Community, Writing, the Library

It is important for us to have communities of peers who understand our ideas (though not necessarily always agree). This understanding facilitates discussion and interaction, joint projects, and sympathy.

The combination of reading and writing are good ways to gather information and develop one’s own thoughts and understandings about things, as well as record one’s experiences and feelings for later contemplation. The books that we read are part of the historical process of the recording and transmission of knowledge.

When you write, you have the capacity to transmit your own thoughts and experiences over time and distance and between other individuals remotely. When others read what you have written, they are given a window into those thoughts and experiences you can put down. If you create a library of a few core books which are dearest to you, because they give you strength, expand your horisons, or bring you closer to the good and the beautiful, and then add into the library works by yourself and your closest friends, family, and peers, then you would create a common and mutual understanding among each other of your values, goals, and the experiences which have led you there.

Types of works which might inspire you to write for yourself and those who know you are biographical works, philosophical disertations, stories, allegories, anecdotes. This is being presented as a physical library of books, but in our technological age one could also have libraries of videos, illustrations, or other forms of documentation and transmission, such as the art on one’s walls and objects that are useful and significant and have, for example, ‘inherited’ significance - this can extend to places as much as things.

Another reason why I advocate just the library is that the library is a symbol of our education with deep historical precedents and traditions around the world. Education means more than a belief system, though belief is already inscribed in our striving and searching, it is the handing down of those practices which have helped us survive and thrive as a species.

We live in an era of info-glut and the mass proliferation of new information. As individuals we must cut through this glut of information for ourselves, because we must make decisions and guide ourselves through all the clutter, chatter, demands, and effort to keep ourselves alive and accomplish the goals which we set for our lives.

I recommend you, therefore, to bring organisation to your library and control over its contents.