFA in 1994. He shared the following Rock memory:
A lot of spots are dear to me “in” the Rockefeller Library, but none so much as a place that’s out: the Zechariah Chafee Garden, hidden away downhill behind the Rock. There’s a high wall all around, and the B-level doors from inside the library as well as the outside gate onto Lot 52 are always locked. You know what we’d do? After closing, we’d climb onto the A-level deck at College Street and scale the side of the building around back. It involved using your arms and legs to sandwich the vertical supports, those cement gills that, along with the narrow tinted windows, give the Rock its retro-futurist, “Empire Strikes Back” charm. Suspended 20 feet above the garden bricks, we’d take our lives (or at least our fibulas) into our hands for a chance to dance with Zechariah’s ghost in his secret garden. When I think of the Rock, I’ll always remember the place where they keep my graduate thesis (Brown’s first electronic MFA!), the stacks in Western Language and Literature where I first picked out “On Being Blue” by William Gass, and the little desk in circulation where I brought flowers to that sweet Norwegian staffer who stole my heart (oh, Katrine, why can’t I find you on Facebook?), but if I come back in May for my 20th grad-school reunion, at midnight after campus dance it’s the Chafee garden where you’ll find me—although I better watch my back, because a peek at street view shows a sign that DPS has gotten wise.
Forrest Gander is a professor in Literary Arts at Brown. He shared the following Rock memory:
I remember teaching a poetry course in the Rock in the basement on a day when Sawako Nakayasu, an MFA candidate, was giving a presentation. When I opened the door to the room—the class in file behind me in the dark—we saw, by the skanky light of the big basement window, Sawako Nakayasu, completely immobile, cellophaned face-up on the middle of the table in the center of the room like the victim in a horror movie. Everyone rushed in. A little hole had been punctured in the cellophane over her lips and through that hole, she began her presentation.
The above quote is from Enough About You by David Shields ’78. The library he closed “every night for four years” was the Rockefeller Library. Here is the full paragraph from Enough About You:
During freshman orientation, I joined the Brown Daily Herald, but by February I’d quit — or perhaps I was fired — when there was a big brouhaha surrounding the fact that I’d made stuff up. I started spending long hours in the Marxist bookstore just off campus, reading and eating my lunch bought at McDonald’s; I loved slurping coffee milkshakes while reading and rereading Sartre’s The Words. I closed the library nearly every night for four years; at the end of one particularly productive work session, I actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, “I shall dethrone Shakespeare.”
If you have a special Rock memory please submit here or share it on twitter or instagram using the hashtag #Rock50Memories. Below is a visualization of the memories we’ve already received.