Some months back I was exploring a side entrance to the magnificent Suzzalo library. It was already one of my favorite places within throwing distance of my office, because of its air of disuse and abandonment, a wonderfully surreal notice proclaiming it "not an entrance" and the way even this tiny portion of the building was lavished with beautiful details like an ironwork window, marble stairs, and stained glass over top of the inner set of doors. I also love the way the gently rounding portico provides shelter, an invitation to enter, a place not inside or outside but neither, a place of transition. This is before even the first doors are encountered, so the reason is not mechanically functional, not a windbreak or a system of air flow. It seems a strictly human gesture of comfort and protection.

And in this lovely space, already replete with the mark of a seemingly lost, antiquated, gentle and distinguished period of architecture, my friend spotted a tag on the upper righthand side of the first set of doors, a tag which was made of something vaguely metallic and bore the numbers 899. I was immediately enraptured by it, exclaimed with joy and pleasure, and ran my fingers over it again and again. My companion was utterly mystified by this reaction: how could I find such a thing beautiful? I didn't have an answer then but on my way to the bus stop this morning I found myself thinking about this moment and the reason seemed self-evident, as if it had been sitting in my mind fully formed for months and waiting for me bring it into consciousness.

That tag — and all instances of found objects in the world that belie antiquity as well as showing signs of once being part of a rigorous (and yet forgotten) system of meaning — strike the same kind of awe in me, the reason being that they seem closely analagous to the world we live in: it feels to me like a creation which has lost the key to its significance but still retains the earmarks of a once-glorious coherence. That coherence has been mostly lost, and the material from which it is made is beginning to decay and show its age, and we have no way to get in touch with anyone who can tell us what they meant by it all.