It’s called The Book of Life because it’s about the most substantial things in your life: your relationships, your income, your career, your anxieties.There’s always been a longing to gather the important things in one place. Some of the appeal of a Bible or the collected works of a big name author is the sense that amidst all the chaos and disparate sources of knowledge, someone has taken the trouble to distill, to compress, to say what is essential. In a world overflowing with information, what we most need is curation. The Book of Life aims to be the curation of the best and most helpful ideas in the area of emotional life.
Ultimately, life is only 500,000 hours long so we have to make sure the ideas we need don’t get lost – or take too long to find.
The Book of Life redraws the sense of what a book is. Up to now, books have been the most ambitious way in which ideas are presented. But they have suffered from serious limitations: they’ve had only one author; they’ve usually be written over a relatively short period of time. And once they’ve been finished, they can’t be changed (even if the author gets a great new idea). They have also been largely restricted to words, images being too expensive and film impossible.
Well now this is promising! Exciting! I have always hoped to find the best and most helpful ideas in the area of emotional life!
Also, it’s interesting to learn that before now books had only one author, were written “over a relatively short period of time,” and had no pictures. I wonder if there were any exceptions to these rules?
Yes, I certainly want to learn all about life from people who have such masterful command of history and the English language, at least in the area of emotional life.