The Library of the Forgotten
The Library of the Forgotten
On the subconscious mind of civilization
Does writing that is never read have any value at all?
Think of the vast mass of literature produced in the last century. Hundreds of thousands of books published every year, many of them read by a few people at most; within a year or two, the vast majority of them are ignored and very soon forgotten.
Was all that effort, that pulp and paper, worth it? Were those ideas, those stories, those experiences, captured for nothing?
As a lover of books, you might feel sorrow to contemplate all those pages that now meet no eye; ideas that fizzled and died like flares sent up in the night; emotions felt and recorded that no longer reach another heart.
Isn’t that a waste? Isn’t it sad?
And of course, this mountain of paper isn’t simply a product of modern life. In 1500, less than 50 years after the first printed copies of the Bible came off of Gutenberg’s presses, more than 10 million copies of 40,000 individual works had been printed in Europe.
Most of them, if they were ever read, have since disappeared from the collective memory of humanity.
If you put together all those forgotten works—including ones whose existence we recall only in form: the scrolls of the incinerated library of Alexandria, the lost plays of Aeschylus and Euripedes, the classics burned by China’s first emperor in 213 BC—you would have a library far bigger than the library of any living works.
That library of the forgotten, larger than the Library of Congress, buried deeper than any ruins, is a monument to our deepest desires: to be remembered, to live on beyond our lifetime, to save something beautiful from our brief encounter with reality.
And it’s this impulse that makes these forgotten works not sad, I think, but a source of wonder.
Anyone who writes knows that the act of putting down your thoughts is itself transformative. The process of writing an unread book (I have written one of them, several version of it, in fact) makes you a different person from the one who started it.
Jorge Luis Borges, who loved to imagine impossible libraries, once said (as you can see in the video below) that “the task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music.”
“You are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed.”
All those forgotten books are an index of how important the act of writing down our lives is, and always has been, to mankind, Homo Scriberus. They attest to many lives transformed.
While fewer people seem to read intensely these days, many more people write. And I view that as a positive development.
The impact of a book is felt most deeply on the person who produces it. It gives puts what happens to you into a matrix of meaning; of thoughts and ideas that persist outside of your own experience.
A book is a form of thought into which we have evolved.
Without a book the thought does not exist.
Better a world of writers than a world of readers.
What I’m Reading
I’ve been going through some long works I never read before. Just this morning I finally finished The Count of Monte Cristo. (Fifty hours in audiobook form.) It had been recommended to me several times. I can now see why.
The book is gripping, endless, and deliciously melodramatic. What particularly struck me was how the plot created the template for so many works to follow it.
Take Batman:
The mysterious, icy, sophisticated, dangerous, and cunning billionaire who has a cave lair, multiple identities, and who exacts revenge outside the judicial system for brutal injustice suffered when he was innocent. He develops himself under the tutorship of an unfathomably wise and mysterious religious master, and relies upon a reserved, skilled, and trustworthy servant almost as competent as his master.
Yes, that’s all in the Count.
Few people seem to read it today, but the story has steeped itself into the culture.
What I’m Working On
We’re finishing up another session of Create, Publish, Profit. I gave two lessons, the first of which was on Building Your Authority to a community. I’ll be happy to share that when it’s available.
My other side projects are keeping me busy as well. I thought I’d have more to share on that now, but it will have to wait.
Until the next time,
Ben
I find this personally interesting because, several years ago, I made the choice to continue writing with no intention of "sharing" (i.e. publishing) almost any of it.
I've been writing for decades. I've written an unpublished novel, numerous journals, countless essays, outlined countless plots and characters for novels or other stories. I've worked as a freelance community journalist. Less than two years ago I wrapped up a decade of having worked in the book publishing industry. What precipitated out of that experience was a realization that I did not want to become a servant of social media or other online platforms or any other mechanism required to market myself, my platform, my writing, my book(s). It's just not how I want to invest my energy. But none of that has any impact on my writing, my reading, my thinking. I just write for myself, and it's just as valid (even if no one ever sees any of it).