36: Orange

It feels like a library when you first go in. I mean, it is a library. Down the stairs, for it is largely situated underground, there are, following the reception area, a couple of always empty reading rooms as books are not permitted to leave the building; one is on minus one, the other below on minus 2. The book stacks you enter through an arch on the west facing partition. When you’re through the arch, there is a wall to the left which, once you’ve begun making your way along the wall of windows that goes off at ninety degrees to that red brick monolith, even before venturing through the stacks, can seem like the last truly solid landmark. So, the rows of stacks, as you look from the archway, go off to the right, where the windows are, the building curving slightly so the far corners of the space are not visible from that vantage point. when you start making your way down the endless shelving you will eventually be left with a feeling that there is no far wall and that possibly it is a vast circular construction and maybe that solid wall you were staring at to your left in the archway is the closing wall of the stacks too, but you’ve never reached that point, so hmm. Turning into the actual stacks, after some time you realise they curve too though they almost weave and wend in such a way concern takes over, you forget the volume you’re after, or it really becomes of secondary importance to marking the route by pulling out books slightly, as having checked the libraries app you find there’s no wireless beyond the reading rooms. After your sandwiches and snack bars have been polished off and the last person you saw was 90 minutes ago and you now understand that look of intense anxiety that was in their eyes, the light appears to shift from the low wattage orange and yellow blur to something more like daylight again. Have I gone back on myself? Am I at the wall of windows again? No The shelves are now overflowing with books, some so loaded they have collapsed and the tomes are scattered about in piles of various sizes, others split, without covers or freed from their binding completely, a breeze rustling loose leaves into new combinations. Trying to backtrack, you find yourself constantly coming back to the same scene. What Sottish reshaping. What distance. Whenever they crease the footnotes or outline a word. With its barbed wire fence that, as you can see, with the appropriate amount of wonder and respect, we can raise it up through wonder, we can drop it through respect. Whether we have enough saliva, whether we have enough grist chewed up.