SNOW!

it will all be melted in five minutes; look, it's almost all gone already.

The Jimmy Eat World version of 'Firestarter' is possibly the greatest cover version in the world, ever. Genius.
One of these days, I will learn not to spell that word 'genuis'; which sounds dangerously like the Latin for 'of a knee', especially given my complete inability to learn declension tables properly. Third declension onwards, I'm amnesiac. Yet another thing to cling to and try to reshape in the air as it disappears.

My library is among the greatest libraries in the world. It's up there with Bodley, and Alexandria, and Washington DC, was it? The one in Read or Die. In fact, pity poor Yomiko, stuck with the BL (which, with its unironic forecourt and lovely workable-in cafe, could to all extents and purposes not be a library: I've certainly never seen any books in it beyond those of the visitors), when she would have been so much happier with this.

The stacks go up indefinitely, don't even consider the floors in their inexorable rise but stand like pillars holding the building up with the weight of books. In Sciences and Miscellaneous (in whose Witchcraft section - which comes between Wine and Women - one finds "witchcraft and demonology" by M. Summers, author of "the vampire in europe"), the floor is in one place fibreglass, and each touch of the bookshelves may result in a static shock; further on, it is wrought-iron through which can be seen the people on the storey below. In the Reading Room, whose walls are covered with dictionaries of everything from Law to Latin, old men doze in leather seats under the view of sun and London square, while academic girls in a-line tweed skirts sit at age-smooth wooden desks and make notes from tracts propped up on plush bookrests.

Up in religion, distracted from Enoch by the dark stacks at the back toward Biography, the pull-switches to bring light to Pagan Worship or Zoroastrianism; easy to hand, suddenly, a treatise on angels, published in Utrecht in 1739, first thick pages of ready latin intersposed with hebrew and arabic - Angelis nomina non sunt propria, eaque Michaëlis & Gabriëlis sunt symbolica* - and just calling out for translation. A desk in the stacks, warm under a window and the dust dancing on still air, the dark crumbling sap rubbing off on the palm of one hand, and just reading, in a house of nothing but books.

The one problem with this layout is that the slightest hint of an image not behind an lj-tag and, whee, broken. That's not even taking into consideration the fact that it routinely fuxx0rz up supacat's entries, with no apparent reason. Which is to say: ( utena test behind the tag. )

*"the names of angels are not their own, and those of Michael and Gabriel are symbolic"