The chain and ball of life: your books

 

“We must drag the chain and ball of our personality to the end. This is the price one pays for the infernal and divine privilege of thought; so in this life it is only the chosen who are convicts—a glorious band which understands and groans but which treads the earth amidst a multitude of phantoms with maniacal gestures and idiotic grimaces. Which would you rather be: idiot or convict?”

– Joseph Conrad, circa 1900, cited in Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life (Camden House, 2007) Courtesy "Propaganda in Focus" Thanks to Saverio for posing in this image. 

One of the balls you are chained to in life is your books. I am relocating, and you see, above, part of the 42 boxes that contain my books, just those in literature, history, mythology, and other literary subjects. I will probably need a similar number for my science books. Let's say that the total will be a hundred 40x30x30 cm boxes. Maybe 30 books per box, a total of 3,000 books. And I have another set of boxes, just as many, stored in a deposit. Not bad as a ball and chain. 

These hundred boxes of books could be scanned and stored in a digital memory weighing a few grams. But digital storage is so fleeting and unreliable -- not so much because of mistakes or physical damage; but mainly because it is so easily fudged, changed, and made unrecognizable by the powers that be. Once, the deeds of the great were engraved in stone, and it took some effort for their successors to carry out the "damnatio memoriae," the erasure of the past. Today, it takes just a few clicks of the mouse.

It is a good exercise to go through some of the events of the past decades and see how their current descriptions look different from what you remember them to be. It may well be that your memory is playing tricks on you, but you cannot discount the idea that somebody went through the records, re-arranging them as they wanted them to be. It happens all the time on Wikipedia.

Books are not engraved in stone, yet they are at least a fixed record of the past -- not easy to alter. So, I'll keep these books as long as I can, although I am afraid that their lifetime is limited anyway. Fires are the enemy of books, and over the years, the probability of going up in smoke, a Seneca cliff for paper, becomes a near certainty for a book. The oldest book still existing is St. Cuthbert's Gospel; it dates back to around the 7th century AD. Will some of my books last for more than a thousand years? Who knows?

Why I still buy Paper Books: It is the Same Strategy that Women use with Men

I know that e-books are less expensive and take much less space than paper books. Nevertheless, I seem to be stuck with paper books and I am the first to ask myself why.

I think I found an answer with the book above, that I actually read as an e-book. I was not looking for a seduction manual for men, I was searching for "swarm intelligence" which is in the title of this book but, alas, is never discussed in the text! (this is an advantage of e-books, they are searchable).

I got this book for free as part of my subscription with Amazon and I even read some of it. I didn't find it very interesting: not a bad book, but overlong and saying things that I mostly I already knew. But I got a few ideas from this brief experience and I have to say that I found that the author frames very well the problem he tackles with the example of a restaurant.

Think about this: how do you select your dish from the menu of a restaurant? Florian Willet examines two possible strategies depending on whether the restaurant is expensive or cheap. If it is expensive, you'll be probably very careful in choosing the dishes that seem to be the best and, positively, you won't order more than you can eat, that would be a big waste of money. Conversely, if the restaurant is cheap, let's say it is a buffet, then you have no such worry, you can nibble a little of this and a little of that, try all items and when you are full, you don't care if you left some good food untouched in your plate.

Willet's idea is that these two strategies define how -- respectively -- women choose men and men choose women. For a man, sex is not an expensive choice and the ideal strategy would be to try as many women as possible, one after the other. That depends on how expensive women are and this explains why some men tend to aim at lower social status women -- less expensive in terms of the effort needed. Male doctors, for instance, tend to have affairs with female nurses rather than with female doctors. For women, instead, sex is an expensive choice if related to procreation. So, men are expensive not so much in themselves but for the consequences of the decision. According to Willet, a woman tends to choose a man with the same care that you would expend in choosing the best dish on the menu of a fancy restaurant (if she can).

All that is not especially new, as I said, but the curious thing is that I found myself applying Willet's theory to Willet's book. I would never have chosen it if it hadn't been free, I was just nibbling at it just as if I was standing in front of a buffet. It was the equivalent of a one-night stand with a woman in a faraway town where you just happen to be passing by.

And then something flashed in my mind: I love reading books, but like a woman who can't have too many partners together, I can read only a limited number of books. So I tend to choose books as if I were choosing a dish at a fancy restaurant or as a woman tries to choose a partner for life, or at least for an extended relationship. And that's why I buy paper books: they are more expensive. So, I carefully select what I think is best for me, then I pay for what I buy, and I am committed to reading the book I bought.

I think I'll keep staying with paper books -- economic science tells me that! Too bad it has nothing to do with swarm intelligence