Here’s the thing you start to get when you hang around an occupation: it isn’t perfect. It isn’t supposed to be perfect. ... Its utopianism is driven not by some postapocalyptic or prelapserian ideal, but by something immediate and ... tactical. It’s a utopia that glimmers briefly here and there, and only in the present—and yet is in dialogue with the past as well as the future.

That spirit is in evidence even on a rainy day when the people’s mic is quiet and the occupiers are mostly holed up in their tents. ... Some of them are just getting out of the rain—although getting out of the rain in the midst of books is a special case: a visitor shakes off her poncho in the doorway, settles onto a donated chair or an overturned bucket, and listens awhile; conversation rises and falls, ebbing into the peculiar, charged quiet of people reading together. And then a book catches her sight ... and soon the words are flowing, her own thoughts answering those of another, a remote or long-dead author who likely never imagined a tent city in Dewey Square, and whose notions yet enliven the occupation with a tender, special force.

Books have been doing this kind of work for a long time. In the middle of the nineteenth century, England’s Chartist movement—its energies strikingly similar to those of the Occupy movement, its intent similarly misunderstood by the powerful—established reading rooms throughout Britain. This was an era when public libraries were not widespread; most lending libraries charged subscription fees. The free Chartist libraries were enormously popular—and for the elite, enormously unsettling. A commentator in Blackwood’s magazine argued that “Whenever the lower order of any state have obtained a smattering of knowledge they have generally used it to produce national ruin.”