On Analog Metaverse Curation 📚
Field Notes from the Future | 010
At the beginning of the 2020s we were taken on an unplanned and involuntary journey into the future. I’ve been taking notes. Let’s get equipped.
If you spend your breath explaining what you’re against, people will very quickly tire of your company. Since I’ve already explained my dim views on the quest for the Metaverse as it’s currently understood, we can leave that particular subject and move on to more fertile ground. What would be a more human, resilient and life-enhancing way to create an overworld than escaping into VR goggles? Well, I think we have a few easy options available to use right now, using age-old technology and resources available to anyone reading this. Our last Field Notes delved into the idea of your brain as a unique collection point for wisdom that cannot be duplicated by simple collections of data. Let’s go deeper on how to build a library that will allow you to grow strong in this Skull Wisdom. It’s time to explore the Analog Metaverse.
The lifelong process of absorbing books might be closer to the work of the psychonaut than the journalist. You always have to remain aware that books are the encrusted and accreted mental outlook and historical perspective of a human, or an entire school or clique of humans, often no longer living at the moment you encounter them. This is of course assuming that the books in question are real books, books with viewpoint, opinion and philosophy, something more than a collection of search engine returns or platitudinous reworkings of other’s well-trodden ground. The archaeology of ideas is not a riskless endeavor, as demons and ghouls lurk waiting for release by incautious diggers lacking discernment. Many more than we imagine who begin the journey of idea collection lose their soul and mind along the way. But we are also always a few pages away from the treasures of the bibliophile’s art, a preserved human experience or lens to view times long past, crystalized in ink to await the eager searcher. The discoveries are worth the danger.
Building a library, a physical collection of important books that you own, is a work of subcreation. Your library is an Analog Metaverse that allows you to dip into and out of a personalized set of preserved realities at your whim. The connections between the works your read, the ones you choose to own, and your own thoughts and experiences build a unique and precious viewpoint that you have to share. Although a skill less common in our world of device content management and streaming services, curation is to my mind one of the newly vital skills that will enable human beings to cope with the deluge of information we now realize threatens to drown us. What goes on the shelves?
I. Physical Information Inhabiting Space
First, a brief explanation as to why I think you should have a library of physical resources somewhere in your home. Choosing to purchase, store and display a written work is a statement about its importance to you and to the world. Slowly collecting these over your lifetime does something both to you and to the collection. I am not a believer in some sort of spiritual or mystical process unleashed by the proximity of pages to each other, or to you. But the fact is that the reading I do in my home, within arm’s reach of shelves of other works, is different in kind from the audiobooks I happily enjoy while running errands or the Kindle books I read while traveling. Being able to take a break from the page and scan the spines lined up on the shelves sparks new ideas, mental connections between the voice of the author in my hand and the remembered sayings of those in repose. Noticing that book I’ve been meaning to read for the longest time, reorganizing my old favorites and remembering how they changed me. Just because these phenomena aren’t easily explained doesn’t make them any less powerful. Why not begin creating this sort of growing, mutating analog world in your home? Time and attention are the only ways to feed it, so you probably shouldn’t wait.
II. The Responsibility of Curation
Now, just any old cluttered heap of books won’t do. You’ve got to add your own mind to the mix. The books that go into the library have to mean something to you. And you have to remove works that no longer hold that meaning, or that someone else would benefit from, or that you “always wanted to read” until you realized that you actually didn’t. The library is a breathing organism, accreting and shedding ideas so that it always reflects and activates your mind. Don’t allow it to grow stale, either. A hundred volumes of business advice or trite science fiction aren’t a library. What we need are combinations, endless multifaceted gems of information scintillating together. Your library should be like the ideal reading habits we should strive towards: broad, personally fascinating, partially influenced by ageless wisdom and partially unique to yourself.
Spend time thinking about your books. Don’t let your To Be Read pile boss you around. All of these things are there to serve you, with the goal of creating a physical environment that allows you to use literature and written work to the full. That may be a haven of personal creativity or a place where stories float aloft to hungry little ears, or something else. Human mortality tells us that we only have six or seven decades of reading in which to absorb the world’s words. Haphazard won’t do. (This is of course discounting the undoubted existence of libraries in the Heavenly realm, which though a personal article of faith and one widely shared is not strictly confirmed through orthodox theology). In your earthly reading, remember that not all books are created equal. While all things are lawful to read, and many things should be read, only a few are profitable, to apply the Apostle’s words specifically.
