I love coming early to work! The job is not all that and a bag of chips, but getting here early in the morning before almost anyone else has its charms.
The building is quiet: no students studying or administrators administering; no banter, no chatter, no class study groups socializing more than studying; no budding romances budding, none of that.
There’s me. And the stacks.
I walk from the elevator to my little cubbyhole office, and I travel through one of my favorite sections. I pass Dickens and Kipling and Yeats and Forster and a lot of others on that row. They sit and call out to me to open their pages and read. They invite me to pause for a moment, open the covers, breathe in that aroma, and spend a little time with them.
For a moment, at least, I’m transported away from the pressures of this stupid world and into a world of literary genius, paper, ink, and wonder.
All I need is a card catalog. No, not the digital kind accessible on my computer. I mean one of those big wooden pieces of imposing furniture, comprised of a whole bunch of little drawers filled with 3 x 5 index cards. The Map of All Knowledge. The Fount of Wisdom. The key to learning anything about everything.
But alas, it’s just me. And the stacks. And time to wander.