Narcotize

narcotize
verb, transitive. To stupefy with or as if with a drug. To make something have a soporific or narcotic effect.

As Diane entered the central reading room with her classmates, her gaze ascended to the skylights in the ceiling of the vast space and for a moment, she struggled to breathe. Never, ever, not once in her brief life had she seen a place more marvelous, more filled with wonders.

She wrenched her attention to what her teacher was telling the class.

"... more than half a million books, on every subject you can think of, class ...."

Diane believed it. She could see some of them, in stacks that occupied at least half the floor of this huge room. She knew there were more somewhere else.

She knew her mouth was gaping in amazement. She didn't care. She trailed along with the other fourth-graders as Miss Zimmer led them to the globe near the information desk. It was three feet in diameter.

"Find Cincinnati for us on this globe, Gary," Miss Zimmer singled out one member of the class.

Gary stepped to the globe and turned it until the United States was uppermost. There, on the upper right quadrant of the land mass, was a shiny spot where Cincinnati, Ohio was located. So many people had pressed a finger to the globe's surface there to indicate their location on it that the paper had been worn off.

The tour continued, but the evidence of the multitudes who had entered the library and contributed to the wear and tear on the globe would be one of Diane's most vivid memories of it.

Thirteen years later, she entered the University of Cincinnati and frequently rode the bus from the campus downtown on a Saturday so she could use the library's vast resources to research a paper. It was so much more pleasant to use than the university's library, with its closed stacks and slow access system. It was impossible to browse there. Diane much preferred the public library, where a brief look in the card catalog would give her a call number or two, which were like keys to unlock a treasure. She would navigate to them in the stacks, narcotized by the subtle scent of books in the thousands--their pages, bindings and glue--and find, not only the books that bore those call numbers, but dozens more that stood near them, like relatives in a vast family gathering, waiting for her to open them and find exactly what she needed to earn that "A."

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.