Today in the school newspaper, the veritable Quest, always seeking and never finding, I saw yet another article concerning the efforts of the library-workers of Reed College to unionize so as to prove their payment and working conditions. This afternoon I approached a girl working at the library desk and I questioned her as to whether or not there was a copy of the book entitled "Catullus and His World" on reserve, to which she replied, "Do you have the call number?" Now, I did not have the call number, and I was forced to exert myself and look it up, then give it to her, upon which she promptly retrieved the book for me, and we both went about our business. However, there are computers at the library desks. And the library workers have access to those computers. And she was not engaged in any other activity concerning her work -- well, there is work and then there is work. She was doing work, mayhaps, but it is not of the kind and type that one is being paid to do. It was homework. She was being paid to do one kind of work, and she was setting herself about an entirely different type of work. And when I asked for help, she proceeded to have me go about her work so that she wouldn't have to go about my work. In any event, this all has something to do with the fact that the Reed workers are poorly treated, seeing as they spend so much time working, and indeed deserve more pay. I feel this extension of pay and improvement of working conditions might profitably be extended to all those who spend any time in the library; if we, the humble students of the Reed community, are not going to receive pay for reading long books for long hours, while they, the workers of our humble school library, are to receive pay for the doing the same while making us go about their business of searching out a book's call number, then I think a serious offense is being committed against the united citizenry of Reed College in general. It is absolutely infuriating.

So that aside, I just spent about an hour and a half reading about Catullus. We approach books very often as we approach television -- we hope for something instantly entertaining that will release pleasure into our cerebral cortex in short intervals. But to sit down with discipline and commit oneself to a thorough reading of a book, this is another matter entirely. I think that it is so far from being a vice in fact a virtue to simply commit a block of time to reading a book, cover to cover. And not a simple, easy book like "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" but a rather more difficult book, like Gibbon's adventures in Rome. There is immense profit to be found in simply committing one's mind to a task and having at it for hours on end. The mental stimulation is only one of the benefits to be secured from such activity; straining against one's own impatient will, keeping one's eyes from glazing over at the repetitive list of place names that accumulates like a mountain from a molehill of abstruse references, and continually searching and grasping with one's mind for a point, a verb, a manner of location, anything -- these are all useful and commendable skills. Because the next time someone whom you are paying asks you to do the work you are paying them to do, you will have obtained at least a modicum of the self-discipline neccessary to keep from yelling at them and stamping your feet repeatedly like an unruly four year-old.

On a final note, it would be enjoyable to sit down and read the Aeneid in latin, entirely, with no notes, translation, or aids in the way of a guide, source-book, dictionary, etc. The mind is so used to encountering things it understands that it rarely sojourns into unfamiliar or unknown territory. To you all I bid grace.