WE WERE SO BEAUTIFUL!

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a book I loved very much in high school. It’s a book a lot of people loved, and then a lot of people hated, because that’s how these things usually work. Things are novel and then they are trite and then you will start to doubt whether anything you ever really loved was wonderful after all. The Perks of Being a Wallflower was a wonderful book because I loved it and not the other way around. It was an introduction to subculture for many of us living in white bread suburbia who hadn’t yet begun to conceive of things like gay football players or Smiths records or cross-dressing performance artists. I, like the eponymous wallflower Charlie, had never been to a real party or done drugs or been kissed. And I, like Charlie, latched onto things like sadness and crushes and books and English teachers. Of course I read it three times and dreamed of one day being rowdy and brazen and infinite. I was dying to be infinite, but nothing infinite ever seemed to happen to me.

You heard James?” said Lupin, in a strange voice.
“Yeah …” Face dry, Harry looked up. “Why—you didn’t know my dad, did you?”
“I—I did, as a matter of fact,” said Lupin. “We were friends at Hogwarts.