the arithmetic, survived, turns out to be a liberation

This homage to the anti-library has been doing the rounds, and with good reason, given its prettiness of style and sentiment alike. This section, in particular, felt less like a calling-out and more like a nod of camaraderie: Somewhere in his forties, a reading man performs the arithmetic, once. Forty books a year, if the year goes well; multiply by the decades one can decently hope for; and the product arrives with a small cold shock, because the number is four digits at best, and modest four digits at that. Every library, even Pepys’s, exceeds it. I performed this calculation a few years ago and recommend performing it never, or at most once, for the same reason one reads an actuarial table at most once. But the arithmetic, survived, turns out to be a liberation. Since you cannot read everything, or even most things, or even most of your own things, the library is released from its obligation to be a curriculum and becomes what it always was underneath: a landscape. One lives in a…

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