Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and renowned expert on eternal suffering, once observed: “Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness in which there is no love.” He forgot about the Morse Media Room and the jejune dioramas discussing the relationship between music and math. I mean to say without equivocation that Lamont Library is the worst place I have ever been, or could ever conceive of visiting.

Most Harvard students are already aware of the library’s more salient shortcomings: the place is heated like a poinsettia nursery and the reading rooms prematurely compel students into the very cubicles that will erode their souls after their emigration to the office. More subtle drawbacks include an Escherian array of staircases, and the Language Resource Center, the only place on this continent to still rely heavily on cassette tapes.

Yet the academic abattoir at Quincy and Mass Ave. nonetheless teems with students, pale and wretched beneath the library’s oppressive fluorescence. The overcrowding does wonders for the place’s Dantean ambiance, but it forces us to consider why people are so compelled to return to Lament (I hope this catches on).

The Yard’s landscape even presents those bound to Lamont with a gilded alternative: Widener, the venerable elder statesman of Harvard’s many libraries and an ideal location for scholarship of all sorts. Of course, its size inhibits it from keeping its neighbor’s bordello hours, but that’s part of the charm. Would you rather read in an elegant memorial to the Titanic or in a concrete Crock-Pot named for a man who called Benito Mussolini “a very upstanding chap?”

The library’s atmosphere makes a Sisyphus of every present student. They strive for new knowledge even as the steady crush of clammy air and ambition-on-Adderall inexorably overwhelms them. Even as one seeks to comprehend Kierkegaard upon entering Lamont, he will leave knowing only that philosopher’s existential despair.

And on his way out, that student sometimes encounters a guard who will rustle through his affairs with silent, fascist intensity, as if the library’s DVD collection housed something worth stealing. This, however, does come down to luck, and a portion of Lamont’s staff is quite friendly considering the amount of time they spend in the horrible building.

There exists just one viable refuge from the whole macabre orgy: the Farnsworth Room. Soft lighting and a standing ban on laptops make this genteel area a solemn sanctuary from the pandemonium outside. Rediscover your pen and move upstairs, and watch as all your despondency dissipates.

To bookend this plaint with allusions, we turn to George Orwell, who offered in Nineteen Eighty-Four a picture of the future as “a boot stomping on the human face—forever.” Sadly, that future is now, and it’s across from the Barker Center.



James M. Larkin ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Matthews Hall.