interrogo

If you're aware of graffiti and the things that people find important to write on walls and other surfaces, you're probably familiar with the phrase "question everything".

Often this seems to be a defensive approach to a corrupt world.  Fed up, angsty people looking for social change and a better world spread the word via wall-writing.

Usually "question everything" seems to carry a connotation of "accept nothing" and "you're surrounded by lies and conspiracies and you're being duped" and other similar warnings.

Sometimes there is validity in this, but it certainly is not the only way to question everything.  Questioning is a very valuable skill to develop.  After all, if there's one thing I learned from Sesame Street, it's that asking questions is a way to find things out.  And don't we want to spend our lives finding things out?

I think it's important to question everything.  At the very least, to not be afraid to ask questions.  If you just accept everything, even the acceptable, you'll never learn things.

I mean, think about little kids.  They have EVERYTHING to learn because they haven't learned anything yet (particularly not how to give up) so they ask all the questions that people usually just accept.  Like why the sky is blue and why birds can fly and why cats can't talk.

Calvin's dad has plenty of fatherly wisdom to impart to us.  There's a collection of it here.

Ask questions that you normally wouldn't ask.  Ask yourself why you get up when you do.  Ask why an average diet is considered to be 2,000 calories.  Ask if there's a more efficient way to tie your shoes.  Ask why Gatsby bothered to get real books and never cut the pages.

And then answer as many questions as you possibly can.  Some questions have good answers that are easy.  Some questions have good answers that are harder, but might give you some insight you normally wouldn't have arrived upon.  Some questions don't have good answers...yet.  And some questions may never have good answers.  They might only lead to more and more questions without answers.  But it's still important to ask them.

Asking good questions makes you notice things you normally wouldn't notice.  It makes you accept things as an educated sovereign mind, rather than just ignorantly forgetting about the wonderful things around you.  You have to know a thing or two in order to ask a question, so it challenges and enhances this education called life in multiple ways.  It's delightful, really.

And don't turn into a four year old and only ever ask, "Why?"  Remember sometimes to ask, "Why not?"

circumstant

So my friend walked into my room earlier today.  I was sitting at my desk reading this book (and writing in it of course...one of the best ways to enjoy books.) Upon seeing this scene, he commented that my room looks like a library.  There are always several stacks of books on my desk (textbooks and otherwise) as well as papers and notebooks open waiting for a pen to complete them...so it's not too hard to see where the notion that I live in a library comes from.

Although it is true that I live in a library...I frequent this building on campus to study and borrow books and use the computers...If I could sleep in the library, I probably would just move in altogether.

Alas, the library I live in does not look like this.

What's nice about my library room, though, is that it is my own creation.  I built my own environment and accidentally made a library.  Awwwyeah.

See, whether we're building an accidental library or some other habitat to define us, We ultimately create our immediate surroundings.  Yes, there are always aspects of life that can't be helped and that are out of our control, but we still decide which books go where in our libraries.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what to do with a library...what direction should a library of all things be headed?  Personally I would like my library to be such that an owl-eyed man could walk into my life, pick the books off my shelves, and be thrilled to see that they are in fact real books.  Some of the pages may not yet be cut, but all the things in and around my life will never be counterfeited.

Basically now that I've unintentionally or perhaps subconsciously built a library around my life, I intend to continue to build it until it becomes something majestic.

librorum

I went to the bookstore the other day while my sisters were clothes shopping.  I used to be a bit of a book addict when I was younger, in fact I would often be grounded from reading because I would opt to read a book rather than do my chores or homework or sleep...
But it had been a long time since I had stepped foot in a bookstore (not including the university bookstore, because that doesn't count since every book in there is heinously overpriced and written by some presumptuous professor...) and at first, I was a little unsure of what to do there.  

Obviously, my tastes in literature have changed since I was a young girl scurrying excitedly around the fiction shelves, so I took my time to peruse the shelves, pausing in the philosophy and religion section, then moving toward the sport section to see what kinds of soccer books they had, then finding myself in the leather-bound journal section (which is a section that involves looking at ALL the books, and feeling them and smelling them and loving them...Every book should be leather-bound.) But I did reconnect with my dormant bibliophile.

Unfortunately, I did not end up taking any books home with me, as I'm at university right now, and don't really have much money or space for all the books I want to have.

Plus there's a lending library that I frequent.

But one day, I do plan to obtain a large and beautiful library of my own, with a cozy chair by the fire.  And a dumbwaiter, because it's quaint, and because I'll probably spend hours in that library, and someone will need to send me sustenance without disturbing me.

How to obtain a library

That might just be the way to go, really.  Because his books are old, and old books, in addition to being relatively hard to find, are THE BEST.

This brings me to the slight dilemma called: what kinds of books will I put in my beastly library?

