A Love Letter to the Pattee and Paterno Library

Dear Pattee and Paterno Library,

You have stood in the same place for 80 years, withstanding the test of time. Housing the future and the past, providing opportunity for the inspired and the burnt-out. How else would we have survived this long if it wasn’t for you?

In the latest hours of the night, those where the sun begins to peak behind the neverending rolling hills, is the only moment when you are truly ever alone. Is the quiet hum of the heat flowing through the skeletal walls of each floor comforting? Do you prefer the sounds of footsteps, typing or the music leaking from the headphones of a passerby?

Yet you never really are alone as you hold the writing of the most celebrated individuals, house historic engravings on the desks in the Stacks, hide a love letter left between the pages of “Pride and Prejudice” signed 1974. 

Do you notice the way the time passes? Familiar faces who get the same order at Starbucks every Tuesday and who spend those same two hours in the Stacks may seem to stop coming abruptly. Maybe their schedule has changed, or maybe they have graduated. Do you ever grow the same attachment to them, as they do to you?

Do you know every space you hold? From the study rooms that bring conversation and focus, to the computer lab where the future unfolds on a screen, to the Harry Potter Room which has become a quiet place for the occasional siesta and of course the six stories of the Stacks where a catacomb like web holds generations of history. A student has found inspiration in each one of these places, has written down their future and wished for success.

When a new generation steps foot inside their future home, do you think they experience the same gratitude you do? Your survival is counting on the future, the survival of the future is counting on you. Maybe this gratitude between person and place is not something that can be seen, but something that can be felt. Yet, there is no way to know if this gratitude lives on through the life after Penn State, when the student sets out to face the real world. Do you think they sit in their office, lab or classroom wishing they could see you once again?

How often do you reminisce on the past, a life lived before? What do you feel when you see a familiar face, yet one aged with time and life, brings in a smaller version of themself? This version looks closer to the one you knew almost 30 years ago. How do you feel when they bring their child to the spot they loved for four years, sitting there for hours at a time, marking it theirs with an abbreviation scored into the wooden chair on that final year in ‘96. Do you feel this same joy? Now, their child sits in that chair, spends hours planning on a future in which they hope to live, one day returning to the same spot that has withstood for generations.

We hope to remind you of the role you play on the lives of every single student who walks through your doors. To remind you of the way you provide a space for them to thrive and succeed. To remind you of the impact you make that will last a lifetime. To remind you that this story is one that will be told for generations, one student at a time.

We love you Pattee and Paterno Library, thank you for pushing us towards success.

Love,

VALLEY

xoxo

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