So I can buy books, without having to read them or store them! I'm going to send them a chunk of cash. Alternatively, you could enrol in the same kind of scheme for me ('Book Aidan'): you buy books from reputable online stores and get them sent to me. I'll post a synopsis which you can then recycle on your blogs, in your essays, at your Reading group or dinner party. How about it?
Students: you could join the Book Aid club, send the books to Africa and get them to write your essays for you! Your marks may even improve!
2 comments:
This is the vertiginous metaphysical solution for your book addiction. Contemplate this passage from Borges - it comes from an essay that would later form the basis of his brilliant story 'The Library of Babel' -
"…Lassewitz arrives at twenty-five symbols… whose recombinations and repetitions encompass everything possible to express in all languages. The totality of such variations would form a Total Library of astronomical size. Lasswitz urges mankind to construct that inhuman library, which chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence…
"Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus’ The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat’s theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn’t publish, Urizen’s books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalogue of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalogue. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves — shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies — ever reward them with a tolerable page."
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Total Library’, 1939.
Beats Dewey - must institute this system (and read the story).
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