This is beautiful
Comment on Tbr? Never met them
dudinax@programming.dev 5 days ago
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 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.
Nassim Taleb
MidnightMarauder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
FishFace@piefed.social 4 days ago
Hmm. This would mean, I think, that the utility of a large library is just the removal of the delay between needing some information and having it. But how valuable that is depends on what that delay tends to be - and if you don’t often need information only contained in books in a far off library, that’s not very much.
dudinax@programming.dev 2 days ago
The quote’s a bit dated. It’s pre-internet thinking. It’s aimed at people who want to be continually learning something.
Delays getting a book from some other library can be arbitrarily long depending on which book you need, even if the library is close.
FishFace@piefed.social 2 days ago
Yeah for sure. But I think also it’s only relevant for people who spend so much of their time researching stuff that those delays become a bottleneck to something. Most people can go and do something else while waiting for a library book to be transferred - or while waiting for an opportunity to buy a book with information they want. Maybe Umberto Eco was so frequently held up by this that it made sense for him. Or maybe hoarding literature was indeed a status symbol for him and he just had a convincing story for why it was actually practical.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
This is brilliant. I need it tatted on my ribs.