A badge of honor

Jessica Stillman

In my discussion of unread books a few days ago (see "Thousands of unread books," Aug. 24, 2018), I omitted some of the best arguments as to why this is a good thing. Jessica Stillman fills in these blanks in an article she wrote for Inc.com, which I found on January Magazine.

Unread books help you live longer, she says, or at least give you the will to live longer. It has often been observed that those with a will to live longer, because of some unfinished business, do live longer. All those unread books on the shelf may not be as much incentive as a 90th birthday party or a  family visit, but they can help.

She repeats Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument that read books are far less valuable than unread ones. Unread books in your home remind you daily that you don't already know it all. They give you "intellectual humility," so that whatever your age you know there remains much more to explore much more to discover. If you know how ignorant you are, "you're way ahead of the vast majority of other people," Stillman writes.

She reminds me of what Eric Hoffer writes about intellectuals, or at least the worst kind of intellectuals: They have read so much about some things that they think they know everything about everything. They have become less interested in learning than in lecturing others about what they know, or what they think they know.

Unread books in your personal library, Stillman says, "isn't a sign of failure or ignorance. It's a badge of honor."