I love going to the library because it is a refuge from life’s cacophony. It is quiet and everybody has their head reverently bowed, reading, some moving their lips. The moving lips irritate me. It’s like reading out loud with the sound turned off. Sometimes I can hear them softly whispering, especially the children. They disturb the library’s sanctity as a citadel of silence, contemplation, and wonder. 

I nearly go into a rage. I take a book into the Men’s Room. I lock myself in one of the stalls. Saturated with anger I tear the pages from the book, crumple them up and flush them down the toilet. I put the mutilated book deep in the trash can, punch the wall until my knuckles bleed, and return to my seat. Today, I tore up Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen.” I feel like the author: “I’m like the king of a rainy country, rich but helpless, decrepit though still a young man.”