[ WP ] You 're reading a random book in a library , you realize there 's a chapter about you .


 
 They built this stupid library in the sixties, along with the rest of this awful campus. It looks like the Soviet Union won a bomb shelter design contest. Concrete juts out of more concrete with the textures of the frames imprinted into it. Le Courbusier would have loved this place. A machine for living? No. A machine for learning. 
 
 It's roughly pyramidal, inverted on its point, staggered in steps with slanted windows. Some light filters down into the atrium, mostly at the winter solstice. The administration recently installed some curving benches and television screens that are supposed to improve collaboration. When they let students in for the opening tours, my daughter told the architect it was stupid. He did n't take any more questions from her. 
 
 Once you get off the bus in the quad, you have to meander through the fluorescent hallways, dodging assholes from asshole clubs with their asshole pamphlets before you finally find the brown steel doors to the library. Only an undergraduate poli-sci major could really believe that setting up a table near the cafeteria is going to help people in Palestine. Once, Jen says, there was an anti-abortion table set up. That made some waves. The architecture may be brutalist but apparently the student body is healthily progressive. If ever the youths are n't progressive, we're doomed. Old people are just bitter that they spent their lives in debt to the future, discovering when they went to cash in their world that it has been given free-of-charge to their grandchildren. 
 
 The atrium has stairs ( concrete ) going up to the different floors, each of which is a maze of pastel-painted metal shelves and cheap industrial lighting. The air is dense with books, like someone, somewhere, is pumping them into a shredder. There is never a place to sit at the desks in any library so I have found a distant, narrow alley on the sixth floor, sitting on my coat between a row of books about alternative rules for lacrosse and the collected volumes of a hundred-year agricultural census of eastern Saskatchewan. A thin carpet is glued across most of the floor, woven from random, multi-coloured threads. There is a factory somewhere that makes this carpet and the owner is one of the richest people on Earth. Or must be—the same carpet was in every kindergarten classroom I have ever seen. 
 
 I chose this place because none of the other books would distract me, though I know that if I were to open any of them I would be proven wrong. This is the danger of libraries, even ugly ones. I once went to a library at my university in search of a book on postmodern automotive design and lost four hours to a book about an Amish community in Pennsylvania. Generations of family and community history were being threatened by the debate over whether to allow rubber tires on tractors. There are mornings when I wish for such problems. But we suffer as much as we believe we suffer. The books are mirrors. What is n't? 
 
 The book I am reading is from two floors down, in an equally forgotten section, not far from an embarrassed and quiet section of lesbian erotica. I do n't know why it is there, perhaps for gender studies students. The smut would certainly have been a more interesting read—this writer suffers from a terrible case of academia—but I could n't stay away after Jen found it. It is a book ( in small part ) about me. 
 
 The details of my birth do n't warrant mention and I spring, almost fully-formed, onto the scene just after my undergraduate. “ Setting out to follow the work of Beaudrillard and Virillio through an exploration of the automobile as social touchstone, Rathburn's early research and publications failed to attract the attentions of readers.34 ” I am another faceless student to only briefly exist. The passage exists only to introduce my fourth book, an exploration of a postmodern reading of Tesla Motors' chassis design. I saw a line into the future, the auto as canvas like never before. The axis around which our entire constructed civilization has turned since the early twentieth. It is a transition into a chapter on Virillio. The slight against my potential is contextualized, made relevant, supported with evidence. Jennifer. Her father. After that book, I slip back out of existence. The footnote details Baudrillard and Virillio's works. 
 
 The chapter itself is good, though poorly written. Ideas appear that I never had myself, and I note them as if later I will resume a project I've been working on. Turn the mirror away and let it reflect something else. How can I wish I did n't love her? So I might blame her? Jennifer. What would I have been without you? Or was I really ever the protagonist? 
 
 A young man, thin and with greasy hair, has stepped into the aisle at the far end, and is sliding his right index finger across the spines of all the books, looking for one in particular, prodding at his contact lens with the other hand. He does n't notice me, or he does n't care. 
 

