Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Hush, my children and gather round for a university student's Halloween story...

I'm looking up jounal articles for a psychology research proposal. It is almost as bad as doing an annotated bibliography. But believe me, an annotated bibliography can be a lot worse.

How, you ask?

When you're doing an annotated biblography for a botany paper. More specifically, an annotated bibliography for a paper on a botanist from the 1860s.

That is when you must descend into the bowels of the U of T Gerstein library! Ask the traumatized few who have been to the Z stacks. It is as if a hundred years of students' despair has turned into ash and settled on the dimly lit shelves. Run your hands along the shelves and feel the residue of sighs, heavy on your fingertips.

The quiet is tremendous. You hear your heart beat.

Then, in the distance, a moan. Is it a ghost? Is it one of the ghosts of U of T?

You creep along the narrow spaces between the shelves, careful not to disturb the fragile pages, a hundred years old. Another mournful wail. Who is it?

It's a student dozing on and off on a stack of musty books. He has been in the library for the past 30 hours, willing himself to look through the yellowed pages. His brief rest is troubled. It is the weight of thousands of books bearing down on him!

The silence!

Oh, the horror!

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