A Trip to the Cathedral in Times Square

evergreene.com

Last week I got a phone call from an old friend who lives in the mountains of New Mexico and is happy there among the snakes and coyotes and birdlife and wild greenery and I listened to him rapturing about a life I would regard as a penal sentence for serious crimes.

I am a city person and have known this since childhood when I spent miserable summer hours hoeing rows of sweet corn on Fred Peterson’s farm and my great pleasure was hitchhiking into Minneapolis to sit in the library. I read Thoreau’s Walden in high school, and in my forties, bought a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin and had no idea what to do there and gave it away and moved to New York. It was a smart move.

I grew up near the Mississippi River back before cellphones, when it was possible to sit and do absolutely nothing at all; the river was a good place to do nothing by. It was an idyllic boyhood, except for hoeing corn, but of course adulthood was confusing and I did several outstandingly stupid things that the move to Manhattan put behind me, which is where the past belongs.

Some people come to New York for opportunity, I come for a clean slate. I board the downtown B train at 86th and squeeze into a car packed with strangers, some so close I could bite their earlobes, and I find this comforting, a hundred people wedged together, avoiding eye contact, being mannerly. A woman is speaking to two daughters pressed close to her; she speaks in Spanish, they reply in English: “No” and “Why?” and “I don’t think so.” A slight woman squeezes through the pack, saying softly, “Can anyone help me?” and I pull a $20 bill out of my jacket pocket, more than I intended to give, but I give it to her. She says, “Thank you so much.” This small transaction illuminates my day.

I get off at 42nd and the glass canyons of Times Square, Billboard National Park, ten-story jumbotrons flashing hi-def imagery, a dense world of honking and hoopla, a place for farm kids from Iowa who’ve had all the serenity they can tolerate and need turmoil. Barkers saying, “Show tonight … you like comedy?” Panhandlers in superhero costumes badgering the tourists to have a snapshot with them. I go into the Public Library and up the stairs to the gigantic Rose Reading Room, thousands of red and blue and green spines of heavy tomes packed on the shelves, a cathedral of thinking where cellphone calls are forbidden, a hundred or so contemplatives with their laptops, gathered here to be free of salesmen, influencers, opinionators, all the wiseacres of the world, and find the freedom of thought.

I don’t see anybody haul a reference book off the shelves; Google has rendered half the library obsolete. I came here to look up a woman charged with murder whom Abraham Lincoln defended in Peoria, a case a friend of mine said she’d heard of. I asked a librarian at the main desk and she said, “You’d have to go to a law library in Illinois for that.” But I googled it on my phone: “Lincoln murder trial Peoria” and there it was.

The woman, Melissa Goings, was 70, married to an abusive man who was trying to strangle her when she grabbed a stick of firewood and hit him and killed him. Lincoln took the case before an all-male jury and asked the judge to let him consult with his client. They went to an office below the courtroom and she escaped out a window and never was seen again. Lincoln told the judge: “I didn’t chase her off. She asked me where she could get a glass of water and I said, ‘There’s mighty fine water in Tennessee.’” The indictment was dismissed.

So I could’ve found this out in the woods of Wisconsin, but I don’t think I would’ve been so curious. The magnificence of the Rose Reading Room makes you believe that the truth is important. Frankly, you live in the woods, it’s hard to escape yourself. You need to board the downtown B train. You sit in the Reading Room among other thinkers and it inspires you to try to be useful. Three years after his act of mercy, Lincoln was elected president. Where will we find the likes of him today? This question needs to be answered. Thanks for reading. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Garrison Keillor © 08.31.26