Better Angles

My library ID photo makes me look like a ghost. My face is pale, the edges of it slightly blurred. My eyes are there, technically, but the overall impression is: recently exhumed. I treasure the small indignities that come with belonging to places like this, being issued a badge by a building that has been standing so long it doesn’t care if you look alive.

Outside, it is raining in a way it rarely does in London: straight down, no mist. I come in with my umbrella dripping and shake it once, politely, over the mat. The foyer smells of wet wool and old paper and whatever polish is used on the woodwork. At the coat lockers by the entrance, there are two girls—late teens, early twenties—moving like they’re in a hurry even when they’re only taking off their coats. They are talking quietly next to me, and their American accents catch my ear. They should realize that whispering in this place only amplifies words, like prayers in a church. I’m not trying to listen. I’m doing that thing where you are simply a person standing near other people. Your ears are open. You can’t close them like a book.

One of the girls says, “She said she pictures him up there doing the crossword with Abraham Lincoln.”

The other girl makes a small sound of wonder, “Really? Your grandmother?”

“I swear.” The first girl is undoing her scarf, pulling the dry half of her hair out from under it. “Like, literally. She said, ‘I just see him there, like at breakfast on Sunday mornings with a pen and a coffee, and Abe Lincoln is there.’”

“Why Lincoln?” the other girl asks.

“You know Grandpa was obsessed,” the first girl whispers. “Like, Lincoln was his hero. So Grandma said…you know. That’s who he’d be with in heaven.”

“Your grandma said that? Wasn’t she Catholic?” The second girl sounds genuinely surprised.

“Yeah...” The first girl laughs quietly. “The ‘early mass every Sunday morning, grace before every meal’ kind of lady, I know. But she didn’t say anything about God or angels or—” She pauses, seemingly searching for a word that isn’t too dramatic. “—you know. She just said that. The crossword. Lincoln. Like Sunday afternoons, but nothing to do with church...”

“That’s kind of… nice.”

They shuffle off toward the stairs, their footsteps swallowed almost immediately by the building. I stand with my umbrella still in my hand, like I’ve been handed something important and I’m not sure where to put it. Offered in passing between a scarf and a locker door, the image strikes me as if it had been aimed. A crossword in heaven. A pen. The pleasure of a clue solved. Abraham Lincoln—awkward, tall, present not as a marble bust but as a man in a room. It is funny, objectively. I swipe through the turnstile. The machine makes its small accepting beep. Welcome, Ghost Member. Welcome back, Lady Who Looks Like She Died in 1865.

The stairs to the reading room are carpeted, but the iron grates at the landings give off that industrial clink underfoot. The library reminds you that, for all its beauty, it is also a system. Heat rises. Dust falls. People walk. Books wait. The motion-sensor lights come on half a beat after I pass, polite, as if to say: after you. When I finally stop at a landing to catch my breath, on the stacks in front of me, there are lists on two placards mounted, identical in their neat black lettering except for a single vowel.

RELIGION — Angels (on one)

RELIGION — Angles (on the other)

I have seen them before. The first time I noticed the misprint, I assumed my eyes were tired. The second time, I assumed someone had made a joke. The third time, I considered mentioning it at the desk downstairs—“Excuse me, your angels are being obtuse on the third floor”—but then I imagined a staff member coming up with a freshly printed list to fix the error, and I couldn’t bring myself to remove an accidental poem from the world. Today, perhaps because of the girls, I stop and consider it once again.

Angles. Angels. It is the smallest slip, and yet it changes the whole meaning, flings the word into a different universe. Angels: winged messengers, comforters, the beings you imagine hovering around battlefields and bedsides, lifting the unbearable for you, or at least standing close while you bear it. Angles: measure, tilt, position. The way an object changes as you move around it. The way you can look at something from a slightly different place, and it becomes something else. More comprehensible. The building holds both, if you think about it. The religion section always has. People come here looking for angels in answers, reassurance, someone to tell them that the incomprehensible thing is part of a plan we can try to understand. People come here looking for angles too, whether they call it that or not: a different way of seeing their life.

I think of the girl’s grandmother: a religious woman picturing not wings, harps, or Judgment, but a puzzle, a pen, and a breakfast table. A heaven that looks suspiciously like comfort, even with the search for answers continuing. Not her comfort, really. His. The life he loved, raised to eternity. That, I realize, is a kind of love rarely acknowledged: one that imagines the world not as you want it, but as someone else would. The love that says: if there is a door, I hope it opens onto the room you always wanted to sit in. I don’t say any of this aloud. I just stand in front of the two signs, then I go up another flight.

From my usual desk by the window, I can see the street and the reflection of the room behind me, both blurred by rain. Inside, the reading room is a low tide of human activity: people hunched, people turning pages, people taking notes. The library is quiet, but it is not empty. It’s full in the way a church is full even when no one’s speaking—full of the intention to pay attention. I sit. I open my laptop. I’m supposed to be working on something practical: emails, documents, something with bullet points, almost certainly. My day is full of words that are meant to do tasks. Instead, I find myself thinking about Abraham Lincoln.

