Everyone Here Before You
- Luke Zinger
- Oct 29
- 3 min read
Wisdom from the ghosts of Butler Stacks.
By Luke Zinger
NINTH FLOOR STACKS, BUTLER LIBRARY. It’s almost midnight on the night before a midterm worth 45% of your grade. You’ve consumed nothing but Blue Java hazelnut coffee and a stale slice of lemon loaf since 11 a.m. Out of the corner of your eye, you start to see strange words swimming around your field of vision, appearing on the walls, on the arms of the chairs, and on the table you’re working on. You snap back to reality. Written above the outlet in front of you, in a shaky hand, a message reads: “everything is gay.” To the immediate left of that sentence, you see: “real ones eat box on the first date,” and “two addys a day keeps the doctor away,” scrawled in green ink. Finally, you look right above your head and see: “ethical fuckboys exist.”
The crackling, dark clouds of emotional extremes that drive college students to etching in the bowels of Butler Library speak to each other in quippy, playful little ways. The message “Why do I have to be human?” is followed by: “Exactly, we should all be cows.” An ink sketch of a teddy bear and some pine trees captioned by “People judge what they hate in themselves” is written directly below “Reverse cowgirl on top!!!” Existential fear is met with tension-breaking humor, and world-wizened advice is answered with jarringly candid sexual proclivities.
The writing on the walls of the stacks exists outside of time, allowing present-day Columbia students to engage in conversation with ghosts. Hearing the words of undergraduates long departed is most possible in the stacks, where one is unable to tell whether a particular piece of graffiti was penned two weeks or two decades ago. Crucially, these messages are not the sanitized resumé fluff of Student Council elections won, award-winning dissertations penned, or non-profit initiatives started; they tell us the desperate, raw, stupid, obscene, sweet, honest thoughts of our predecessors as they were sleep-deprived and caffeinated to the point of giddiness. We hear their ghosts whispering to their friends in the chair beside them: “When I get upset I have a tendency to bite scaffolding, which is bad as I’ve already had three teeth capped this week,” and, “My heart hurts, I fell in love with someone I can’t be with.” These messages left behind by students from who-knows-when, are perhaps the truest forms of intergenerational advice left at Columbia.
If there is a way to communicate genuinely with our alumni, without the looming promise of a LinkedIn connection or summer internship, we should grab hold of it. So much of how Columbia University is defining itself in a time of immense pressure seems nearly impossible to make out, and finding footing in a moment so precarious can feel incredibly isolating. But despite all of the current challenges within our University, someone in May 2022 thought to ask: “Is everything going to be okay?” By turning to the paranormal, the benevolent ghosts of undergraduates who may now be business moguls, Pulitzer Prize winners, and world-renowned heart surgeons, preserved exactly as they were when they knew nothing and were no one at all, we are reminded us that there were people that felt this way once before. There once was a Columbia student who felt it necessary to write: “One thing you can always count on is time. This too shall pass.” Another student thought to write what everyone was thinking: “I see everyone else here, and start to worry that I will be the only one who will never be great.” The final response is simple: “Breathe.”
To spend a night in the stacks is to be on the verge of madness, to see ghosts dancing in the corners of your eyes as you scramble to meet an 11:59 p.m. deadline, and to feel the outburst of frustration as Courseworks logs you out at 12:01 a.m. But as you helplessly press “submit” at 12:03 a.m. looking up and seeing “Just know everyone here before you suffered too. You got this!” written in a messy green scrawl might remind you of what you are: a naïve, precocious college student surrounded—if not physically then metaphysically—by people going through the exact same thing.
