Like a scattered blanket left uncared for during a rush hour morning, she lay resting on a colourful (let us say of a largely light citrine color with twirls, loops, and hoops of other colors spun away) colonial sofa. She was all the while guarded carefully on either side by smaller, brown leather couches and tall brown lamp shades with trapezium pleats. Wearing blue jeans and a purple crop-top, she let her legs fold enough to not fall off but also just enough so as to rest one above the other comfortably. Her arms, which pillowed her, crossed against each other, much like the crossed limbs of leopards napping on the branches of acacia trees in the much-famed photographs of the Southeastern African Savannah. Her hair, perhaps grown to right under her shoulder, blonde mostly, excepting the cinnamon roots, partially covered her face. My subject’s black leather ankle boots were left to give company only to her folded and relaxed little sack by their side.

She was the heart of the hall – the library hall patronised by the Morrisons. Only underneath her sofa, there was a carpet. And the edge of the carpet was tended by an empty podium, intended perhaps for future (rather, past?) speakers. Should the library have served its duty entirely, she would meet the speaker’s eye, instantly. Even sans speakers and evening events, the mezzanine, not very high, that flew past her head, the gaze of Dante in some distance from one direction and Roman Emperor Caracalla from another all assured that she was the heart of this very room and could not be missed. Yet, she seemed to not mind and sleep away in peace.

To my eye, in her, simultaneous furnishment – her well-selected boots and her perhaps unexpected abode at a site of symmetry –  and abandon converged: she seemed to know full well the attention she may draw from being in the centre of the room and the gaze of the living and the dead, long long dead, yet she seemed to not care. There was even something untame, something brave in this hour of sleep too. To resist a nap after lunch is challenging, but to resist getting up around 5 maybe deemed sloth. As much as silence comfortably hung over, crawled in, and marched about this library, the universe of the campus was far from quiet. Doe slowly was prepared in this minute, around 4:45 (let us call it dusk in the temporality of the university day, if not by the measure of the sun and its “golden hour”) to empty itself. Some returning, some issuing books, walked away, making sounds around. Yet my subject slept.

I began to suspect that there may be something more than abandon at play. One may introduce helplessness as a characteristic. It returned to me that this was one of the hottest days of the year (touching nearly a 100° F) – only I would get affected hours later. She must be bogged down entirely by the heat, I thought, that blared with little consideration, like weights on the head, fire on the skin, and fumes on the stomach. Meanwhile the warm yellow light from the lanterns in this room seemed to cushion us all. And of course, wood on all sides, in the heavens and on earth, and shelves of books in this cosmos that was the library seemed to protect us all. She was allowed, despite the grind of the end of the first third of the semester, and owing to this perfectly measured lighting, and furnishing by Oxbridgian aesthetics, to rest, rest that she much needed. That also explains why she was not alone. A few others too (some with macs that seem to fall off the light clutch of their hands), on less appealing sofas, and in less obvious and central locations, had fallen asleep and to unintended nap-monsters.

I could picture thus, that in the fifteen minutes that would follow, or perhaps in the fifteenth or so’th minute, when Morrison will shut, she will be jolted to wakefulness, made to set her feet into her boots (even if she would like to do it gently, like the rest of her fellow sleepers, she would be forced to get up quite gracelessly in that last minute), move out into the sun that was nowhere near setting (but I presume that she carried cooling shades in her sack). Perhaps finding another seat with no wooden cooling and warm light-lulling on campus, or her home, she will have to return to work. The near-hundred-degree late summer day had clearly and certainly stolen hours from her day and her study schedule. I wondered if she will panick in a few hours’ time that she had lost much of her afternoon to the leopard-nap. I imagined her cursing herself for letting the pleasant character of Morrison get to her. However, she may have also led life already at some degree of edge for any lost amount of time to shock her. She may after all with a subtle, friendly, but mostly indulgent little chiding, get on with the study that she had had planned for the day.

All of this though, is but my getting ahead of myself.

I have all along suppressed the one detail – risking falling off the sofa, an opened book, its spine facing the sky and the pages caressing her two arms, rested on the woman. As always while observing my subject, I hid the details of the book from myself. I wanted to reward myself at the end of the assignment with the title. Right before I would leave the library I stole a glance of the book from behind her sofa. It was a copy of Walden and other Writings. Indeed, there was something spectacularly satisfying about this fact. This – was “verily” how the book was meant to be read: with bouts of naps (a few drops of drool may also be spared on its pages provided it is a heavily hot afternoon). Nobody reads – I hope – Thoreau with hurry and duty, and instead with leisure. I shall take a leap and call him the Sage of Leisure.

And I also hope this was an hour of leisure for the leopard. It must be.