Well, there are three kinds of books:

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and a few to be chewed and digested."
    -Francis Bacon

So we have those books that look interesting, and you pick them up and get a few chapters in, and find that they're really not that interesting or worthwhile, and you don't even finish them.  They don't have to taste bad, they're just not something you want to finish, for whatever reason.  Maybe you're even too full already.
Then the books that you read entirely, and you get something out of them, but then you're done with that book (and possibly that author) and you won't necessarily choose to read it again until you're obligated to do so.  They're like vegetables.  They're probably good for you, but you have to grow up with people making you eat them before you really care for them.
Finally, we have the books that you can never really get tired of. The authors you always turn to. They take you forever to read because you enjoy them so much, and continually pause to go "aaaaahhhhh" and revel in the sentence you just read.  They're books that are made out of pure bacon.

And really, I would want to select bacon-quality books for my library.  And get multiple copies, too, so I can annotate them, and then annotate them again, and then other people can annotate them...

The only problem here was already identified by our friend Francis Bacon.  Only a few books are bacon books.
And yes, I can list plenty of books right now that I would consider to be literary bacon, but  when you think of the outrageous number of books there are in the world (even if you're only counting those printed in languages you can read)...there is an unfortunate bacon shortage.

Which is why being well-read and having an extensive library means having vegetable books too.
Vegetables are not inherently unenjoyable, they're just not bacon.  And as delicious as it might be, having an entire library filled with copies of The Great Gatsby and the works of Oscar Wilde wouldn't necessarily be the best of libraries.

But there will definitely be two copies of Gatsby.

excellentia

Once upon a time, I wrote an essay for an English class.  I was a sophomore in high school, but I had taken sophomore English the year previous with a bunch of other freshmen, and as such I was in put in a class full of juniors when I changed schools.  This wasn't a huge deal (although in high school, it can't just be ignored, so all the juniors were well aware of the five or so sophomores in that class) but it was interesting.

This is how my essay writing attack plan went during that year of high school:

1) Read (most of) the book
2) Participate in class discussion of the book
3) Think about the book and my essay
4) The day the rough draft is due, show up about ten minutes early to class and write down some stuff about the book and what it means.  Usually this overlapped into the starter that we wrote every day, so I'd write the rough draft instead and write the starter later, since the rough draft was due more immediately.
5) Trade rough drafts with another student and edit theirs while they edit mine
6) Go home and forget about the book
7) The day the essay is due, wake up early in the morning
8) Completely disregard anything written in the rough draft and any of the peer feedback written on it.
9) Write the entire essay in one actual draft, one sitting, just over one hour.
10) Success!

I followed this plan of attack quite closely.  I went to school that day, armed with my last-minute essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter entitled "Hester Prynne as a Protein Shake".  I was quite fond of it.

When the essays were handed back, I received mine and began flipping through it, reading the comments written in.  I got to the end and flipped it over to see my score.  Next to my "A" was a note that read something along the lines of, "This is quite possibly one of the best essays written by a high schooler that I have ever read".  This was high praise indeed, and I was pleased.  Some of the juniors were slightly less pleased, however, when they heard that a sophomore had written the best essay in the class.

Well, the semester continued and it came time to write another essay, this time on The Great Gatsby, one of my favorite literature classics.  But when it came time to write the essay, I was unusually nervous.  It's very unlikely that I would write another essay that was just as good if not better than one entitled "Hester Prynne as a Protein Shake".  You can't compare everyone to protein shakes, after all.  I was afraid that my Gatsby essay would be compared to the Hester essay and would be a disappointment.  My essays were always good, but it's intimidating when you have a standard to live up to...

I followed my usual attack plan and wrote the essay and turned it in.  I received high marks and everything was fine.

I still get intimidated by my writing, though.  Sometimes, I write something fantastic, and people love it, and happiness reigns.  And every time I write something after that, I'm afraid that people won't like it as much as the fantastic one.  It's like I'm Daisy Buchanan, and whoever reads my writing is Jay Gatsby, and yes, sometimes Daisy is fantastic and beautiful and just like Gatsby remembers/imagines her, but more often, Daisy can't possibly live up to that unrealistic expectation that Gatsby has envisioned and hoped for, and so she becomes disenchanting despite the fact that she's a remarkable person.

The only solution to this is for Gatsby to die.
Which means you, dear readers.

...I would actually prefer that you not die, though.  I have come to enjoy having people read the things that I put on the internet, and if you die, that might become more difficult for you to do.

Really, the best solution I can think of is for me to continue writing, and you to continue reading, and sometimes things will be fantastic (which I attribute chiefly to the topic of the writing...some things are easier to be fantastic with) and happiness will reign,  and the rest of the time, I'll be practicing writing (and you can be practicing reading!) and ideally getting better, to the point where fantastic stuff is produced more regularly. :)