I read The Tower of Babel recently, so the timing for this one is perfect. I always love thinking about libraries and books through a sci fi lens.

These past few months, because of the lockdown, I haven’t been able to just grab whatever book I want, whenever I want (and I have been needing Fahrenheit 451 and 1984) which has surely amplified the sense that I’m living in pure dystopian darkness.

Updike on Borges is brilliant:

“I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum,” John Updike wrote in an essay about Borges in 1965. “Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life.”

In the real world, the dawn of the written word incited the same kinds of anxieties that accompany any new technology that reorders people’s relationship with information. Socrates worried that writing would destroy human memory. And, indeed, the oral tradition was, across many cultures, upended by print. In the Victorian era, people were cautioned that reading fiction would make their minds atrophy. The telegraph, telephone, television, and internet, among other technologies, have all prompted similar concerns about how technology might destroy intellectual rigor.