I'm a woman in my twenties, working an information desk in the library of a future city, all curving ramps and towers. I have mixed feelings about my job. People come in with two general classes of problems. One looks hard, but I can solve them effortlessly. The other looks no harder, but I flub them every time. Maddening.

The hard problems aren't word-riddles, but physical objects that appear in the sky and reach down to land, a bit like tornados. They even have a helical structure. But they're not wind--something solid. A tilted widening cylinder with a spiral ramp coiling up around it! You can climb it. Where does it go? People ask and ask, haunted by these stairs that follow them round...

At last, a really huge unanswerable riddle touches down in our area, and a man needs help with it. I go face it... and notice that the structure generates a vicious pessimism inside me, so strong I don't even look for solutions! I just accept the funnel as a given, despite the mood it radiates. All these riddle-tornadoes have done this, but I never noticed--maybe because I'm rather pessimistic on my own. But this is strong even for me, and reasonless. Induced!

Yet... as soon as I notice and set aside this helix-generated despair and self-criticism, the solution to the insoluble puzzle just pops out at me! I'm incredulous--but suddenly it's childishly easy.

And it wasn't from defeating my pessimism, or even from fighting it--all I had to do was merely notice it.

Uh...lesson? What lesson?

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