This is not unusual. I am American by birth and by the way certain sentences have lodged in me, but I have lived away long enough that my country feels sometimes like a story I heard and can no longer track down the book. When I do think of it, I think of its myths. Its unfinished business. Its heroic faces used as shields. I know, rationally, that I could find Lincoln’s inaugural addresses in seconds with a search engine. But the library is right here. The stacks are right there. The thought of walking through the building to find the text is, suddenly, irresistible. Why ask a machine when you could ask the shelves? I close my laptop. I get up. This, I tell myself, is research. This is not avoidance. This is, in its own way, the point.

In the corridor outside the reading room, a man is carrying a tower of books so high he cannot see over it. I press myself against the wall to let him pass. He mouths “thank you” without a sound. The stacks are cooler than the reading room, the air drier, the light dimmer. There are places where the aisles narrow, and you can feel the building’s age in the way the shelves have settled a fraction closer together. I walk toward where I believe American history lives, then second-guess myself, then correct. This library has a way of making you feel pleasantly lost even when you’re not. Its topography is designed not for efficiency but for encounter. When I find the Lincoln section, it is both exactly where I expected it to be and somehow deeper into the building than seems physically possible.

There are the big, familiar biographies, the serious spines, the same portrait replicated next to different fonts. A small fleet of historians writing about him, interpreting him, trying to keep him in a particular pose. My eye catches on the Stephen B. Oates volumes first: With Malice Toward None.

“With charity for all”, I whisper, finishing the line. A line people love to quote but struggle to live. I pull it out. It is heavy, containing not just a life but the weight of what we ask a life to stand for. I flip it open and see, stamped on the inside cover, old markings of everyone who’s taken it home, its past lives on different shelves. And then another book beside it pulls at me with an almost embarrassing familiarity: A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War.

I have not seen this book in years. Decades, really. And yet I recognize it—the title, the font, the image, the colors—the way you recognize someone you once loved. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve changed. The recognition is immediate, physical. When I was ten, I idolized Clara Barton. I read about her moving through field hospitals, tending to soldiers who were missing limbs and names, and thought: “This is what it means to be good.” To stand in the middle of blood and smoke and do something useful with your hands. I dressed up as her for Halloween—an outfit that involved a long skirt, my hair in a bun, a hand-drawn Red Cross taped to my chest, and a little canvas bag. I filled the bag with bandages from my mother’s bathroom cabinet, which were very clean and very unused, and I walked through the suburban streets feeling solemn. I remember someone’s father asking, “Oh, are you a pilgrim?” and me replying, with the indignation of the sincerely informed: “No. I’m Clara Barton. Founder of the American Red Cross and Angel of the Battlefield.”

At ten, I believed in angels. Not literally, but in the sense that I believed there were people who could step into disaster and make it bearable. People who did not look away. People who comforted others in impossible, painful times and did not become bitter or broken. Now, in this aisle, in this quiet, I realize something simple and a little shameful. It isn’t that I’ve become cynical, exactly. It’s that I have, for a stretch of years, been safe. I’m so distant from the troubles that felt so close in my country and my childhood. I’ve put a whole ocean between me and my better angels. My problems now are the kind I can solve with calendars and emails and the careful use of commas. I spend my days moving through rooms where the worst thing that happens is an awkward pause or a poorly phrased sentence. I live a life where I can wander into a library in the rain and decide to spend my time catching up with Lincoln.

I pick Clara Barton off the shelf—heavier than I remember—then put her back, then take her out again. The childish part of me wants to keep her close. The adult part is self-conscious about being so moved by my childhood hero on a weekday morning. Then I flip open the book. The language is earnest, old-fashioned in a way that feels both comforting and faintly naïve. I picture my ten-year-old self reading it at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, writing in my notebook the sentences I read like commandments and the words I’d need to look up later in the dictionary. The image from the locker conversation floats back: the grandfather in heaven with his pen, his puzzle, and Abraham Lincoln. And now Clara and Abe are here, in the stacks, close enough that I could touch them with my fingertips. Not the people, of course. The ideas of them. The paper versions. The collected angles.

I pull a volume of Lincoln’s speeches from the shelf and find what I was looking for:

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Bandaged by his words, I let myself wander without urgency. In a different aisle, I spot a book about medieval cathedrals and think of stone being cut and lifted, entire lives spent in service of something they never saw completed. Back in the reading room, I sit at my desk. The rain has softened. The window looks less like water and more like glass. I reopen my laptop. My life has not been miraculously rearranged by Abraham Lincoln, or by Clara Barton, or by two teenagers in damp coats. But in a building full of quiet and full of ideas, I feel less alone among the ghosts.