Sic transit gloria literae
Recently, I've realized that studying in my apartment is an exercise in frustration.  There's just too much in the way of video games, books I actually _want_ to read, manga, comfortable places to nap, and corners to stare blankly into.  And, trust me, my reptilian self would much rather make time with the sleep banker than be hypnotized by marginal cost curves.

So I've taken to lurking in Memorial Library, which, by my rough estimate based on their card catalog, contains two million books--and the card catalog only contains acquisitions made since about 1978.  This is not a small number of books.  And--get this--every single one of them is physically present.  Every card in that catalog and blurb of HTML on the website actually corresponds to a unique brick of cardboard and paper resting somewhere in the jungles of the North and South stacks.  The South stacks are brightly lit with clean, glassed-in study rooms and modernized movable stacks with pressure plates to make sure no one is crushed between Anglo-Saxon chronicles and feminist literature of Victorian England.

The North stacks, however, are dark, and the lights activate with a loud "snap" only when their motion sensors are triggered.  The shelves there are metal painted swampy green, the windows are small and double-paned.  They also contain study cages, just large enough to contain one full grown man, a couple bottles of Mountain Dew, a few books, and a mid-sized tortoise (for a foot-rest).  They shut with a satisfying clang and feature chairs that are sturdy enough not to shatter under one's weight (usually) but aren't nearly comfortable enough for a conversation with Somnus.

Study-time gold!

Nonetheless, my mind gets to wondering, as if often does late at night when the invisible hand of the free market is tightening around my throat.  I think about all those millions of books literally surrounding me, the entire shelf devoted merely to Jung (nay, books on Jung _in English_!  German must have two shelves).  Just thirty feet away books with Arabic letters in fading gold leaf on the spines.  Someone must have actually been able to read Arabic to catalogue those in the first place.  There are enormous bound volumes of government surveys from Communist Russia, Japanese magazines from the 70s, and French books written while Algeria and Vietnam still saluted the red, white, and blue (mostly white) flag.  In randomly poking through the shelves I've found books from as long ago as 1850.

I get to thinking about the sheer number of man, woman, and professor hours poured into those things.  And then I think about how often they get read.  Not very, I'm guessing.  The majority--particularly the novels--are probably just there to collect layers of dust which reseachers in the future will take core samples of to obtain information on library conditions in the late '00s.  And the library copies are the lucky ones--most of their fellows were pulped long ago.

Publishing a book is no gauruntee of eternal glory.  The vast majority of those authors have been forgotten to all but a handful of academics, along with the books they poured so much sweat into.

Of course, this might be just me attempting to console myself for the fact that I haven't landed a book deal with Tor yet, but I think there's much truth there.  The same truth which is captured in the Percy Shelly poem at right.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.^[1]

Glory in this world is fleeting, whether it be the pride and glow of publishing a book or building a colossus in the desert (dang, there goes my back-up plan!)  Both are worthy endeavors--I've always loved a good colossus--but, IMHO, those pursuing them should do it for the present, not glory they hope to obtain in the future.

And speaking of the present. . .I should really get back to reading Brothers Karamazov, which is 140 years old and still going strong.  So I guess that's the other side of this particular coin.