har-ish

This drawing is meant to be a lot of things. One of the things I see in it is a library.

That immediately makes me think of Umberto Eco and his wonderful idea of the anti library, the collection of books we own but haven’t read.

I find that idea strangely comforting. We tend to think of a library as a record of what we know. Eco’s anti library turns that around. It becomes a record of everything we still don’t know. The unread books aren’t evidence of failure. They are a reminder of how much there is left to discover.

I have always liked collecting books, particularly the sort that I know I will probably need considerably more than one lifetime to get through. Genetics, biology, history, literature, philosophy, all sorts of wonderfully unnecessary things that somehow find their way onto my shelves.

Perhaps that is what I like about Eco’s idea. A full bookshelf isn’t necessarily a declaration of knowledge. It can be a declaration of curiosity.

And somewhere in that collection of unread books is an aspiration that I find both slightly ridiculous and completely sincere:
I want to be a scholar like Umberto Eco. Not necessarily because I want to know everything.

Perhaps because I’d like to remain sufficiently curious to realise just how much I don’t.