I’ve found a few new YouTube channels to watch recently, mostly related to religion and mythology, and a few of these channels feature backdrops of shelves filled with books related to the subject matter.
It feels slightly pretentious, but seems to be a common design choice. After all, if a channel is trying to be scholarly and informative, what better way to show this than with books? But it also leads me to wonder why those books are being displayed: has the content creator read all of those books? Does the creator understand those books they have read? Are the books accurate and truthful, or are they outdated or false? Just because their titles sounds relevant to the subject matter being discussed, doesn’t mean they add anything to the content of the channel. Also, I’m slightly envious.
This subject comes up in my own life every so often. I often share how late in college, I came to the realization that if I read every book in the entire library, my life wouldn’t necessarily be better for it, a reminder that learning only accomplishes so much. Moreover, I don’t like owning too many books, personally, though I occasionally make the error of thinking that more books are better.
Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be more valuable to know 20 books really well than to vaguely remember 200 books. I think this would only work if those 20 books were truly worth knowing, and my challenge, when I find something I want to read about, is to search for those good, quality editions. Sometimes I find them, sometimes I don’t. But then again, I know that I’ve learned a lot from all my reading over the years, though I can’t always pinpoint exactly what I learned or from which book my knowledge came. One thing is certain, though: owning books you haven’t read won’t do you anything!
In the midst of studying Tibet, I find frequent references to the late David Snellgrove, a prolific author and explorer who has written an impressive resume of books. But by many accounts, apparently including his own, his earliest writings were very misinformed. Which makes me wonder: if I’m going to read any of his books, which ones are worth reading? And that’s really the dominating question when it comes to books in general, isn’t it? You only have so much time on this earth. Which books do you really want to read?
It’s not a bad idea to read some of the older books that may be relevant to whatever field you’re studying, but many of them are obscure because many of them never contributed anything particularly valuable. Sure, there may be some rare gems that simply weren’t popular at the time, but how many other dusty old books do you need to read first before you find those?
Part of the goal of the scholarly corpus is to have data available when somebody needs it, so adding to said data is a contribution to humanity whether it is popular or not. In this sense, old books may still be valuable, but it doesn’t change the fact that our lives are limited, and there’s little sense reading data that isn’t relevant to your purposes.
I bought my first Buddhist text from BDK, a translation group based in Japan that is trying to translate a widely-used edition of Chinese Tripitaka into English. Their goal is to produce faithful translations from a religious perspective, so kind of like Wycliffe translating the Bible into rare languages, but just for English instead. The Buddhist textual canon is enormous, so I can’t imagine them trying to do what Wycliffe does, but I still appreciate their efforts to translate the Tripitaka into English. Anyway, so their goals aren’t strictly scholarly, but at least in the book I bought, they point you to the scholarly editions if they exist, which is pretty cool. These books are made of excellent material. Properly stored, it feels like it could easily last 50-100 years and handle some wear and tear in-between. Technically, this is part of their goals, so I think the quality is great.
But it doesn’t always make sense to produce such quality books, either. Back when I worked in a library, we were once throwing out a huge cloth-bound set of encyclopedias. I asked our technical librarian, “Shouldn’t we hold onto these?” He just shrugged. “People often think these are special because of the fancy binding, but they’re really not. Nobody wants these”. So we threw them out.
Value is in the eye of the beholder.
I also think of books on archaeology. On the one hand, old archaeology books are invaluable because they record the past, sometimes before objects were looted or destroyed. On the other hand, the data wasn’t always interpreted in a meaningful way. Archaeological theory is constantly evolving, new finds are constantly being discovered, and old representations of data are often found to be inaccurate. I’m convinced that nothing ages worse than archaeology books. You could have a voluminous collection of them and still be no closer to the truth, in theory.
I still feel the draw of academia. It’s something I’ve been pondering quite a lot in my heart lately. But whereas some of these social science and humanities disciplines that interest me seem focused on taking shots in the dark, connecting odd subjects together so graduate students can say things sensational enough to get attention, I just want to do something meaningful, something that lasts. I’d love to learn enough Tibetan to contribute some solid translations for the Kangyur, or to compile lists of religious manuscripts so people could begin work on comparative textual analysis for various world scriptures. Surely, much of that has already been done, but what about the parts that haven’t? Surely there’s something concrete I could contribute to in this world, which doesn’t have some vapid title like “Liminality and Gender in Post-Colonial Diaspora X Communities” or some such bullshit?
Sometimes I fear that if I do go into academia I’ll be forced to become one of those frantic professors with rooms and shelves and boxes full of books. I feel that would be something of a waste, and would clash with my preference for simplicity and minimalism. But at this point, it’s simply too early to speculate either way, as any pretense at academia feels like a distant dream, and one that I’m not entirely sure I want without knowing the full consequences, or even the limits of my own capabilities.
Books don’t offer everything they promise. I’ve learned that much by this point in my life.
(Funny enough, the picture of David Snellgrove on Wikipedia features him holding a book in front of several book cases! This is an established motif in Western culture, I suppose. It’s never going away.)