Thirty-one years later, I still have tiny seizures of memory about the writers I loved in college. Whatever was contained between the covers of their books enlarged upon entry, like stepping outside from within a dark and tiny house: the sensation of the sun on your arms and the endless sky.
Not too long ago I bought another copy of the old Norton anthology, my first literary companion and still the ultimate symbol of my education. The swayback enormity of its pumpkin orange spine arched in an ever-greater curve with each use, each consultation by a student. Like the Bible, its thousands of onion-skin pages spoke with a bygone authority: Here is everything you need to know.
The bookstore with the wagon wheel is still there, a compartment in the tiny do-nothing shopping mall south of the campus. Walking through its series of rooms was the first time I felt the restrictions—the bite—of economy, longing for the complete novels of Jane Austen or a set of Proust or a particularly old edition of Pylon.
