From the Present:

Something that has followed me from my childhood and increased with years is the feeling of sheer awe that I feel when I walk into a library. This wonder was most pronounced last year when I visited the François Mitterrand site of La Blibliotéque nationale de France in Paris.

When the library opened in 1996, it was one of the largest in the world. The layout consists of four connected 24-story tours designed to resemble open books which surround a beautifully gardened courtyard. Walking the modern hallways inside, one feels like they are aboard a space station. Less then seeming futuristic, the realization dawns that the present has become the future.

Despite its epic proportions and it’s 10 million volumes and over 180,000 volumes accessible to library goers, the reading rooms are cozily designed.

Though you aren’t supposed to take pictures, I snapped a shot of this man who certainly found the interior to be comfy:

What I like most about The François Mitterand Library in Paris is that it’s realistic. It’s epic proportions express exactly what they are meant to portray – that the amassed amount of human knowledge is vast. It’s so very, very vast, larger than our three-pound brains can fully realize. Even with a hundred lifetimes, we could only scratch the surface.

There are a few ways to react to this realization. One is running anxiously through a library and hurling volumes of books to the ground while having a panic attack. Those of you who have actually felt like doing this understand what I mean. Sometimes it’s depressingly dislodging to realize how short our lives are given how much there is to learn, do and see.

A better reaction is to feel awe commensurate to what the store of human knowledge warrants. And that’s a lot of awe. It’s like a plane filled with awe crashing on The Island of Awe surrounded by an ocean of awe. A poem from my book iPoems for the Dolphins to Click Home About “The Honesty of ADHD” reflects that feeling, one of its stanzas reads “Learn anything / And / Ignore everything”.

Meaning that…

In life we have big choices to make. Every instant we choose to do something, we are choosing to not do an infinite amount of other things. Even the simple act of choosing a book at the library is filled with consequence. By reading one book we are at that moment passing up reading every other book. Books also influence who we are and in different ways depending on our connection to the book, they become a part of us.

We are also opting to read instead of doing everything else that we could be doing.

On the great stage in our minds, we only ever see one act of that great play we have all been unwittingly cast in. If we could see the whole script, I wonder what parts we would want taken out. We we put in more action scenes? More love scenes? More scenes of us quietly reading in a library?

I can think of a few scenes in my own life I would take out if I had been given a copy of the script in advance:

SCENE ONE

Luke wakes up at 10am and stays in his bed until 2pm. He doesn’t really do anything, just lies there. He starts to read, but gets bored with that and so just lies there. He knows he has a class to get to at 11a.m., and knows he should go, but he doesn’t. He just lies there.

SCENE TWO

Luke eats a whole can of cake frosting.

SCENE THREE

Luke feels nausea. 

SCENE FOUR

In order to be liked by his other classmates, Luke makes hurtful remarks about Brianne behind her back.

Fifteen years ago, I chose to read books on magic with my little brother, which I think was a pretty good choice for me.

From the Past: 

September 17th, 1996 – Age 11

Today was nice. I got some magic books from the library and me and Tyler (my little brother) put on a show. 

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