tsundoku.

On the antilibrary, life's finitude, and preservation.

The Last Unfinished Painting, originally titled On the Roof, by Amrita Sher-Gil. (Source: Wikipedia)

“Some sirens were screaming over and over, fire trucks and police cars and ambulances, those urgent noises that remind us that someone is always burning or breaking a law or having their body give up and if it is not you yet who is burning or breaking or falling apart, then you can be sure that it soon will be, that soon the sirens will come for you but you will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.” — Nobody Is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey

I think about death every time I take a flight. As the plane rises and the pilot swerves it to get on the invisible highway, I fear this might be it—the final destination! It is only once the plane breaks the cloud barrier and the pilot tells me to relax via the static-y microphone that I finally take a breath. The same fear takes over me as the plane gets close to the ground—I blast Eminem’s Mockingbird in my over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones and clutch either my phone or the armrest(s) until the tires hit the ground and the plane slows down enough; I always peek through the window and watch the air brakes at the edge of the metal wings struggle against the wind as the plane tries to slow down. Then at some point on the runway, after all the thud-ing and skid-ing are done with, I feel a sense of safety and control. I become my normal self again. The anxiety disappears and I turn off the airplane mode on my phone and I tell people I am still alive and life resumes.

Occasionally—often—I feel a similar anxiety when I look at the growing piles of unread books in my room. Then I buy more books; each time I visit the bookstore close to my house because the bookstore is also a cafe and so I tell myself I’m only going for the coffee and not the books, but, of course, coffee is never just coffee and so I come home with more books. Then I tell myself that’s it, no more books because the pile of books is now even taller, but, of course, I come home some days and see more books arrive from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.org or some other place that also lets me buy books on the internet with a few clicks without any supervision. The pile grows even taller, so tall that I have to start a new pile next to all the other piles piling, and I feel the way I feel before the tires hit the runway and the air brakes fight the wind—

And yet, I am here. Alive and breathing and reading and writing and doing all the things that can be done. And yet, life is still transient for us all; so we hope that at least our work and the work of others will last the test of time. We are obsessed with preservation—the preservation of knowledge: as books and as code¹ and as seeds², and yet we all know how it all ends.

There is a word in Japanese—tsundoku, which roughly translates to the act of acquiring books and letting them pile up in the house without reading them, hoping to read them later. Another word to describe it is antilibrary by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I suppose that is what I am doing. And I suppose I am not the only one who has been going through this problem, if one can call this a problem, even. After all, it is merely the preservation of knowledge, stockpiling in my apartment.

I don’t know if others feel the anxiety that I feel. Or if that is a rarer phenomenon? Maybe the anxiety isn’t so much about the unread books but instead about the idea of preservation itself.

Our species has always been obsessed with the idea of preservation—preservation of knowledge in great ancient libraries, preservation of seeds in the Arctic for our eventual apocalyptic future, preservation of code, even, for a different kind of apocalyptic future. We want to send humanity to Mars and beyond for the preservation of our species and all the evolutionary code embedded in our genes. We want to invent technologies to deflect Earth-ending asteroids, which won’t really end Earth anyway, just anything living on it.

But to what end?

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” said the king, and another king destroyed Alexandria. One day, Vesuvius came alive and destroyed an entire people, burying them under molten rock, preserving death itself as a final act of its life.

But we quote too much from the past. And we think too much about the future. We spend too little time in the present, always rushing, rushing, rushing. Rushing through the streets, rushing through work and rushing through leisure, rushing through reading and pleasure. But it isn’t information we really need; rather, we need more contemplation. It is the act of sitting with the text, spending hours, even days, with the thoughts of another writer, having a conversation through time and space, that fills us mentally and intellectually, even spiritually³.

And yet all this preservation will eventually go in vain—the seeds in Norway and the code in the Arctic and the libraries and the archives, our collective memories and shared history, all of it. Because we forget. We keep forgetting. We are not separate from nature, from the other animals and the plants and the water and the air. We are merely a part of the system; forms of carbon obsessed with creating our own forms of silicon, playing dice with god, with the universe, yearning to become our own gods, if only we could create a new life form and terraform planets and mine asteroids.

But again, to what end?

The sun is getting brighter, and in a billion years, it will become so bright that all the oceans on Earth will boil. It will become brighter and larger and brighter and larger as a Red Giant, engulfing Mercury and Venus, maybe even Earth. It will be a Red Giant for a long time, but then it will shrink down, eventually becoming a White Dwarf, incredibly dense and the size of the Earth, and will contain the planets that it swallowed.

In the end, we will all become a part of this White Dwarf, with all the unread books piled up, all of us, all our stories, our kindness, our rage, our cruelty, our vanity, our legacy, our posterity, and our past. There is no permanent. No future anyway. There is only now.

So, then, in this urgency—which isn’t really an urgency, because no matter how much we read, in the end, there will always be something left—how can we read and what can we read? Accepting our inevitable deaths, and the deaths of the planets, accepting our finitude, what can we do about tsundoku?

Doris Lessing, I suppose, can provide some words of comfort to our—my—anxiety:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

The Sun is growing bigger and brighter. The Red Giant is coming! The White Dwarf is coming! We—our material comforts, our knowledge, our stories, our memories, our kindness, our cruelty—will all be preserved in the death of the star that gives us life.

Now is the only time. So feel free to read what you want to. Let the books pile up. Read the book that announces itself to you in this moment. The others will wait; preserved until it’s the right time for them.

“The few others on the bridge were smug and safe under umbrellas and it was clearer to me than it had ever been that all there is on earth is the eternal now and nothing else. I had heard, in the past, lots of people say that, say that nothing exists except the present moment, that nothing has ever happened, that no one is here or not here, that no object is more than its action in a moment, and if all this business about the present moment is true, and I am still inclined to believe that it is true, then all I was at that moment was a set of senses held captive in a wet body in wet clothes in the piss of a cloud, stranded on the center of a bridge and I was just that and nothing else, and the past, the recent past, and the less recent past were not a part of me, just something gathered around me, an audience for what I would do next.” — Nobody Is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey

1. The Arctic Code Vault

2. The Global Seed Vault

3. Great conversation on reading between Ezra Klein and Maryanne Wolf