Sometimes, completing a book is that great expulsion of a strange pressure that we like to dignify with childbirth metaphors but which is much more like wrapping the head of a giant tapeworm around a stick and slowly pulling all sixty feet of the bastard out of your back passage. Sometimes, like this one I just completed, it’s an act of perverse woodwork. You can see the shape of it in your head, but it’s not like sculpture, where the image is trapped inside the raw stone and needs to be revealed. It’s throwing up a whole weird rickety structure you only half-imagined, and then spending days and weeks screwing beading and architraves and batons and odd knobbly bits to the thing, banging pegs into slots you cut two weeks earlier knowing they needed something to fill them. And, finally, you’ve fitted every joint and groove, and you look up at the thing, and all you can say is, well, it ain’t art, but it ain’t falling over either.‘
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.
I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave’s mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave.
In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold silver and precious stones.
In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air: he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite, around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs.
In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids.
In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metals into the expanse.
There they were reciev’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries.
[gallery] A new spider species. Please let me know if this is fake, because it’s hard to believe.
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