The Unknown Unknown

The Unknown unknown

There are, as he said, three kinds of books: the ones you’ve read, the ones you know you haven’t read (like War and Peace), and the others: the books you don’t know you don’t know.

The internet is a splendid invention, and it won’t go away. If you know you want something, the internet can get it for you. My point, and the whole point of this essay, is that it’s not enough to get what you already know you wanted. The best things are the things you never knew you wanted until you got them. The internet takes your desires and spits them back out at you, consummated. You search, you put in the words you know, the things that were already on your mind, and it gives you back a book or a picture or a Wikipedia article. But that is all. The unknown unknown must be found otherwhere.

Strange Books

If I had been sitting at my computer, I wouldn’t have known to search for them. I had to go outside. I had to let the element of chance in. Computers are machines. The internet is, ultimately, a huge army of machines. And machines do not allow in the element of chance. They do exactly what you tell them to do. So the internet means that, though you get what you already

The Good Bookshop

the Good Bookshop. Not the warehouse, not the internet, but the Good Bookshop. It is a room (or two) where the unknown unknowns of the world are laid out on tables and stacked in shelves. It is a room (or two) where you can find what you never knew you wanted, where your desires can be perpetually expanded.

What point is there in satisfying a desire you already have? You are no better, no larger, at the end of it. A desire satisfied. It is, incidentally, a favour that e-books have done for the Good Bookshop: they have made books beautiful again.

In these new and glorious days when the margins on physical 3 are that little bit higher than on the electrical alternative, publishers produce exquisite bindings. Bookshops haven’t been this pretty.

Bibliomancy: The Future of Books

There’s always a strange feeling you get when you come across one particular line by chance. It feels somehow significant. That’s irrational of course, but humans are irrational creatures. Even the sturdiest, most down-to-earth chap will turn pale if he opens a book at random and sees the words PREPARE TO MEET THY DEATH.

This feeling is so deeply entrenched in human nature that many cultures have a practice called bibliomancy, where you use books to predict the future. When an ancient Greek fellow wanted to know what the future held for him, he would take a copy of the Iliad and let it fall open at a random page. Then he would point at a line, read it out, and that would be his fate. This was the Sortes Homericae .

The Romans did the same thing with Virgil. They called it the Sortes Virgilianae . Medieval chaps would do it with the Bible and called it the Sortes Sanctorum

Story about St.Francis of Assisi doing it. He had just decided to give up all of his possessions, but then wondered whether that included his books, of which he was inordinately fond.

So he opened the Bible at random and found the line:

When the Victorian poet Robert Browning got engaged to Elizabeth Barrett, he decided to use bibliomancy to see whether the relationship would work.

he was looking for was a bit of encouragement. Reassurance from the mystical world of books. Something to tell him that love would conquer all, that sort of thing.

Annoyed to discover that he’d picked a book on grammar. Italian grammar, to be precise. He decided that if he found a conjunction that was a Good Omen, or maybe just a possessive pronoun.

If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity. I just tried it, and found the line ‘I am a vapid and irreflective chump’.

I just tried with School of Life dictionary

The Ghost in the Bookshop

Bibliomancy works (or seems to work) because we can’t help but find God in random things. It’s that moment of discovery, in the back of the bookshop, when your hand pulls out some funny little tome, with a funny little cover and you say to yourself: ‘Yes. This is what I’m going to read next.’

It doesn’t matter what the book is. It’s the one that caught your eye.

In a Good Bookshop all the books are good. If a bookshop contained every book ever written, what are the chances that you would find the one book you need? Well, they’d be perfect if you already knew what you needed, but, as I have been saying, that is not the point of a bookshop. That’s something for the internet. No, the perfect bookshop is small, small and selective.

I find the shop down a narrow street in a town that I have never visited before. I go in, and there is only one book. Just one. It is laid out on a table in a plain cover. I cannot even see the title. I buy it, and it tells me all the secrets of the universe. I know that can never happen, but it might make a good first chapter for a novel.

The Romantic Bookshop

Of all the bookshops, in all the towns, in all the world, you accidentally walked into this one, and accidentally fell in love with this particular book.

And again, yet again, the internet has produced the pernicious possibility of getting what you wanted. Internet dating allows you to name the exact specifications of the man or woman that you wish to acquire

And, if you do that, you will get what you already knew you wanted. You won’t get Mr Darcy. You won’t get Miss Bennet. Romeo would have specified NO CAPULETS and Juliet would have specified NO MONTAGUES.

They all got what they wanted – the Darcys, the Benedicks, the Beatrices – but they got what they never knew they wanted. And that is what makes their stories romantic. Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better.

They all got what they wanted – the Darcys, the Benedicks, the Beatrices – but they got what they never knew they wanted. And that is what makes their stories romantic.

Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better

The Theology

There is an interesting and rather paradoxical idea in philosophy and theology that a chap can be enslaved by his desires.

By this view, I will never find peace because I will always be running around trying to appease these unappeasable masters. That’s why Buddhism asks you to free yourself from desire.

I don’t think I’m enslaved by my desires, largely because I’m not sure how I’d pass my time if I didn’t have them.

hours a day with nothing to do. But I am sometimes fenced in by my desires. Because I already know what I like, I never try anything new

But I am sometimes fenced in by my desires. Because I already know what I like, I never try anything new.

I am sometimes fenced in by my desires. Because I already know what I like, I never try anything new.

I prefer my known knowns. I prefer getting the things that I already knew I wanted.

Geography

Almost the last place to go was northern Canada. It was after the Second World War, and there were a lot of planes left over and a lot of qualified pilots and they buzzed over the tundra, taking notes, taking photographs, and taking away the fun of exploration for ever. That’s when we really got interested in other planets. They were all we had left.

Almost any question you ask can be answered. It’s only the questions that you didn’t know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns.

the book is still waiting for you, the perfect book, the one that will answer every question you didn’t know to ask. It’s on the shelf at the top, in the corner, just within reach of your grasping hand. The unknown unknown, waiting like an undiscovered continent, just at the back of the bookshop.

And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns. It sounds like a riddle. It isn’t a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter