The Libraries
It seems my posts come either far and few between, or all on the same day.
Today is a day of two posts. Given the excitement of this past weekend, one post would be sufficient, except for the discovery of the most beautiful college libraries in America.
I won't talk about my favorites, because that would be far to difficult to pick, and anyway everyone has their own taste. But go. Look at them. From noble Gothic to the most brilliant modern architecture, these are twenty five of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. Tears were brought to my eyes. I might be having a librarygasm--which is exactly as dirty as it sounds, meaning about as dirty as your hypothetical maiden auntie's socks. The day after wash day. But who needs dirty when you have stained glass windows, gothic vaults, and books?
Carroll's library, sanctuary and second home though it is to me, really can't compete. The only thing that can compete is possibly Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel, which did to my brain what the above link did to my eyes. Borges, being Argentine, is probably classed as a 'magic realist', but the stories of his that I most love remind me of my favorite bits of Lovecraft--the passages that brought wonder, rather than fear. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Quest of Iranon. Although Borges carries a bit less of the pathos of Iranon and more of the 'mind-asplode' of...um...I'm not certain I've ever read anything that opened a can of mind-aspolde quite as much as Borges does. Carroll's library, as secondary in beauty as it might be, does contain a volume of his completed works, which I am making my way through right now. I'll pretend it counts for my crawl through the shelves of that other library in my life, the workplace. Which it won't be for much longer, alas. It's not even the steady paycheck I'll miss as much as the...well, the structure it provided, for one thing, and the experience, and the camaraderie. Three of us pages are leaving this summer. It's the end of an era. And that's always a little sad.
Now that I'm getting back in the habit of making blog posts, perhaps I'll make one about where I've been the past two weeks. Once the flurry of June birthdays passed (I don't know if I notice this more because I'm born in June, or if most of my friends and relatives really do have June birthdays, but not a day has gone by when somebody I know wasn't becoming a year older), I spent most of it split between the couch and a pile of books, and this computer, where I continued typing/editing my novels. Oh, who am I kidding. I spent half of it on the couch, about 5% of it typing, and the rest went to watching the second season of BBC's Merlin on Youtube. But more of that later. Suffice to say, what those libraries are to book lovers, that series is to lovers of eye-candy. I happen to be both.