the draught of knowledge

The bells of the chapel tolled, but he had lost track of how many chimes, so he was still floating out of time, the blue evening light filtered through the library's elaborate window panes and the dusty, weathered stacks. He was stuck inside the sphere of lamplight, surrounded by the piles of books he's made the walls of his academic universe, pillars of text stretching back to the bones of the world. He spent hours hunched inside that yellow sphere with the dust motes and the rustle of paper, his pencil filling in the spaces between the books with his own thoughts. He could have used a laptop, but it seemed more real to him to go at it with his shirt sleeves rolled back, with the real live books sighing away in front of him. He wanted direct contact, his bare skin soaking in the words of ages.
There were people, he knew (though the concept was hazy and half-formed), people outside who did it all seemingly without effort. It just came to them on the morning air, and they breezed it all onto the page, floating not wading through coursework and term papers. He didn't know how you got to that level, surely not by hard work because what those people did was at another plane, more a direct and somewhat mystical channeling of knowledge. He despaired of ever achieving the same facility, feeling himself weighed down by the rigidity of his own habits.
What he didn't know, and what was evident to most professors was that he wanted it badly, there was a fire in him and he would search for books and drink in lectures to feed it. Here was one who needed knowledge, and so the breathing pedagogic fossils knew that he would always find it and they were not concerned. It would never occur to them to tell him this, but they remembered well their own journeys, hunched with their noses touching the pages to better direct the torrent of knowledge. They knew that you either wrote all the time because you had to and the words coming out were as natural byproducts of your existence as shit or carbon dioxide, or you were kidding yourself. The ones who made it--who had to make it--were the ones who immersed themselves gasping in the vortex, becoming percolators and wells and taps for what they could barely sense, the raw river of consciousness tugging somewhere at their souls.
Looking up now from his private fold of the universe, he stared blankly, trying to see beyond the bubble of his thoughts like a goldfish through the watery glass. He wondered about the world outside, but didn't know how to go there, or if they had water.
The library settled on its foundations and he settled too, back into the depths of his research, and the pages rose up to welcome him back.