More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
Books
In Defence of the Unread
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I read this today from Nassim Taleb: “The point [is] that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage, but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means allows you to put there." 1
I don’t always find Taleb comforting. Incomparably stimulating, rudely enlightening, disarmingly wise, irreplaceably salient, always. But never comforting. Until this morning.
I was thinking about the books in my study, about how many I have not read, how many I want to read, how many I am actually reading all at once. And I noticed a bit of guilt as I surveyed my personal library. There were lots, lots, I have not read.
And then that Taleb comment popped up in research I was doing for my writing, and miraculously the guilt fizzled, and in no time I was feeling proud of the number of unread books I have. Not exactly proud, I guess. More like okay. Like a not-bad person. Like a person who loves to learn and intends to read masses more before she dies, and practically lives for the written word, reading it and writing it. Like me, I guess. The real and now acceptable me.
Taleb wouldn’t care about all of that slightly agonized self defining, I suspect. But I thank him anyway. And now I spend some of my early morning time gazing at my books, imagining that they love each other as much as I love them, read or unread. Judgement-free. Pleased just to be, and to be with me.
Books are friends, after all.
1 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007
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C L I C H É S
Why They Are Boring and Should Be Banned
​A cliché is a sentence that bores immediately.
Like:
“Think outside the box.”
Boring at “outside.”
“Time will tell.”
Boring at “will.”
“The darkest hour is just before the dawn.”
Boring at “hour.”
“She is growing by leaps and bounds.”
Boring at “by.”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Boring at “kill.”
“He’s just a bull in a china shop.”
Boring at “bull.”
The very second we know what comes next, we’re snoring.
And this matters. In fact, inflicting boredom on anyone is a sin in my book / says this worshipper of linguistic sparkle. Humans just shouldn’t be bored. Life is too short / languishes when brain-bashed by boredom. Ask anyone who has been whacked by a cliché in the past week. Ask them how much sleep they got after the first two words. Ask them how they, nevertheless, managed to look engaged, nodding their way through cliché lethargy.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the very duration of friendships can be predicted by how many clichés a friend inflicts per visit. Human conversations do not want to go gentle into that good night / collapse of their own weight / fall down a rat hole / die from I-know-how-you-are-going-to-finish-that-sentence ennui.
So here is a tip: good sentences startle. They proceed without precedent. Clichés Don’t. They put us to sleep / anaesthetise us.
It is our duty / our worth-the-search triumph to think before we speak / scan for clichés ahead and turn the sign 90 degrees.
In fact, I think it may be our sacred obligation as blessed-with-language mammals to baptise our expressiveness into cliché obsolescence, and demand of our language-loving selves never-tried-before marriages of words.
And if in conversation we fear we will seem slow as we take time to generate a fresh phrase, we can at least de-cliché (not sure about verbifying that – or that!) our writing. No reader will ever know how long mine-sweeping our clichés took. They will just be grateful for the vigour of what they read. They won’t know exactly what is stirring about it, what is transfixing, what makes them glow and want more.
They will never know (unless we tell them so that they can begin to crater clichés in their own writing) the care we took to ensure that our piece sang.
But we will.​​
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