Looking Up

Look up.



This is what you see. Those are the nearest windows and they're fifteen feet above you, at ground level.

Look down.



To look down, you need to lean over the glass railing in front of you. These are the carrels on the floor below you.

I get a little vertiginous looking down. I don't look up.

In this venue, it's nothing about the quality of light that cues you into the time of day. I don't know what else to say about this.

This particular library is like an old shoe. There are more computers and they've moved the journals, but there are familiar faces among the mole-like librarians. The round tables are gone (I wonder where) as is the coffee machine that dispensed the sugary, milky, sludgy nectar that sustained me through many a Sunday once upon a time. (I actually sought out that specific coffee machine, and was disappointed to find it had bee replaced with some glowing, refrigerated entity filled with glass jars of murky juice-ish drinks and two-dollar bottles of water.)

Today I spent about four hours in the library; I only emerged because the air conditioning got to be too much. I thought I'd go and get a coffee, but it was blazing hot outside and I got overheated just by walking around a bit.

After class, I went upstairs to the teaching greenhouse to gaze awhile at hundreds of our tiny tobacco sprouts growing warmly and unawares under thousand-watt lightbulbs. The display greenhouse next door was open so I went in and looked around and pet the cycads and lilies and ferns.