Via Kottke
From the introduction of part one of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Presumably Eco's two groups of visitors -- the librarians and antilibrarians -- annihilate each other when in close proximity.
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that makes me feel better. i think i have a 50-50 distribution at this point. i read an interview with a spanish writer, trapiello, who told a story that once they were remodeling his house and a worker came into his library where he was working. the worker said, wow, what do you do for a living? and trapiello said, i'm a writer. the worker looked around and replied, so you wrote all these books then? trapiello in the interview confessed that he felt he had to answer Yes. (maybe a typically spanish literary confusion - don quijote - over who writes and who reads, who is the author and who is the character. . . ). i thought it was absolutely delicious.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently fighting my way through the incredibly dense (as apparently all of Eco's works are) Foucault's Pendulum. It doesn't surprise me at all that this is his take on the idea of owning books. It's quite beautiful really.
ReplyDeletei didn't really like Foucault's Pendulum but i do like his essays. his literary theory can be good good.
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