Trough of Knowledge

When you enter Randall library [UNCW], you are thousands of dust jackets from flooding the room with knowledge. And yet, look around and you will find glazed eyes glued to iridescent screens, shaded from the true feast that lay beneath muted covers just beyond machines. No longer are students lined aimlessly along bookcases, like antique bobble heads, nodding along slightly as eyes dart from shelf-to-shelf. Nor are we shoving our noses into the lignin permeated paper, breathing in the sweet smell of vanilla and almonds, as if our noses could capture the essence of the story without ever turning the page.

Instead, we all consume from the same source, and when the bigger pigs are hungry, the runts don’t eat. Without the protection of cloth binding, knowledge is consumed and regurgitated back into the trough, then fed to us as false-truths. Us runts are starved in a place abundant with feast, scared to venture into a new world only paper-thin, and be reduced to a label—as if you, too, were just a book on the shelf.