The morning of day twelve of the Occupy Wall Street protest, a few people are waving signs and shouting slogans. Mostly, though, everyone is just hanging out. They take naps, play board games, and pick up books from the haphazardly organized library that occupies a bench on the side of Zuccotti Park. There is no rhyme or reason to the selection: a volume of Walter Benjamin’s writing sits beside Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep”; the only books that are sectioned off are the children’s books. All together, about one hundred titles—along with back issues of Harper’s—await protesters and passersby—in the spirit of the affair, you needn’t be an “insider” to borrow.
But surely, I said, literature of a more overtly political nature must be in demand. Where are the manifestos? The pamphlets? Betsy said that she had seen people passing around “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life,” by Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of The Center for Nonviolent Communication. And she’d placed Noam Chomsky’s “Profit Over People” front and center on the table. It’s flanked by the works of Howard Zinn, Karl Marx, Ray Anderson, and Cornel West, who visited the protest two days ago.
But maybe more important are the books that take the protesters’ minds entirely off the matter at hand. Between rallies, Betsy told me, some of the protesters had begun holding poetry readings; and if I were to visit after sunset, I might see several of them huddled over novels, reading by candlelight.
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