crazy at the library
The library is a quiet place. It is also a mental echo chamber. The smallest repetitive sound, nervous tick, coughing, whispering, clicking of pens, amplifies exponentially over time. It all oozes in from perception’s periphery and demands attention. We become annoyed, then hostile (but unwilling to get up and yell), and feel a great discord in our environment, as though a revolution were taking place, our minds now revolting at the obliviousness, sociopathy, ungraciousness (we are trying to be quiet) and (at worse) will even venture to identify with the source of the irritation, to understand the person we have decided is crazy.
There is a man behind me now who is opening and closing cd cases. That is all he is doing, and he has been doing it for the past hour. He is listening to something too — maybe, he is wearing headphones, barely attached to his bobbing head — and emitting a sort of stoner’s laugh (an expression of a mind turned into itself) every few minutes. And now he is grunting as well: perhaps the cd cases are not cooperating as he hoped. The cases he opens and closes are creaking like a door. I am hearing what sounds like a door open and close over and over repeatedly, although no one walks by, no one talks, there is no bustle or other noise to accompany it. It is not regular or rhythmic; it is not caused by some natural force like the wind which I could forgive. It is a grown man sitting behind me. Why is he so obsessed? Does he realize the sound he’s making, with his headphones on? Does he know his headphones are falling off? Can anyone say what this man does or doesn’t know? Is knowing the same for him as it is for me?
And soon I am asking myself: Do I really know any of the things I know?
The other day, a woman was here, at a computer, tapping furiously one key on they keyboard. tap tap tap tap. Very loud. Every thirty taps or so she would laugh gleefully. She was playing some stupid pinball game. tap tap tap. I begin to feel for the keyboard itself, I feel the patrons around her turn their minds inside out. I feel the librarians tired and hardened, unable to bring themselves to confront this woman. tap tap tap. Gleeful, blissful, entirely library-inappropriate laughter. O that poor keyboard. The waste! The waste of time and everyone’s mental effort on this stupid sound.
We all boil, silently. I could touch the mental pressure in the room. (It is something like a pressure cooker.) I know that we are here, and she is there.
