So, reader. I said that I have no doubts or reservations of any kind about my new university. This is still, mostly, true. However.

The library.

Reader, I am so unbearably spoiled. I knew that I had been blessed by libraries, but I didn’t know how blessed, how spoiled. The libraries that taught me what libraries are include: the Petri Dish’s substantial collections beautifully housed, Georgetown University’s ugly, depressing but well-stocked system, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library’s Humanities branch. I spent more time than I needed to in one particularly Victorian reading room in Beloved Library during undergrad, or wandering the stacks, my fingers trailing over rows of spines, or curled up under Tolstoy, tucked away where no one could find me and my books and my papers. And that is where the self who decided to trip off across the ocean to nourish the Scholar Within was born.

Libraries, in short, are important to me, as they are to probably everyone who reads this, and probably in much the same ways. The space, as much as the content, of a library shapes my experience of work. I have been spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.

Yesterday, I had my first serious poke around Brit Uni’s library. What an incredibly, horribly depressing place. The light inside is the same colour as the light inside Penn Station. The walls are a greyish-brown concrete. The windows are small and ill-placed, the ceilings heavy and ponderous (also concrete). A sense of darkness huddles over every space. I can’t imagine doing work there — except, perhaps, for the chain-yourself-to-a-desk-because-this-has-to-get-done-NOW-no-excuses kind of work to which poor spaces are sometimes suited. Just as well, because it closes at nine. (What on earth do the undergrads do about that?)

And its collections are… well, sparse. It boasts a respectable number of volumes, but most of these are multiple copies of single books used in classes. The books are poorly looked-after, scribbled over and over and over, their spines cracking and bending. Many of them are paperback, and therefore disintegrating. Many Big Works of scholarship in the areas I’m familiar with (early modern and modernism) are not represented. Forget any of the Medium-to-Not-So-Big works. What is there tends to the radical, which pleases me — but seriously, kids. Are we really all traipsing off to the British Library every time we have a vague research need that can’t be satisfied by the internet?

“Yes, mouse,” will come the tired, impatient-growing reply, “we are. And you are effing spoiled rotten.”

I will note, however, that as far as I can tell the pre-modernists are conspiring exceedingly well to funnel as much cash as they can into special collections — as noted, this library holds a surprisingly spectacular array of early books, for which a brand-new, extremely shiny reading room has just been installed. For this, I am deeply grateful, and such a thing is not, ever, to be discounted.

What my experience of dismay comes down to, of course, is money, and the place of higher education within the socio-economic structure of this country (of most of Europe, for that matter). I never realized just how wealthy the Petri Dish is as an institution — a wealth that could only be accumulated in a culture that prizes higher education for its elitism, not, as in Europe, for its populist potential. The P.D. and Brit Uni are roughly equivalent in terms of “quality,” well-regardedness, general pedagogical philosophies, overriding political tone, and Archetypal Student. Except that (well, white, Northeastern, educated) Americans feel that an education that doesn’t cost a fortune isn’t worthwhile, while Britons are still scandalized by the fact that they have to pay anything at all for what was once free. And so the P.D. is shiny and bright, and its resource cup spilleth over, while Brit Uni is a little scruffy around the edges, and gives a sense of a bit of a scramble to maintain what it has.

I was aware of these differences, but they didn’t come home to me until I saw that library. It made me realize that I come not only from a wealthy family but from a whole culture of wealth — wealth of the big, material, institutional kind, and the expectations it fosters. I wonder what this has done to my brain. Am I intellectually “soft,” for having been raised on the educational feather-bed of a Northeastern SLAC? Has the fact that I have been accustomed to buying, not borrowing, my course books made me somehow weak? Why is it so embarrassing to discover that I am so deeply spoiled in ways to which I never devoted sufficient consideration?

(And, uh, that thing about tigers and stripes? Yeah, my next step today is to seek out a cheap copy of Renaissance bloody Self-Fashioning, because I refuse to use the one that has jargon spewed all over it in electric pink ink. We won’t even mention the state of the Shakespeare.)