Monday, May 09, 2022

'To Be Spoiled for Choice Extinguishes Desire'

“So many of one’s best discoveries are made while having a browse.” 

Visiting a bookstore or library with a title in mind, finding it readily and taking it home is cause for wonder and gratitude. Think of the dozens of people we could thank, beginning with Gutenberg and his movable type, not forgetting the author, and concluding with the clerk or librarian at the counter. The most remarkable, most easily forgotten gift is that we take this elaborate chain of assistance for granted.

 

Exceeding even this in satisfaction, though, is the joy of finding a prized volume when we least expect it. As a kid, thanks to serendipity, I discovered Kafka, Twain’s Autobiography, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, the poems of John Masefield and Winesburg, Ohio. All entered my life while browsing the shelves in public libraries. No teacher or critic for a guide, no scholarship or reviews, just plain dumb luck. Ignorance, for once, was my friend.

 

“A slack word gathers force: William Hazlitt, in his essay ‘On the Conversation of Authors’ [1820] in The Plain Speaker (1826), speaks of the human bookworm who ‘browses on the husks and leaves of books, as the young fawn browses on the bark and leaves of trees.’”

 

As libraries perform indiscriminate culls and online book shopping turns real shelves virtual, chances for serendipity grow scarce. I grieve for the kids who won’t pick up Gulliver’s Travels on a whim, take it home and join millions of earlier readers charmed (or shocked, in unexpurgated editions) by Swift’s story. We preach the importance of literacy while getting in its way. Much that I know I learned accidentally.

 

“We browse on our culture, drawing from it things upon which we may, if we so choose, concentrate and may even add to. The computer has shot the idea of the browse out of our skies. We go directly to the thing we require and look to neither side of it. Such discoveries as we do make are accidental and not quite the fruit of a good browse. There may be infinitely more choice, but to be spoiled for choice extinguishes desire.”


[The sequential quoted passages are taken from Page 6 of A Factotum in the Book Trade (Biblioasis, 2022) by Marius Kociejowski.]

1 comment:

Jack said...

I don't know about this. The computer allows the user to go from one thing to another quickly -- not really different from wandering library or bookstore aisles except a lot faster. And the search is a lot freer since it is not dependent on who stocked the bookstore shelves or some library bureaucrat.