(no subject)
I hurried into the city this afternoon to retrieve a book from the main branch of the Rochester Public Library. Perhaps retrieve is not the right word, for it implies some degree of familiarity with the library, as though prior to the task and in the process of envisioning how it could and would be carried out I had in my mind any more than the image of the archetypical library, including but not limited to stacks, reference desk, main entrance, and bathroom - - - an image that is undoubtedly the amalgamation of the memories of my most vivid and frequent experiences with libraries. Three come immediately to mind, of course: the main branch of the Newton Public Library, because I spent a reasonable amount of time there during my adolescence; the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, in which I currently spend several hours a week; and the main branch of the Boston Public Library, into which I have never actually entered, but whose facade I have encountered the many, many times I have passed through Copley Square, and which, as a result, is printed clearly in my mind as an enormous body of unbroken stone beneath which smaller, softer bodies pass and above which colossal structures that rise a quarter mile in reflect eachother in blue and black glass panes.
The library was not difficult to find. Not unlike the Boston Public Library, it is a hulking, uniform structure composed of stone and located beside buildings that tower over it. Unlike any of the libraries I can currently recall, however, it is situated by the falls on the Genesse River beside the Broad Street bridge.
This is of no immediate significance to me.
It snowed today for the first time this year. Walking from my car to the building I was struck by the deep gray of the wet sidewalk - a gray like that evoked by the word "thunderstorm" in much the same way that a blinding, blanched white is immediately recalled in the mind's eye with startling lucidity after the word "blizzard" is uttered. I was struck at once by the intense oppressiveness of this city, the streets empty beneath tall, glass-paned buildings, the few cars parked or passing through beaten and rusting, their windows swollen with fog. The Genesee is a flat black blanket stretching from bank to bank beside which even panhandlers are absent for lack of passersby from which to solicit change. This is a place tempered by the stench of its own sixty past years of failure.
But I have little concern for the city of Rochester itself, the quality of life here, the decline of available jobs and increasing unemployment, the growing rates of poverty and violence . For as much as it affects me at this moment, I will leave here a year or two before moving on to elsewhere. Upon arriving at elsewhere, whether it be Boston or Oakland, Miami or Missoula, Tel Aviv or London, the immediate space I occupy and the place in which that space is located will be of immediate concern to me in the same way that the nausea and bone-gnawing ache of food poisoning occupies the afflicting, commanding their attention to their immediate physiological state: everything "outside" will be quelled by the senses as they are drawn to that which directly concerns the body and, in an ascending hierarchy, those things which concern mind, emotional sentiment ("heart and soul," if you must), interpersonal relationships, issues of morality, etc.
IF I am suspected of lacking sentimentality, I urge you to forgive me, for I am as guilty as I could ever possibly be.
IF I am blessed with a consiousness for small details of meaning and signification, I am cursed by my inability to store for any extended period of time that beauty which I obtain through it, and doubly cursed by the inability to prevent myself from turning inwards and after a mere glance screaming loudly, uncontrollably, without any foreseeable end.
The library was not difficult to find. Not unlike the Boston Public Library, it is a hulking, uniform structure composed of stone and located beside buildings that tower over it. Unlike any of the libraries I can currently recall, however, it is situated by the falls on the Genesse River beside the Broad Street bridge.
This is of no immediate significance to me.
It snowed today for the first time this year. Walking from my car to the building I was struck by the deep gray of the wet sidewalk - a gray like that evoked by the word "thunderstorm" in much the same way that a blinding, blanched white is immediately recalled in the mind's eye with startling lucidity after the word "blizzard" is uttered. I was struck at once by the intense oppressiveness of this city, the streets empty beneath tall, glass-paned buildings, the few cars parked or passing through beaten and rusting, their windows swollen with fog. The Genesee is a flat black blanket stretching from bank to bank beside which even panhandlers are absent for lack of passersby from which to solicit change. This is a place tempered by the stench of its own sixty past years of failure.
But I have little concern for the city of Rochester itself, the quality of life here, the decline of available jobs and increasing unemployment, the growing rates of poverty and violence . For as much as it affects me at this moment, I will leave here a year or two before moving on to elsewhere. Upon arriving at elsewhere, whether it be Boston or Oakland, Miami or Missoula, Tel Aviv or London, the immediate space I occupy and the place in which that space is located will be of immediate concern to me in the same way that the nausea and bone-gnawing ache of food poisoning occupies the afflicting, commanding their attention to their immediate physiological state: everything "outside" will be quelled by the senses as they are drawn to that which directly concerns the body and, in an ascending hierarchy, those things which concern mind, emotional sentiment ("heart and soul," if you must), interpersonal relationships, issues of morality, etc.
IF I am suspected of lacking sentimentality, I urge you to forgive me, for I am as guilty as I could ever possibly be.
IF I am blessed with a consiousness for small details of meaning and signification, I am cursed by my inability to store for any extended period of time that beauty which I obtain through it, and doubly cursed by the inability to prevent myself from turning inwards and after a mere glance screaming loudly, uncontrollably, without any foreseeable end.