My mother and I are forever flagging articles and books for each other.
“Take a look at this piece in The Atlantic when you have a minute,” or, “Guess who has new novel coming out.”
It’s an endless conversation, and a strangely vital component of our excellent relationship. To varying degrees, I find myself in similar conversations with other people in my life, refracted to fit the specific characters of those relationships and intersecting interests, but the exchange of ideas with my mom is always top of mind.
Over time this interaction has become a fractal aspect of a weird, larger problem that extends far beyond our regular back-and-forth. Maybe I’m the weird one, and I’d be interested to hear if anyone else struggles with this, too. I’m vexed by a seemingly Sisyphean task of keeping track of interesting sources, even if only in my own mind. Sounds obvious, but there are simply too many to share and too many to absorb to have them available for instant recall. Or said in a more optimistic way, there’s such wealth of source material that I have the good fortune of never running out.
My writing notebooks overflow with turns of phrase that capture my imagination, dialogue scenes that crackle with electricity (at least in first draft form), and descriptions that make me pause and ponder. My directing notebook (the same thing, really, just described using different technical solutions) spills out ideas for establishing shots, cutaways, inserts, ways to compose a conversation, action sequences, moments of quiet repose, set designs, wide shots, lighting schemes, and on and on and on.
Surrounding these notes like a Talmudic glossary, I’ve amassed reference materials, snippets of source material, sparks of inspiration. There is stuff to get me going, and stuff to keep me engaged, stuff to fill in the gaps, and stuff to hold off the distractions.
In aggregate, this describes my library problem.
There’s a classic parable about a king who commands his mapmakers to draw up the most detailed map of the realm. The king wants the best possible information about his kingdom, and his cartographic charge seems like a good idea for getting high quality, well intentioned results. The mapmakers keep coming back to court with better and better maps, but the king insists they go back to their drafting tables and add more detail. He insists their efforts should capture everything knowable and describable in the kingdom, every dirt road and deer path, every shoemaker’s workshop and bread baker’s oven. The problem— or more accurately, the paradox— with this goal is that any map capable of perfectly describing something in infinitely exquisite detail and proper scale becomes a map of equivalent size to the real world it’s trying to represent.
That’s the library problem. With an infinitude of fascinating information, it’s impossible to contain the world. An inevitable, simple piece of wisdom also becomes plain: it’s foolish to try.
So I don’t try. That would be dumb. But what I can’t help, and what sends me back around the library problem wheel is that I cannot help but find my curiosity piqued, fueled by a matching desire to understand. Even as I try to selectively calibrate my attention and interests to suit time and energy, the compelling pull of interesting materials tempts me like a rodent that stumbles upon a bag of shelled walnuts. Unable to resist, the hapless creature cannot help but gobble up one more, often resulting in a bellyache.
It’s down to making decisions, of course, and as personal challenges go this one isn’t really worth complaint. Nonetheless, I cannot seem to escape its clutches. Every time I read a passage that refers to main sequence stars, or the photographs of Edward Weston, or how to cook a great pot of shakshuka, I’d like to have it all at my fingertips. Like a great library the info is out there in the stacks, but it will require the time to look it up, drink it in, understand it enough to make the information my own.
The real world is too big for anyone to capture in notes or models or majestic feats of mentalism. At a personal scale, there are simply too many cool things for my mom and me to share with each other. But as I get older I find it’s the exchange of ideas that becomes the thing I care about even more than the ideas themselves. Information may be endless, and creative synthesis of that endlessness an ever surprising kaleidoscope of possibility. But the moment of exchange, when one piece of information gets passed from one person to another, exists in an instant. I’ve come to believe that shared experience becomes a simulacrum of singularity, and in each small expression of exchange, the entire library becomes clear.