A ballpoint pen etched into the wood, months or decades ago,
I hate it here
On the other side of the desk, a conversation written over who knows how long ago between who knows who.
I got this
Beneath it, an arrow and a response in a different color,
No you don’t
And then a third color, scratching it out,
YES YOU DO
In sharpie or pencil or highlighter, whatever they already had in their hand, students over the years have left their mark on these study carrels. Scratched into hard, dull wood by stressed students with hunched shoulders hiding in mazes of cubicles, this graffiti may be bored or anxious, but it is always raw and private.
It is also universal. When I walked into a new library on my first day of grad school, I ducked into the first carrel that seemed out of everyone’s way, plopped my bag down, sat with a sigh, and then saw the writing. Something so familiar, human, and vulnerable after a month of new things. After a day of trying to look perfect and professional.
I became very well acquainted with library carrel graffiti working at Calvin’s library. I straightened and cleaned and studied at similar desks. On them I read the whole range of human optimism and despair. I traced decades of pop culture references and long-lost inside jokes. Seeing that my modest, Midwestern liberal arts college and Georgetown were home to the same mild vandalism warmed my heart.
And not just the same graffiti, the same furniture. The same stalwart, heavy cubicles. The same slouching, wood-armed armchairs. Furniture built far removed enough from the Cold War that it needn’t stand up to nuclear attack but not so far removed that its creators had shed the instinct that furniture ought to be, above all else, sturdy. On a new campus, in a new city, I settled into the well-worn humility of the university library.
My dad also worked at Calvin’s library when he was a student. Since the furniture hadn’t changed since his time there, I felt like I was part of a tradition—part of something that had been around for a while, absorbing more and more meaning with time.
Not all universities keep their worn library furniture. Wood gets replaced with plastic, labyrinths of cell-like carrels with “collaboration areas.” In December I went home and spent time in another library to finish a paper. As I explored the mostly empty floors, trying desperately to look like I belonged, I toured an incredible menagerie of library furniture.
Virginia Tech’s library features the latest in collegiate furnishings: plexiglass pods that give the illusion of privacy for group projects, giant egg chairs made of fabrics that give the illusion of comfort, high tables with TV monitors on wheels, whiteboards on wheels, chairs and dividers on wheels. Man’s first technology is still the latest technology—more wheels, please and thank you.
Parts of the library remain stable. Like tracing strata in rock, beneath the plastic and plexiglass you can pick out the carpet and cinder block, and beneath that, ceramic and wood. You can especially see the old layers in the stairwells, tiled completely in a pastel green color like some Art Deco train station.
Although I felt like an intruder when I was there in December, my dad brought me there often when I was growing up. Usually to get DVDs for family movie night (it had a wider and less scratched selection than the public library) but sometimes to get books. When I started doing research in school, he showed me how the call numbers worked. We’d look up the titles together and I’d write the number on a sticky note with a pencil I brought from home. I’d scurry after him as he set off on the hunt with long steps, mumbling loudly enough for me to follow along.
…goes to six oh five, next row should be…and if it’s not there…What was it again?
I’d hold up my sticky note and we’d set off again.
It felt like I was getting initiated into a secret world—the shelves were more in shadow, the books more serious than at the town library, not meant for people my age, not yet.
I came back in December as an infiltrator once more—still not a student there, defiantly writing a paper about poetry in the coworking space of an engineering school. If they checked IDs, I’d never get in. But they don’t, and I wrote my paper, feeling like maybe I understood this place better than its students, because I’ve seen its tile and its wood and I’ve found its books.
To get into Georgetown’s library you do have to show your ID. Now that I’m a student again and I have said ID, I feel allowed to walk through those doors and wander the floors and claim a desk.
A sleepy-eyed woman waves me through a couple times a week.
“You’re okay.”
She probably recognizes me by now. But I still hold up my ID, walking with confidence yet requesting permission.
I can be here I can be here I can be here I am from here
Sitting at this carrel, holding my pen, I add my line.
Christina Ribbens (’19) graduated with a major in history and minors in studio art and data science. After working in campus ministry for a few years, she’s getting her master’s in public humanities at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She has a benevolent dependency on tea, is always down for a game of pick-up basketball, and would love to have you over for pancakes sometime.
