‘The Black Swan’ and the antilibrary
Written on July 12, 2008
… 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 allow 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. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,’ p. 1)
Indeed The Black Swan itself is part of my “antilibrary,” among the unread books that do seem menacing at times (or promising at others, or like sirens calling me away from whatever book I’m actually reading), but when I saw this quote at the interesting Total Library Project at SpaceCollective at least I had the book to refer to…
Filed in: reading.
