My poor Mother. I moved to Davis on Wednesday and sent her an additional 12 boxes of books to store at her home. That’s on top of the thousands of my books already there. My books are all over her living room and dining room. They’re in her cabinets in her garage. And they’re in the closets of my room at her house.
You see I have a problem. I buy books like I imagine some women buy shoes. I buy more books than I can possibly read. In fact, I couldn’t read half of the books I already own in my entire lifetime – and yet I continue to buy more. I’m what’s called a Bibliomaniac. What’s it all about?
I was just reading Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and there’s an interesting and relevant anecdote. In the psychoanalytic literature, there is a woman who felt faint in libraries. Being surrounded by so many books caused her to feel tremendous anxiety and she would have to leave to quiet her emotions. It wasn’t that she didn’t like books. Just the opposite. She wanted to have read all the books on the shelves and to have possessed their knowledge so badly that not having not done so caused her terrible anxiety. Her consequent feelings of ignorance were unbearable such that she had to leave.
My problem is similar. I can’t seem to read one book at a time and frequently leave off reading a book I’m perfectly happy with to read another one, never finishing the first. Even when I have more than enough books to read, I order more on Amazon and buy more during any visit to a bookstore. The problem is that I’m possessed by a desire to know that I can’t possibly fulfill. That is, there will always be books I won’t have time to read and things that I don’t know. My Bibliomania is in a sense a form of denial, a refusal to face the reality of limits.
What’s behind this obsessive desire to know everything? I think that behind the Bibliomania is a belief that if I know everything, I will achieve a place of security. From a place of omniscience, all uncertainty will be removed from my life and actions and things will proceed optimally. G-d isn’t anxious because he’s omniscient and omnipotent.
The problem, of course, is that I’m not – and can never be – G-d. I’m a finite, limited, human being. In sum, my Bibliomania is an obsessive compulsive response to the inherent uncertainty and mysteriousness of life. I’m trying to control the uncontrollable. In The Wisdom of Insecurity Allan Watts writes that the answer isn’t more, more, more. The answer is to accept and embrace insecurity, doubt, fear, limits, etc… Only in that way can we truly embrace the present moment and live our lives instead of always waiting for a future in which we will have enough knowledge, money, power or whatever our personal preoccupation is to feel secure. The reality is that that moment is never going to arrive and if we live our lives waiting for it our whole life will pass us by.