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Every now and then, something gets hold of me and I go ahead and wipe the big collection of books that I had collected up to that point. Why do I do that? Of course, I could always point to the stuff that happens at home, maybe even try to blame my partner for it. That would be completely unfair of course. It is true that usually a domestic discussion is the catalyst that leads to this "great cleansing", but it is by no means the ultimate cause of it. So why is it then? Why, after all the time spent looking for, selecting and cataloguing books on many different and interesting subjects I go on a whim and with a single command delete everything that I have so far collected?
In ecology there is this notion of periodic events of "frenzied consumers" devouring all the diversity that had thus far accumulated in the environment, leaving it in a state of /tabula rasa/, for things to start and develop again almost from scratch; such is the nature of the current situation with humans and their environment. Outside of ecology, I can think of a number of similar examples. In the sphere of "current events" comes to mind the current situation in Argentina, where a similar phenomenon is currently unfolding on the institutional context. On a broader scale, cultures and empires also see this periodical collapse of the established order returning to a more or less disperse social order. A familiar example, of course, would be the end of the roman world into the 'middle ages' and a distributed feudal order. Closer to our topic can be the burnings of the alexandrian library, or the great burning of books by Qin Shi HuangDi in the late third century BCE.
What do these all have in common? Am I just trying to abstract some semblance of a pattern in what are really isolated events without any relation? At first glance, it may seem so, I am sure some would readily dismiss my meditations as such and quickly forget about it. Such is the mentality of materialists, the dominating paradigm of our time, after all.
But I am not of that persuasion, and I do indeed believe there is a "force of nature" operating here, a pattern that repeats itself in just about every natural process (and by natural process I mean a kind of _metaphysical_ natural process and not one strictly in terms of mechanistic atomic interactions!), and which we can strive to understand, if just a little bit.
But I am not going to analyze such complex matters here and now, I will be content with supposing the existence of such a pattern and elucidate as to it's significance and not it's causes. Again the strictly material mechanics of these wildly different events is less important than the interpretation of what it means for me, or for the entities experiencing such a breakdown.
Incidentally, the words "breakdown" or "collapse" may suggest a negative connotation, but just like the Tarot cards of Death and The Tower, things are not good or bad per se. Nature indeed operates in cycles and change, and every part of the process is a necessary element of the general unfolding of this thing called "Life" (with a capital L because we are talking about one of the Great Mysteries for which all our rationalising understanding is quite insufficient.)
But that is the need for wiping all my books, or burning the library at the cultural centre of the ancient world? Certainly, great losses were incurred in the latter, how could anyone benefit from that?
I can only speak for my own case. Here is a likely cause: After I have accumulated so much, I find myself overwhelmed with material, gigabytes upon gigabytes of material I will likely never read, and which is both disparate and redundant at times. Say, do I really need 10 books on the Kabbalah (insert whatever spelling you favor here, idc), especially if it is only ancillary to other topics in which I am actually interested? Am I going to read them all just to be able to follow some other book on, say, hellenistic astrology? It is nice to have as much information as possible on a topic, so reading becomes a lot more pleasurable when I am able to understand more and more of what is not explicitly told in a book. But I wouldn't want to drown in trivia either, so that I can never get to my destination because at every step, like Zeno's paradox, I have to first get halfway there.
Similarly, a great burning of books is certainly a regrettable event, as is the mass extinction of species. But whereas knowledge (or biological diversity) is potentially infinite, material resources are not, and from time to time, resources have to be freed for new developments to be made, a "metastable" ecosystem has to (and indeed will by it's own) be thrown off balance, in which the continual struggle for survival continues to be an operating force driving things forward (for what sake? that is not my place to say!), and out of which will emerge hopefully the best, at any rate the most fit, the ones that distill the essence of the lessons gained in the previous generation, and the big deck of cards of available information shuffled to allow for more fruitful interaction.
Simiarly when I wipe my books (they are not really lost, dear reader, for I try to keep a backup, knowing all too well I'm going to wipe my data sometime in the future!), I get rid of maybe those 10 books of Qabala which I meant to read at some point, but of which I need, at the present at least, only a passing acquaintance. How I wish I could be a scholar and read all those books and more, and all primary sources, in their original language, and all scholarship that has revolved around them. But from time to time I need to choose what I am really going to focus on, and forget about all the rest, and burn the library to the ground, leaving just those few resources which I know I will want to keep using for the time being.
Whether that is a healthy or even at all productive modus operandi, I will leave for you to judge; right now, I can start all over again with the never ending quest to learn more about the world and to acquire skills that at least I consider useful (even if the rest of the world would disagree!)
If you got this far, I both thank you for your patience and apologize for the brain dump. Most of all, I hope my introspective thoughts give you some food for thought about our psychology, or about the world at large. If all that fails, I hope I have amused you for a few minutes.
~bartender, I'll have a tall espresso, please, I will be busy with the few books I savaged from the big fire.
I recalled "Torching the Modern Day Library of Alexandria" from The Atlantic that covered the court-ordered dismantling of Google Books, and their huge investment in "digitizing every written piece of work in existence". Obviously, it was drowning in copyright violations and was shot down in court quickly. They devised amazing aways of digitizing (and making searchable) all written content: different ways of having machines recognize a books page thickness and size and weight, the angles and levels used for such and such book, so their machines were not just tearing apart the pages. How they obtained different documents, etc. Hell of a read. ironically, the court ordered them to stop copying, and not ditribute (even for free) any of it, but not destroy what was digitized, so a handful of Google employees can (theoretically) go through and access what they got stored. Est 35% of all written works were put on their servers. Insane.
Also, Google is terrible now, for the better they didn't get everything copied, and (in all likelyhood) overrun libraries, only for a Google Library *fee* instead. I'll take libraries (and physical books).