SANCTUARY

When I was still in school, I preferred to do my homework with caffeine and minor noises. The caffeine, obviously, stimulated the cerebral tissues. The noises are self-explanatory - the anonymous evidence of other humans in the vicinity is pacificatory, but one doesn't really desire their conversation or involvement.
What this meant was tea, in a restaurant, café, or similar environment.

[The tea was mentioned in a previous post that involved a MONKEY. The restaurant, café, or similar environment is described HERE, the praise-worthy habits of a proper school boy are mentioned HERE, and touched upon lightly elsewhere on this blog.]


Many of my classmates preferred to hit the books in the platform cafés at the station while waiting for the train back to Bladel, Budel, Tegelen, or Tilburg. Others headed straight for the old-folk haunted café-billard right outside the school, or retired to a convenient auberge in their own neighborhoods.
In the middle of the afternoon, a quiet young person applying him or herself to their studies is a low-maintenance customer who doesn't take up much time or space, especially given that there are at that time of day so few other people in the place.
There was the required amount of minor noise, and certainly there was caffeine.


Today's students are not so lucky.

One cannot get much done in a San Francisco coffee shop. Too much noise, too many people high as a kite, far too many loonies. And the prices make it too expensive as a regular indulgence - most students cannot afford six dollar espresso drinks every hour for the dubious luxury of sitting amidst tumult.

Anyone doing their homework in the cafés of North Beach will probably be lectured by a pompous bore besides.
Probably some bearded wallah who asserts himself an expert on the very subject of the textbook in front of the student, and who will creatively reinterpret mediaeval history or eighteenth century English literature to fit a Crypto-Marxian-Existentialist agenda. At great and blithering length.

If there were station platform-cafeterias in this city, they'd be occupied by the overflow from the bus terminus. Drug addicts, whacked out weirdoes, conspiracy theorists, and Berkeleyites.

The neighborhood auberge is likely a drinking hole with oversexed trolls at all hours of the day.

[Bear in mind that I am discussing students in San Francisco, not Berkeley. If they are in Berkeley, they are probably not studying but plotting violent insurrection or listening to eppes heavy lectures by Arab intellectuals. Berkeley is not really America, you see, but an outpost of the Heroic Revolutionary Masses™ seeking the overthrow of the First World.]


Years ago the public libraries were choice sanctuaries for students seeking a quiet place. Today, with the numbers of the publicly mad increasing, and the policy of driving whores and homeless people from the streets, libraries are perhaps less than ideal environments. At least in San Francisco.

So I have to ask: where do today's students hang out? Where do they pursue their studies, swot their books, or scratch their intellectual young rumps thoughtfully while pondering the mysteries of Hegelian Philosophy and Keynesian Economics?

Where do YOU read?

I see so few scholars in my usual haunts that I have to think someone ate them all.
This used to be a city that both drank and read more than any other United States metropole.
Now it seems like it merely drinks more.
Where have all the students gone?


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