Working in a library will do that to you.

Every once in a while I catch a bout of knowledge acquisition anxiety. I still have a bookmark on which I wrote, years ago, a quotation from a story by J.R.R. Tolkien: "'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'"

Today in between my shifts at the library I went to check out a book I had put on hold and discovered two more sitting beside it that I forgot I had even requested. The knowledge-fever began to creep up my neck. In honors comp last week, we chose topics for our "course companion" research papers, which needed to involve other classes we're taking. Though my "relationship between music and literature during the Romantic period" drew an "Oh-ho-ho" followed by a "Well, you'll certainly find plenty of information" from my prof, my subsequent search queries were disappointing—whence came the book requests.

Though not specifically about the Romantic period (I just threw that in there because we were learning about a Romantic piece in Intro to Music, and because I thought, silly me, that I'd have to keep my topic as narrow as possible) the books, Music and Literature and The Arts and Their Interrelations, speak precisely to what taking these courses simultaneously has sparked in me. How do music and literature intersect? Do they at all? I know they do. Thumbing through the first title, I chanced on a discussion of story by Thomas Mann I read last year, "Tonio Kroger," which, the author posits, Mann wrote strikingly like the composition of a sonata.

I wanted to read it all, wanted to take it all in thoroughly, systematically, wanted to give the author my full attention, grapple with his premises and gain from his insight. But I had to interview a source for my story and I had to contact KPBS's program director and I had to go to the newspaper meeting and I had to shelf-read and I had to finish my Lit 203 homework. And I still have to type up notes for tomorrow's comp class. And so this is where the intellectual anxiety wells up. I gave up on learning everything there is to know somewhere between elementary school and the end of high school. But I still get the panicky feeling that I'll never have the time to delve into the truly or even just moderately interesting things.

It was funny to see my thoughts echoed, though in quite a different context, in the excerpt I had to read today. A Buddhist left-winger wrote of the Salvation Army, unable to agree with their theology but unreservedly lauding them for acting on their convictions and doing more to help the destitute than most social liberals. She quotes one Army worker as saying, "It's so difficult to find the time. . . . That's kind of a lame excuse, I guess, but I think we're in the last days, myself. There's so many things that need to be done, and so little time to do it in."