The Fear of Missing Out

 I must admit an addiction - to keep writing here. This causes another problem - worrying over the books I have around me that continue being unread.

Reading Ed Simon's A Fraternity of Dreamers is one of the things that kept me from my books on this Saturday evening, but damn it was amusing and thought-provoking that I want to share some of it, and encourage reading of the whole.

I offer this contrition only as a means of demonstrating that my aforementioned fear goes beyond simply imposter syndrome. There are any number of reasons why we wish we’d read certain things, and that we feel attendant moroseness for not having done so—the social stigma of admitting such things, a feeling of not being educated enough or worldly enough, the simple fact that there might be stuff that we’d like to read, but inclination, will power, or simply time has gotten in the way. The anxiety that libraries can sometimes give me is of a wholly more cosmic nature, for something ineffable affects my sense of self when I realize that the majority of human interaction, expression, and creativity shall forever be unavailable to me. Not only is it impossible for me to read the entirety of literature, it’s impossible to approach even a fraction of it—a fraction of a fraction of it. Some several blocks from where I now write is the Library of Congress, the largest collection in the world, which according to its website contains 38 million books (that’s excluding other printed material from posters to pamphlets). If somebody read a book a day, which of course depends on the length of the book, it would take somebody about 104,109 years and change to read everything within that venerable institution (ignoring the fact that about half-a-million to a million new titles are published every year in English alone, and that I was also too unconcerned to factor in leap years).

Well, that's a relief - there is no way to read everything. 

Or to know everything, which ignorance does make us human and needing others:

 Really, though, that’s true of all people. I’ve got a PhD and I can’t tell you how lightbulbs work (unless they fit into Puritan theology somehow). Kircher’s translations of Egyptian were almost completely and utterly incorrect. As was much of what else he wrote on, from minerology to Chinese history. He may have had an all-encompassing understanding of all human knowledge during that time period, but Kircher wasn’t right very often. That’s alright, the same criticism could be leveled at his interlocutor Leibnitz. Same as it ever was, and applicable to all of us. We’re not so innocent anymore, the death of the Renaissance Man is like the death of God (or of a god). The sheer amount of that which is written, the sheer number of disciplines that exist to explain every facet of existence, should disavow us of the idea that there’s any way to be well-educated beyond the most perfunctory meaning of that phrase. In that gulf between our desire to know and the poverty of our actual understanding are any number of mythic figures who somehow close that gap; troubled figures from Icarus to Dr. Faustus who demonstrate the hubris of wishing to read every book, to understand every idea. A term should exist for the anxiety that those examples embody, the quacking fear before the enormity of all that we don’t know. Perhaps the readerly dilemma, or even textual anxiety.

And I can only agree with this idea: 

To this foolish inclination towards completism—desiring everything and thus acquiring nothing—I sometimes use Francis Bacon’s claim from his essays of 1625 that “Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly,” as a type of mantra against textual anxiety, and it mostly works. Perhaps I should learn to cross-stitch it as a prayer to display amongst my books, which even if I haven’t read all of them, they’ve at least been opened (mostly).

And in the end, I cannot really expect all that many readers of this blog:

...  To this foolish inclination towards completism—desiring everything and thus acquiring nothing—I sometimes use Francis Bacon’s claim from his essays of 1625 that “Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly,” as a type of mantra against textual anxiety, and it mostly works. Perhaps I should learn to cross-stitch it as a prayer to display amongst my books, which even if I haven’t read all of them, they’ve at least been opened (mostly).

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