What Are You Afraid Of?

What started off as an innocent trip to the library to try and simultaneously keep up with French class, study for the GRE Subject Test in Literature, and read Derrida's Psyche: Inventions de l'autre became a terrifying view into the abyss. The pictures I took reflect me. As I stood in the section specifically looking for B2430 .D483 P781 1998, I had this haunting feelings as I looked around. There were so so many books on or by Derrida that I could never hope to read them all. Good God! Deleuze was above him. Horrified, transfixed I moved to my right and who was there to taunt me but Foucault! Mon Dieu! Not to mention Lacan staring there pointing out my holes, my inadequacies. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre scoffed at me. All I knew was their names! Their names! Like a parrot, I felt hopelessly inadequate only able to recognize and repeat their names yet here was all this information that I could take, but I couldn't. I can't just call the section my own and forbid anyone from taking those rows of shelves. It was like a new Moment, quite like the one I had already identified as my moment from High School with my first C in Calculus. It was a feeling of shame and embarrassment and hopelessness, yet this seemed much worse. Certainly I could give up Math, and move onto something I enjoyed. But here is a part of English, something I should know. I tore myself away with only Derrida, Barthes, my Norton Anthology, and Robert Wick's Modern French Philosophy, which already completely filled out my backpack and took to the elevator. So wrapped up in the French, when I got on the elevator, I asked to go to floor one, the floor above the one I was on, assuming that there was a ground level as there is in France. The girl just stared at me and said, you were just on level 1. I said excuse me I'm sorry level 2. Why did there have to be so many people in that damn elevator? As we got to floor 2 and they were trying to get up to floor 6 I murmured my apologies with my backpack and rushed to the self-checkout, terrified to have to talk to any librarians: I felt like I was dropping my IQ every second, I didn't want witnesses. As I left the library, I calmed down, felt more accomplished and got over it. But I expect this Moment to be one of my recurring living nightmares, the same overwhelming feeling as the sublime or claustrophobia or becoming deaf.