Off the shelf

Reuniting with a friend and colleague I haven't seen in almost two years, we compared notes on what has and has not returned to pre-pandemic patterns at school. He told me his students described our strangely depopulated campus as a "sad hospital." Too true. Everyone's too accustomed to doing their business on a computer in some private space, so our public space remains unused. My friend and I ruminated on what our students have forgotten, or never learned, about being on campus... It's the serendipity that happens in what we used to call unstructured time. The friend you met because they knew someone you knew, the person sitting near you in the garden reading one of your favorite books, the classmate reading a crazy book you've never heard of.

I found an analogy from my own experience suffering from two years without libraries. What's lost when you can't browse in libraries isn't finding the books you know about on the shelf - though I'll be happy to be able to do that again; it's faster than waiting for them to be delivered to your school, not to mention, before that was possible, the expense of buying your own copies to be delivered to your house. What's gone is the surprise discovery of books you didn't know about, on subjects you didn't know to be interested in - or maybe didn't even know existed. Not just the books next to the one you came looking for, but others which wink at you as you make your way through the stacks, or make eyes at you from library carts of books for reshelving or next to the photocopiers. It's how we get a handle on the unknown unknowns!