The Antifragility of Libraries

The Antifragility of Libraries

Nero lived a life of mixed (and transient) asceticism, going to bed as close to nine o’clock as he could, sometimes even earlier in the winter. He tried to leave parties when the effect of alcohol made people start talking to strangers about their personal lives or, worse, turn metaphysical. Nero preferred to conduct his activities by daylight, trying to wake up in the morning with the sun’s rays gently penetrating his bedroom, leaving stripes on the walls.

He spent his time ordering books from booksellers on the Web, and very often read them. Having terminated his turbulent, extremely turbulent, adventures, like Sindbad the sailor and Marco Polo the Venetian traveler, he ended up settling for a quiet and sedate life of post-adventure.

Nero was the victim of an aesthetic ailment that brings revulsion, even phobia, toward: people wearing flip-flops, television, bankers, politicians (right-wing, left-wing, centrists), New Jersey, rich persons from New Jersey (like Fat Tony), rich persons who take cruises (and stop in Venice wearing flip-flops), university administrators, grammatical sticklers, name droppers, elevator music, and well-dressed salespersons and businessmen. As for Fat Tony, he had different allergies: the empty suit, which we speculate is someone who has a command of all the superfluous and administrative details of things but misses the essential (and isn’t even aware of it), so his conversation becomes mere chitchat around the point, never getting to the central idea.

And Fat Tony was a smeller of fragility. Literally. He claimed that he could figure out a person from seeing him just walk into a restaurant, which was almost true. But Nero had noticed that Fat Tony, when talking to people for the first time, got very close to them and sniffed them, just like a dog, a habit of which Fat Tony wasn’t even aware.

Nero belonged to a society of sixty volunteer translators collaborating on previously unpublished ancient texts in Greek, Latin, or Aramaic (Syriac) for the French publishing house Les Belles Lettres. The group is organized along libertarian lines, and one of their rules is that university titles and prestige give no seniority in disputes. Another rule is mandatory attendance at two “dignified” commemorations in Paris, every November 7, the death of Plato, and every April 7, the birth of Apollo. His other membership is in a local club of weight lifters that meets on Saturdays in a converted garage. The club is mostly composed of New York doormen, janitors, and mobster-looking fellows who walk around in the summer wearing sleeveless “wife-beater” shirts.

Alas, men of leisure become slaves to inner feelings of dissatisfaction and interests over which they have little control. The freer Nero’s time, the more compelled he felt to compensate for lost time in filling gaps in his natural interests, things that he wanted to know a bit deeper. And, as he discovered, the worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper. The sea gets deeper as you go further into it, according to a Venetian proverb.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well. Nero lived, at the time of writing, among fifteen thousand books, with the stress of how to discard the empty boxes and wrapping material after the arrival of his daily shipment from the bookstore. One subject Nero read for pleasure, rather than the strange duty-to-read-to-become-more-learned, was medical texts, for which he had a natural curiosity. The curiosity came from having had two brushes with death, the first from a cancer and the second from a helicopter crash that alerted him to both the fragility of technology and the self-healing powers of the human body. So he spent a bit of his time reading textbooks (not papers—textbooks) in medicine, or professional texts.

Nero’s formal training was in statistics and probability, which he approached as a special branch of philosophy. He had been spending all his adult life writing a philosophical-technical book called Probability and Metaprobability. His tendency was to abandon the project every two years and take it up again two years later. He felt that the concept of probability as used was too narrow and incomplete to express the true nature of decisions in the ecology of the real world.

Nero enjoyed taking long walks in old cities, without a map. He used the following method to detouristify his traveling: he tried to inject some randomness into his schedule by never deciding on the next destination until he had spent some time in the first one, driving his travel agent crazy—when he was in Zagreb, his next destination would be determined by his state of mind while in Zagreb. Largely, it was the smell of places that drew him to them; smell cannot be conveyed in a catalogue.

Mostly, when in New York, Nero sat in his study with his writing desk set against the window, occasionally looking dreamily at the New Jersey shore across the Hudson River and reminding himself how happy he was to not live there. So he conveyed to Fat Tony that the “I have no use for you” was reciprocal (in equally nondiplomatic terms), which, as we will see, was not true.