The archive in the morning was different from the archive in the afternoon.
In the afternoon, the high windows let in a flat, diffused light that was good for reading but had a quality of uniformity that I found slightly alienating — as if the archive existed outside of time, processing its materials with impersonal efficiency. In the morning, the eastern light came in at an angle, fell in slanted columns across the shelves and the reading tables, and made everything look the way old things deserved to look: illuminated, particular, each document casting its own small shadow.
I brought Min Soyon in the morning deliberately.
