The BNF: where sanity goes to die.

Loosely translated, this says, "Intellectual pain and suffering, THIS WAY."

There's not too much to tell about last week's trip to Paris, only because the majority of my time was spent in a building that sucked out parts of my soul that I'm just now starting to get back, a week later. I'm speaking, of course, about the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, or the BNF. It is only now that I can recall my time spent there without wanting to crawl under a blanket and die, or stab myself in the eye with a fork.

"How can it be that bad?" you ask. It's just a library, right? Wrong. It is so much more than a library. It is an institution designed specifically to inflict an immediate inferiority complex on anyone who dares step through its hallowed doors, while aesthetically offering up feelings of impending doom and crushing despair.

Alright, enough with the drama. It's not the worst place in the world (I imagine Guantanamo is marginally less enjoyable), it's just that I don't think it has ever in its existence given someone the warm fuzzies like so many other places in Paris are wont to do. I mean, look at this thing:

It's a beast. I imagine the architect who designed it was simultaneously tripping on acid and reading Orwell's 1984 when he came up with the concept. The library consists of a wooden rectangular platform with four glass skyscrapers, one on each corner. The middle is hollowed out and filled with a bizarre forest of evergreen trees, that, so help me God, are CHAINED INTO THE GROUND. In an effort to spruce it up, they also put various shrubbery around the platform, and then enclosed it in mesh wire cages to you know, give it a home-y feel.

The reading rooms are located ten stories underground, naturally, and the interior is primarily decorated in what I would term "industrial chic": lots of concrete and metal, a bit what I imagine a stalag looks like. To even get to the reading rooms, however, you have to endure a demoralizing interview with a librarian so that she can determine whether you are worthy enough to put your grimy American paws on a single volume of French sagesse. You must present various documents to prove your worth as a human being, such as a letter from your university, a doctor's note confirming your blood type, and four years' worth of tax returns.

God forbid you forget your passport and only have your driver's license and your student ID as well as four different credit cards on you as a form of identification. But I don't speak from experience.

Once the librarian decides you aren't a British robot come to steal secrets, she will take your grainy picture at an inopportune moment (when you are wiping away tears of frustrated exhaustion, most likely) and paste it on your card. You then thank her profusely, because she has done you a huge favor by allowing you to descend into the reading rooms, or what I like to call the Pit of Despair.

You then must go check your coat and put all of your belongings into a bizarre plastic see-through messenger bag, that will slap against your hip loudly if you move, and swing around to hit fellow pilgrims in the temple of knowledge when you walk by. This wins you many friends.

Once you ride fourteen escalators down to the P. of D., you must register for a place in a reading room, which are designated by letters of the alphabet and separated by subject matter. Again, God forbid, you want to research overlapping material, like I don't know, history and biographies. YOU MUST CHOOSE ONE, CRETIN. And choose carefully, because you can't access books from another room if you are not assigned a seat there.

To actually access books you must make online catalog requests, and wait an average of 3 hours before a notice will alert you that your books have been brought down out of the glass towers. You then go pick them up at the desk that serves the location of your assigned seat. (This system exists so the proles will not walk in and wreak havoc by picking up books and looking at them freely. This is a library, after all.)

Additionally, you must scan your card when you log onto a computer, walk through a set of doors, or use the toilets, so that Big Brother knows where you are at all times. I'm not even kidding. Every hour on the hour he comes on a huge screen and you have to cheer loudly.

Meanwhile, you struggle and stammer as you try to communicate your research needs to the librarians in French. They will make no effort to speak to you in English, so don't even try. This is no conversation with the waiter or the taxi driver. This is serious stuff, so bring a French dictionary so you can go back to your numbered seat and furtively look up the obscure words that you will no doubt need. (Do this hunched over under the table if you want to maintain your street cred, obviously.) Again, clearly, I don't speak from experience...

And then embrace that feeling of utter incredulity, when, on your very last day after countless hours of pathetic babbling in French, you hear the announcement over the loudspeaker of the quintessential French institution of academics, the storehouse of all French knowledge that would never dare to be anything but the Frenchiest, saying, "Ladies and gentlemen. The library is about to close. If you wish to reserve books for tomorrow, please let your librarian know."

In English.

Are you KIDDING ME?

And that was my time at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The end.