“I’m not sure computers are the answer, though,” said Arthur. “As much as I like spending time alone in the library, I agree that Miss Davis has a point—it shouldn’t be just for me. But what makes the library so special is that it’s not . . . I don’t know, not connected to the modern world. It might be worth thinking about how . . . how other people can experience the same sense of wonder and . . . and sheer joy that I feel when I’m up there. The connection one feels to the past is palpable in that room. If we could help people understand that, we might find ourselves with more of what Miss Davis calls constituents.”
“If anyone can figure out a way to do that, Arthur,” said the dean, “it’s you.”
—
“Might I have a word, Prescott?” said the chairman, poking his head into Arthur’s office the next morning.
“I suppose you might,” said Arthur, pushing back his chair. Grim as the prospect of a word with Slopes might be, it was still a relief to set aside the grisly essay he had been reading, “Titus Andronicus—Why Shakespeare Condoned Cannibalism.”
“You do understand, Prescott, that committee work is one of the requirements of every faculty member.”
“Was there a meeting this morning?” asked Arthur. “I assure you I didn’t get the memo or the e-mail or whatever other disgusting means of communication is used to summon us to these torture sessions.”
“No, there was not a meeting this morning, Prescott, and if you’ll calm down, I have a proposal I think you might like.”
“You intend to use me for a pilot scheme to see what happens if lecturers are not required to sit on committees?”
“Not precisely. I intend to take you off the Curriculum Expansion Committee.”
“Slopes, I could kiss you,” said Arthur, leaping up. “May I kiss you?”
“No, you may not,” said the chairman, with a stern look. “That is not all I have come to say. I am taking you off the Curriculum Expansion Committee so that I may place you on a committee for which I feel you are eminently more suited.”
“The Committee to Eliminate Committees Committee?” said Arthur.
“The Advisory Committee for the Media Center.”
“For the what?”
“You like books and libraries and that sort of thing, am I right?”
“I would classify myself as a bibliophile, if that’s what you mean,” said Arthur. “But what does that have to do with the media center? What is the media center?”
“It’s what we used to call the library, you throwback.”
“And why do we no longer call it a library?”
“Because we call it a bloody media center!” said the chairman. “Now, do you want to switch committee assignments, or will I see you at the Curriculum Expansion Committee meeting?”
“Is the media center some sort of bookless library?” said Arthur. Was it possible that Miss Davis’s vision had already filtered to the silty bottom of the academic world that was Barchester University?
“I see you’re already familiar with some of the terminology,” said the chairman. “Clearly you’ll be a perfect fit. Next meeting is Tuesday at four in Conference Room D.”
Slopes turned and marched out of the office, leaving Arthur speechless for a moment, until he thought to shout out, “Where in blazes is Conference Room D?”
“In the media center,” came the voice of the chairman from down the hall.
Arthur closed his eyes for a moment, picturing the dark paneling and rows of leather-bound folios in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. That was a university library, and for over four hundred years it had preserved printed and manuscript materials, making it an invaluable resource to serious scholars. Arthur cringed to think what Thomas Bodley, who founded the library in 1602, would think if that venerable institution became a “media center.” The Bodleian, of course, never had to face the question that had been troubling Arthur since his conversation with Miss Davis. Unlike the cathedral library at Barchester, the Bodleian had a built-in constituency—the students and faculty of one of the great universities of the world. Arthur supposed that when the Barchester collection had begun in the early Middle Ages, those books, though not yet called a library, had a built-in constituency as well. Barchester had been a Benedictine foundation and the Benedictine rule required the monks to spend part of their day reading. Now no such rule existed, and Barchester’s readership had dwindled—but was that a true measure of its importance? The wretched media center had a built-in audience, and no one could argue that that was a more useful institution than the cathedral library. Could they?
—
The rest of Arthur’s day had a distinctly downward trajectory.
“I was thinking for my project I could explore how the epistolary novels of the eighteenth century would have looked as tweets.” Miss Stanhope had taken rare advantage of Arthur’s office hours to consult about her midterm paper—which everyone now insisted on calling a project, as if, instead of actually writing, they could hand in a sculpture of Charles Dickens made of ice-lolly sticks.
“I’m sorry, you want to do what?”
“Well, tweets today are like letters.”
“What in God’s name is a tweet?”
“You know, like on Twitter? A tweet.”
“Miss Stanhope, this is not an ornithology class.”
Twenty minutes later, Miss Stanhope had finally explained that a Web site called Twitter allowed people to exchange messages of up to 140 characters (though why this particular number Miss Stanhope could not say) and that she thought this was the modern equivalent of civilized correspondence. The only satisfaction Arthur had in the conversation was in his own adamant refusal to allow her to rewrite Fanny Burney’s Evelina as a series of these tweets. He worried, though, what brave new balderdash Miss Stanhope would try next.
—
As he walked through the cool shadows of the cloister on the way to the library that afternoon, hoping for an hour of peace before Evensong, Arthur could feel the stress and anger of the day seeping away—almost as if the walls of the cathedral could draw the forces of evil from him. Much as he wanted to get to the library, he walked the circuit of the cloister twice, allowing its peace to permeate his mood.
He stopped on the south side and stepped through a stone arch into the open center of the cloister. He stood in the edge of the shadows cast by an ancient yew tree, which spread its gnarled branches over most of that side of the cloister garden. Arthur remembered sitting under that tree as a boy. It had been his favorite place to read in the summer, and it had been the place where he made his own first discovery about Barchester and the Holy Grail. It was the summer after his grandfather had introduced him to Malory, and having spent the year since reading and rereading King Arthur’s Knights, he had moved on to Tennyson’s 1869 collection The Holy Grail and Other Poems, borrowed from the Barchester Library. Arthur recalled, as if it had happened last week, reading that book in the cool shadow of the Barchester yew on a warm and hazy summer’s day. He remembered the bright green of the textured cloth binding and the sensation of the bumps of words pressed into paper as he ran his fingers across each line. The poem began with Sir Percival, retired to a monastery, recounting his history to a fellow monk. On the second page, Arthur had stopped short at the third line from the top of the page. How funny, he thought, that he could still picture exactly where that line fell on the page.
Beneath a world-old yew-tree, darkening half