The Nook

I have a bone to pick with that competitor of Kindles and I-Pads, that thing being promoted in large booths in Barnes and Nobles outlets, and even in the Harvard Coop, known as the  “Nook.”  Ugh.

Nook is my word, and I am not willing to share with a chilly, plastic, electronic device.  Nook has been my word since I reflected on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and identified those cozy corners, spatially analogous in time-space continuum thought to kairotic time. 

Indeed, I currently work in a nook and I love it. Nook is nest. Nook is cozy reflection. I guess that’s why the marketers appropriated my word, and applied it to a nasty little truc that is completely antithetical to the word’s actual sense.

My nook: a roughly five by six foot space jogged off the library of a law office where I write most days nestled under an old North Cambridge third floor eave.  Given that said eave and my desk share the space vertically and horizontally, standing up room  in heels  is actually much less than “5 by 6” might indicate. The whole library, my nook included, is edged with bookshelves, crammed with law books,  Commonwealth case law going back to the century before last, and other things like West’s Massachusetts Digest volumes “1933 to date,” said date being 1986. Bender’s Forms of Discovery dated 1953. Schweitzer’s Trial Guides from 1945. As any practicing lawyer today knows, these books are loveable but completely worthless.  Indeed they may be dangerous, setting forth as they do legal principles which without updated pocket parts,articulate law that is hopelessly irrelevant, off-point, and even toxic in a 21st century context.  Nevertheless, scary as they are, the books are wonderfully cozy. And they deeply inform the nookness of my working environment.

I will figure out how to take a picture, and then will figure out how to post it. I am old but determined. My lawyer nook, physically, conceptually, emotionally, where I actually do lots of non-law stuff truth be told, is where I write this. I don’t practice much law these days, and will probably not renew my license in June. Don’t need the bar card. They are  embarrassing little self-laminating things here in Massachusetts which you have to assemble yourself from stuff they send in an envelope, once you pay your inflated annual dues. In fact, the whole act of being an attorney in this state, I mean Commonwealth, excuse me (they insist on the distinction here), is embarrassing. If you’re a lawyer, you’re not addressed as Mr. X or Ms. Y, you are “Attorney X or Y.”  That’s what the secretaries say when they answer your phone. That’s how people identify themselves when they call each other, when they go for tickets at Fenway or the Symphony. I have never said it. I couldn’t do it without laughing. “Hello, this is Attorney Aberg.”  Give me a break. But for most people, the phraseology cuts considerable cheese.

I prefer my non-hierarchical nook, without a legal phone extension, stuffed with all the landlord’s worthless books, and some wonderful ones of my own. A French Dictionary. An outdated Tribe hornbook on Constitutional Law. A Cribett’s property law hornbook. A biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Roger Haight’s Jesus Symbol of God. and Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti. These and my non-electronic rolodex, my colored pencils for filling in my doodles when I feel like it, a few files I work on for other guys, a big  bowl of paperclips, plants all over the place, and acco bars for my cute little files.

This would be the Nook.  I am happy here. I could probably recreate it anywhere in the world (le Marais would be nice). Maybe even somewhere where I might make enough money to actually support myself. Somewhere where I wouldn’t have to clear out at noon when all the guys that work here climb the stairs to the third floor to have lunch and talk about their cases and current events and occasionally about cute girls. (Some days, when I remember to pack lunch, I join in. Not so much about the girls.) It is not so bad, even given the periodic clearing outs. Indeed, I feel comfortable with, and very affectionate toward, the guys.

I’ll figure out how to work this “nookness” into my Moon book someday, a book that will reflect on themes of kairotic time and Bachelardian nook space. The book which, while I was still talking to my mother, I promised I wouldn’t write, seeing as how it is critical of Werner von Braun (who really was a lieutenant in the S.S., and for whom my father worked at NASA), and his ambitious amorality, and how that celestial light that had informed human hearts for millenia became a pile of rocks. How Albert Einstein died the same month that Von Braun and the hundred other Peenemunde guys he snuck out of Nazi Germany were naturalized as American citizens on my eventual high school stage, four months before I was born a half mile away at Huntsville Hospital. And how Teillhard de Chardin, S.J., one of my heroes, died the same month, too. On Easter Sunday. Having reflected, in the last recorded bit of his handwriting, on the parousia and St. Paul. Whom he misquotes endearingly in Greek.

Mommy doesn’t want me to write all that. But I probably will.