Tracey Durnell here quotes someone else who has reached independently a conclusion I’ve long held: that one’s book shelves operate in a way analogous to a memory palace.

As I trek ever deeper into the plains of middle age, I find it harder to recall unprompted so much as the titles of some books I’ve read—but a glimpse of the right shelf, with its spines of fonts and colour, will often deliver not just the titles but the shapes and weight of the stories or theories contained therein, sometimes with surprising levels of clarity and detail. The physical form of the book somehow contains not just the pulp and the print, but the ideas and images as well, in a rather more literal expression of Mieke Bal’s narratological theories than I suspect she ever intended.

(Of course, we should allow for the possibility that my knowledge of—and professional closeness to—said theory provides a sort of mental-architectural metaphor that scaffolds this effect. I should also note that the one thing that I almost never recall are the names of characters in fiction, which I mostly put down to having learned quite early the fast-reader habit of parsing words not by spelling or sounding them out in my head, but by recalling their shape on the page; I’m never in doubt about what happened to whom, assuming the story is well-written enough, but I sometimes struggle to tell other people the names of characters in a book that I’m literally in the act of reading.)

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At any rate, I know that the memory palace effect is a big part of why I find reading electronically so inferior to “dead tree” media; it’s likely also a big part of why my digital note-keeping systems, despite their increasing sophistication, seem far less effective at getting information into my mind than writing stuff down with pencil and paper. I hardly ever read my written notes, and I should probably make more effort to make it a part of my practice—but I think that on some level I’ve always known that it’s the act of writing them that does the work.

I’m sure there are people waiting to inform me that I am a kind of intellectual dinosaur, ill-suited to the fully digital utopia that is always just around the next corner. My ill-suitedness to that utopia is not in doubt, nor my growing loathing of it—the ironic yet inevitable fate of the apostate, perhaps. But I am also increasingly convinced that we are not suited to it as a species. Yes, there have been media revolutions before, and yes, we are living through another one—though the sanguinity with which most people say this rather suggests they pay little attention to the non-technological aspects of the history they are invoking. An episteme is a surprisingly fragile thing, given how great a load it carries; when one shatters, sharp fragments hang around for a long time, like broken glass in a shag-pile carpet.

At this point I no longer much care if it marks me to others as a conservative or reactionary: I find the digital dimension of contemporary culture baffling, shrill, repulsive, and the horrible purity to which it has distilled the imperatives of commerce and marketing to be both corrosive and toxic.

But I have come to believe that in this regard, Alan Jacobs has the right of it: there’s little to be gained by re-articulating what he calls the Standard Critique of Technology, which has been widely known for close to a century, during which time the object of said critique has swollen to penetrate every corner of life. Instead, wei wu wei, as the man once wrote: or “do by not-doing”, in Saint Ursula’s translation.

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Durnell goes on to consider her library as a hyperobject, per Timothy Morton. I struggled with that particular concept for the same reason I have struggled with Morton’s others—I’m willing to concede that they may indeed be a brilliant thinker, but they are an execrable writer, which makes it rather hard to appreciate the particulars of their brilliant thought—but I still think Durnell is shrinking the concept a little too far in this case.

Morton’s hyperobject might perhaps be more usefully thought as a particularly hypertrophied type of assemblage, in the flat-ontology / STS sense of that term; but not every assemblage need be quite so large as that, and the library as an assemblage (which is in turn comprised of the sub-assemblages that are individual books) seems workable, as well as appealingly fractal.

Every text contains a world, waiting to be read into being, different for each different reader, and for the same reader at different times. This is an old magic, but it’s the magic that made me.