There is quote from Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan:
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. 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 read-estate market allows 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.”
This is more or less what I wrote in What is an Intellectual?, it’s the territory ahead. There are the new ideas and new people, I am always surprised by this.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.” That is both a useful and a consoling apothegm for those whose residences are never large enough to hold all their books.
For the above mentioned economic reasons I sold, trashed most of my library. But I find it hard to let go off books that became a part of me. I still have a box my 6-10 grade geometry textbooks in Russian. I feel certain attachment to such books.
I was actually wondering, that considering the above, it’s surprising that senor eco didn’t make it on monsieur taleb’s reading list.