The book, like the spoon, belongs to those objects that are invented once and for all.

Reading Note

How to Order a Library

by Roberto Calasso — read in November 2025

The book, like the spoon, belongs to those objects that are invented once and for all — in ancient times or even very recently. Our repertoire of gestures is extremely limited. And objects are attempts, more or less successful, to adapt to the inevitable characteristics of these gestures.

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Informatics has reduced the time required to search for a book. It is one of many examples of the illusory omnipotence fostered by machines.

How to find space for the new without eliminating the old? Even this, like most essential problems, has no solution.

The virtual registration of any screen enhances images but weakens the word, which demands an opaque, resistant background — paper, clay or stone. And the movement of the hand writing on paper is the extreme, miniaturized variant of that of the hand drawing. While the ticking of the hand typing is assimilation to that of a clock.

Consider, contemplate: names derived from astrological study, from confronting the stars. (Robert Eisler, Royal Art of Astrology)

The good that comes from a book is not in the facts that can be drawn from it, but in the type of resonance it awakens in our minds.

"Have you read them all?" — the peculiar question of someone who doesn't know what reading means.

The sensation of the immense, beneficent prevalence of the unknown over the known.

This global process — the shift from page to screen — clearly stains even the books that are written today. Writers are now considered part of the content producers sector, and many are content with that. But this presumes the obsolescence of form. And where there is no form, there is no literature.

For the Calasso who goes even further back, toward myth and origin, see The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.