He sat at a library desk to browse through one book, and found another left behind — with text under pictures of life in a village very far away.  He pushed his book to the side.  He slowly flipped through pictures of huts with a person in front of each, of women washing clothes at a mud hole, and stopped at a photospread on boys not much younger than him sitting at desks similar to those in his classroom.  Their intense attentiveness, in their postures, their eyes, mesmerized him.  The boys felt to him to be gifted with complete focus.  He longed to be with them.  So absorbed were they that one boy, in a starched half-sleeve shirt, had his chin resting atop his desk, as though to give his neck a rest without breaking focus.  He could feel the weight of learning in that picture.  Strange information was being brought to the classroom from strange places — and, since he had only just read about the Spanish showing up where the Aztecs lived, he wondered how long that village could continue to survive.  There wasn’t much these students could do in their village with the information that had come to them with the new desks.  They would all have to leave for places where their learning had value.  As, perhaps, might have the boy he had seen outside the library?  Yet, this boy was alone, sitting on the curb, cut off from life around him.  That sense and scene lived in him as an image for years, and became eventually the reason why his first attempt at a career had been to leave the city for faraway posts, laden with skills and information he hoped villagers could use in their efforts to keep their lives ongoing for centuries more.