Librarius

Men.

I believe it is important as men, as doers, as thinkers, as leaders, to possess a library.

A comprehensive personal library.

A personal library is a place where I go when I want answers from authorities on the subject, expert thinkers in a specific domain, well formed opinions on topics from those who have spent their lifetime studying and thinking on them.

Yes, there is the internet. I know.

But a library is a place of study. Where I pick up new books or old books that teach things, new things every day. We can read these books for minutes or hours. We spend time with them over our life. A personal library allows you to build a relationship with your books, with ideas.

You don’t read a book once and say, that’s it, I have it figured out, all the knowledge is there, and I’m able to contextualize all past and future experience with this single reading! No way.

Every man should possess a library, collecting his favorite books, containing his favorite ideas.

By favorite, I mean the ones that instill a persistent intrigue and wonder and amusement and fascination. Books that you love, that you long to return to, which contain ideas that clarified muddy waters, that have germinated future worlds of mind, of thinking and acting and believing and understanding

A library is a good thing.

The internet is no substitute.

It cheapens “knowledge”.

There are men who have walked this earth, who have compiled a life time of reflection into books, into works of thought.

We can peer into their mind. We can engage with them forever.

These great minds, of varied experience

A library is a mental playground. It is necessary for growth, for independence.

I believe this.

I like to, anyway. Or maybe it is all bullshit, and we die and our ideas die with us, along with the paper and ink, and symbolic splatterings.

However, I believe that there are good forces and bad forces, destructive and constructive, and that building and creating, and the process of doing this, is a good force.

It is life.

Books and the knowledge they contain, the specific knowledge that we choose to intrigue ourselves with, has a lasting impact on our character, building us into forces of change.