Prof. Dario Martinelli, Head of KTU International Semiotics Institute
What present is better than books? They are inexpensive, they make you look smart, and the recipient cannot show disappointment in receiving it, because s/he has to look smart as well. Let us visit a bookshop, then: is it only me, or these places are getting totally packed with guides entitled 1001 places to visit before you die, 1001 books to read before it’s too late, etc.?
Let alone that all these references to my imminent death cause me a vague state of anxiety, and let alone that listing and charting has become the disease of the century: what puzzles me is the mathematical aspect of this trend. A good book, read in proper conditions and with proper concentration, demands a good week to be finished (always counting on the fact that it is not “War and Peace” or “Ulysses” we are talking about, otherwise we need more). 1001 books divided by 52 (the weeks in a year) makes – wait for it – twenty years. Twenty years means that if I kill a man, I am out of jail before I finish the books. If we also add the music albums to listen to, the movies to watch, the places to visit and the artworks to admire (the latter also requiring a lot of travelling across museums all over the world), then it becomes clear that these guides can be afforded only by highlanders.
Which also means: if we need a lifetime to read/hear/watch all that stuff, how did they (the authors of such guides) manage to make it? How did these geniuses find time to visit who-knows-how-many-thousands of places, and select the 1001 very best ones? How many movies one needs to watch before something at the level of Citizen Kane or Vertigo appears?
So, before you enter a bookshop and get tempted to buy one of those guides, I would like to share with you my investigation on the subject. There is a particular character on the World Wide Web, whom I shall take as example. His name is P.S. (I am not aiming at him in particular, so revealing his full name is not so important, but of course it is available at request), and he runs a homepage amazingly crowded with reviews of all kinds: novels, movies, records, scientific essays… He orders everything in charts, gives marks, categorizes by period, style, author and opus. A “serial lister”, really.
He introduces himself as poet, historian and free-thinker, and says that his jobs are: cognitive scientist, writer, poet, music historian, film historian, political commentator and software consultant. Among his hobbies, we find “adventure travelling”, literature, arts and international politics. He visited 102 different countries and declares to have 128 friends. He was born in 1955, and has published several books. He started to compile his numerous databases and charts about 30 years ago (bear with me: we wil need all these data later).
Leonardo da Vinci looks like a lazy hippie, in comparison.
Mr. PS, according to the last available update, declares to have reviewed 7344 musicians, 551 books, 3727 movies.
So, let us calculate:
1) Music. Supposing that a musician releases some 7 albums in a career (certainly not an over-estimation: if it is true that some acts disappear after 3 or 4 releases, it is also true that many go easily over 10), we reach 51408 albums (let’s say 50,000 to make things easier). An album lasts averagely 40 minutes, so we reach 33,000 hours of listening. Let’s say 30,000. We divide by 24 (hours in a day) and we get 1,250 days. That is, three-and-half years, 24/7 without break, spent only on playing records.
2) Books. 551. Let us generously imagine that Mr. PS is a superfast reader and gets rid of any book (Proust included) in 48 hours. We get to 26,448 hours, that is 1,102 days, that is more than 3 consecutive years. Still in the 24/7 mode.
3) Movies. 3,727. Two hours of average length per movie makes 7,454, a bit more than a year.
Thus, only to get acquainted with the sources, we need seven years and a half (let’s say seven). Without break. In fact, to be honest, when I have to review an album, I need to play it at least three times. If I wrote a review of Mahler’s 5th symphony or Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue after playing them once only, I would be simply fooling my readers, selling a very superficial analysis as “expert’s opinion”. Thus, we like to think that the various PS’s of this world are taking their job seriously. And, in doing this, I am also ready to acknowledge that Mr. PS is far cleverer than me, so let’s assume that consulting any work not more than twice is enough for him to understand them. So, seven years, multiplied by two, makes 14.
Now, let’s give the guy a decent life. Let’s give him 7 hours per day of deserved rest, 2 hours for meals, personal hygiene, health care and physiological needs; 7 hours between actual work, transportation and professional update, taking into account all his jobs (he writes poetry, prepares and gives lectures and conferences, interviews, reads about cognitive sciences, offers IT consultations, has to keep up-to-date with the world’s political situation, etc.). 3 more hours for social relations, including his 128 friends, the unavoidable talks with publishers and colleagues, some bureaucracy, and a bit of sex that we all hope he indulges himself in. Finally, one more hour for typing his material, at a speed that Dan Brown’s secretary could only dream of. We are still ignoring the 102 countries he visited, but never mind: let’s say that PS works during the trips, and spends his entire holidays with the iPod, listening to the music he will eventually review.
That all amounts to 20 hours, so only four hours (and not 24) are devoted to play/watch/read the material he reviews. This means that our initial 14 years must be multiplied by 6 (i.e., 24:4).
That’s 84.
Years.
Our hero was born in 1955, and he has collected material for 30 years only.
Our target is 30, not 84. Oops.
Proposal: let us say he sleeps less, eats at fast-foods, writes pataphysical poetry and practices sexual abstinence. We have a far less healthy person, but we saved at least two hours per day. So, now we can multiply 14 by 4. Still, bad news: we get to 56. He turns 60 this year: did he start his reviews when he was four???
Of course, the truth is very different: in order to fit in any reasonable calculation we have to admit that Mr. PS does not listen to/watch/read anything more than once in his life, if he does at all (even like that he needs to have a super-active and super-efficient life, with no distractions whatsoever). His reviews, when read carefully, are full of mistakes and omissions, and so are those that you will find in any guide in bookshops: most of the works reviewed are hardly touched: few minutes per work if we are lucky (just to get an idea, try to understand Psycho by just seeing the girl escaping with the money, or Moby Dick by just reading the pages where the anatomy of whales is described).
The truth is: these guides are only recycling existing reviews of various works, without any specific research or added value from the authors. It’s commonsense sold as illumination. Somebody should write a guide called 1001 guides to avoid before you die.
We live in an era when specializing on something is discouraged and the cultural patchworks are dominating. Reality becomes more complicated with time, and instead of being offered interpretive tools to cope with it, we are just suggested to replace it with the over-simplification of “shopping lists”. We are promised the essential, the all-you-need-is-this, and in return we renounce freedom of choice, pleasure of searching for something, and ultimately participation in our own life.
If we are planning to buy books for our dear ones, let us go “searching” for the right ones, let us open them, browse them, read the back-cover synopsis, let us get charmed by their promises and let us buy one for ourselves. As Umberto Eco once wrote, books suffer if we don’t abuse them.
And, by the way, Happy Christmas to everybody.
