Umberto Eco Gomes, curator of the Umerian library, which contained the Umerian chronicles – The History of the Origin of the Empire.

» The writer Umberto Eco Gomes is one of the few scholars with encyclopedic knowledge, an inquisitive mind, and something interesting to say. He owns an extensive library (containing thirty thousand books), and divides his visitors into two categories: those who respond to her with an exclamation: «Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a great library! How many of these books have you read? ”And the others – a very small minority – who understand that a private library is not meant to tickle the owner’s vanity, but is a research tool. Read books are much less valuable than unread books. Such a library should contain as much knowledge that you do not yet have, as much as it allows you to put it there your financial condition, mortgage rates and the difficult situation on the real estate market. As you age, you will accumulate more and more knowledge and more books, and the increasing number of unread items on the shelves will feel like a pang of conscience for you. That’s how it works, the more you know, the more rows of unread books you have in your library. Let’s call this collection of unread books anti-library.
We usually treat our knowledge as private property that we should protect and guard. It is an ornament that allows us to climb the career ladder. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensitivity by focusing on the known is a human error that extends to our mental operations. People don’t flaunt anti-resumes. They don’t broadcast what they haven’t studied or experienced (that’s the job of their competition), but it would be nice if they did. We need to turn not only the logic of the libraries upside down; we will also work to turn knowledge itself on its head.
Note that the Black Swans stem from the fact that we do not understand the probability of unexpected events – the key lies precisely in these unread books. We take what we already know a little too seriously. »