III. Joyful Misuse of Ideas
All truth is Gods truth. You need to be misusing more sources, or at the very least applying them more creatively. Military tactical manuals contain insights on theology, and theological works contain insights into military tactics. You mustn't be afraid to think a little weirder. The author could not have fully comprehended the good uses you would make of his words. This is not the same as deconstructive analysis (horrible death throes of an ailing field), but more like seeing all of the places where the truth fits. All of the bland and useless Insights slung around on social networks suffer from failing to engage in this work. A Twitter thread claiming to distill the valuable material from even a mediocre book, let alone a great work, is at best bread dough in its earliest stages. It needs the addition of various elements to give it interest and contrast, leavened by the reader’s own personal experience and with enough time for any ideas generated as a result to demonstrate their worth. You cannot force or fabricate this kind of reaction to good writing. It is an additive process and includes every work you have ever interacted with in a meaningful way.
There is a practical way that you can jumpstart some of this chaos if you like, and that is to go remove any hint of organization from your bookshelf. Especially if you have topically sorted your books. Topics are to sell you books, not to truly organize the material inside them. In your personal information world, Hackworth’s About Face may be shelved next to Heinlein’s Grumbles from the Grave, while Ambrose’ Band of Brothers belongs far down the shelf near Wouk’s oeuvre. An author’s individual works in the same genre may be split across many different personal shelves, while another collection may bridge genres due to specific influences or concepts contained within. (If anyone can identify why Eagle of the Ninth, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Ender’s Game might be filed together in my library, you win the prize). Pulling one of these ribbons will lead you to a whole constellation, interwoven works connected by the moment you first encountered them. Plumb the depths of this secret world. Scatter your library periodically and see how it will rearrange itself in your mind. You might be surprised at what you discover.
Once you begin the journey of collection, the real work can begin. If you want to become a Wizard, or build a modern Monastery, or instantiate your own Inklings-esque PubDAO, you’re going to need a fruitful library, well-incubated in time and well-traveled by your restless mind. A vibrant well of wisdom doesn’t just happen over accumulated years. Order your collection, make the connections, observe the uniquely weird nodes that begin to form. Take notes. Take more notes, all over the margins and in growing stacks of notebooks and scraps. Please don’t think of this as “building a second brain” or whatever lifelessly sad analogy is being peddled by those who see all points of data alike as grist for the mill. You are tending a life-garden. Carefully pruning a bonsai creation of wisdom so that, when called upon, you can select from its perfect fruit to bless those in need of instruction and help. We read widely so that we can become widely useful to others. We restrict our reading so that we don’t drown out wisdom by sheer volume. We pursue varied and twisting paths through the library because we never know what might lie buried underneath the next page.
At my son’s soccer practice yesterday, I met Edmund Burke. He told me thoughts at length concerning the taxation of the American colonies, and explained the common failures that all systems of government experience due to the humans who are called upon to make epochal decisions by ballot and committee. The fact that I was talking to a ghost at the soccer field, conjured by turning pages, never came up between me and Ed. Earlier that week I thought through human experience of the Holy Spirit with Daniel Henderson, who lives yet but whom I’ll probably never meet. Tonight I’ll venture into the tortured world of H.P. Lovecraft to experience the despair of human minds weighed against chaos eons, or maybe even ask Homer if those Achaeans have sorted their all-too human squabbles out yet. I can’t wait to see what they’ll all have to say to each other. Welcome to the oldest Metaverse.
I’ll see you in the Future.
And he preserved through many lives of Men the memory of all that had been fair; and the house of Elrond was a refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good counsel and wise lore. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. ~ Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth. The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. ~ Ecclesiastes 12:9-12
This is fantastic. Would love to read more about your reading process someday.. how you decide on what to read, how you use public libraries, when to buy a hard copy or when an e-book suffices, etc. Great stuff!
This is great. Sharing!