Good intentions
It can take time to get around to things.
Our consultant with too many books has something of a system for working out which are available easily (that is, not buried deeply in a pile somewhere). A part of that is his Aspirational Bookcase, an idea that the rest of us have adopted in some form. It is a small bookcase, just three shelves, in which he keeps books that he intends to get around to sometime. But he realizes it will take sustained attention to do justice to any of these and the decision to take up one of them should not be made lightly. It does not include those for studies he has set aside indefinitely, or computer languages he may never learn. Neither does it include books that he will get to in the ordinary course of things, or that he’ll read as a sort of reward when he’s gotten his real work done.
Those now in the case include a collection of the works of Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poetess (in Spanish), Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a two-volume edition of Pepys’ Diaries. On the scientific/mathematical side there is a volume on interferometry (as applied to radio astronomy, but our astronomer has ideas about other wavelengths), one on gravitational waves, and one intimidating work on Quantum Field Theory accompanied by another not so intimidating. There is a two-volume Treatise on Natural Philosophy from the end of the nineteenth century. The last is hardly cutting-edge science, but there may be useful ideas or techniques therein that aren’t taught or even remembered nowadays simply from lack of space.
Such a bookcase could easily become just a graveyard of good intentions. It would be simple, and quite human, to place all one’s difficult or tedious projects in one place, saying, “I’ll have to get around to those someday,” and then cease to notice them because they’re always there. We certainly do it in other contexts.
But the Aspirational Bookcase has actually served its purpose. Works have indeed graduated from it: Boswell’s Life of Johnson, for instance, and Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Don Quijote (in Spanish) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene have been returned to it after being read, because our respective consultants intend to read them again. And an eight-volume edition of The Spectator, a 1792 edition inherited from a great-great-grandfather, remains because we refer to it more or less regularly.
No doubt the technique wouldn’t work for everyone. Some would find the daily reminder of things yet to do unbearable, and consign it to Storage; others would cease to notice it at all. And our Russian-speaking consultant makes no commitment about when he’ll get to War and Peace (in the original tongues). But for some of us it works. What would you put on your Aspirational Bookshelf?
