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Unlike the plague of ‘stuffocation<\/em><\/span>‘ that has us owning far more shoes, clothes, watches or food than we need, and a lot of times unused, this is a happy problem to have. Having a pile of unread books<\/em><\/span> in your book shelf or library. Without getting into the spiel of ‘curse of knowledge<\/span><\/em>‘, it is a not so subtle realisation that the more you know, the more you realise how little you know. Sledgehammer blow and much needed when we try to defy gravity and get too floaty for our own wings!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books<\/em><\/span> 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 anti-library<\/em><\/span>. The concept it describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku<\/em><\/span>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Illustration by Ella Frances Sanders from\u00a0Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n It is said that nothing is more important than an unread library<\/em><\/span>. These might include what are politely called ‘classics<\/em><\/span>‘- classics are those books which people praise but don’t read.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cIt is our knowledge \u2014 the things we are sure of \u2014 that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Lincoln Steffens<\/em><\/span> wrote in his\u00a0beautiful 1925 essay<\/a>. Piercingly true as this may be, we\u2019ve known at least since Plato<\/span><\/em>\u2019s famous\u00a0Allegory of the Cave<\/em><\/span>\u00a0that\u00a0\u201cmost people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n But how do we face our inadequacy with grace and negotiate wisely this eternal tension between the known, the unknown, the knowable, and the unknowable? That is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/span>\u00a0explores in a section of his modern classic\u00a0The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u00a0\u2014 an illuminating inquiry into the unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate profound change, and our tendency to manufacture facile\u00a0post-factum<\/em>\u00a0explanations for them based on our limited knowledge.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are some other compelling works that will beautifully complement The Black Swan<\/em><\/span> and they include astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser<\/em><\/span> on\u00a0how to live with mystery in a culture obsessed with certitude<\/a>, philosopher Hannah Arendt<\/em><\/span> on\u00a0how unanswerable questions give shape to the human experience<\/a>, and novelist Marilynne Robinson<\/em><\/span> on\u00a0the beauty of the unknown<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Welcome and embrace the unread so that we don’t dread the unknown!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ENDS<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An anti-library is a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read. The term was coined by seminal writer and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Unlike the plague of ‘stuffocation‘ that has us owning far more shoes, clothes, watches or food than we need, and a lot of times … Continue reading “Dear reader: How big is your anti-library?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1058,"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056\/revisions\/1058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sureshdinakaran.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/lostintranslation2.jpeg\"){kind=spacer}
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