Der Spiegel has interviewed Umberto Eco about an exhibit he is curating at the Louvre. The exhibit focuses on the importance of lists to culture and art. It may sound a bit off the wall, but Eco gets at some fundamental aspects of human nature. He says in the interview that people make lists in an attempt to feel like they are managing the uncontrollable diversity and immensity of life. We know we’ll never encompass all of it, but we keep on trying to establish some kind of control. He goes so far as to say that we like lists because we fear death.
This idea of trying to impose some kind of logical order and control on the world seems to me particularly important today, when we have so many choices available to us and so much information to try to assimilate. One example I thought of is that it’s impossible to keep up with all the books being published on any topic or in any genre, so the ubiquitous “Top 10” or “Top 100” list is a godsend. Another is that so many travel destinations beckon; where should we go? I get over 19 million hits on Google when I search on “places to see before you die”; multiple hits all refer to the same “1000 places to see” book, but plenty of other hits refer to a variety of other lists.
I’ve always been fond of “great books” lists and reading lists of all sorts; when I was younger they gave me a feeling of optimism and of worlds opening up in front of me to study and appreciate. However, as Iain Pears writes, in An Instance of the Fingerpost, “It is cruel that we are granted the desire to know, but denied the time to do so properly. We all die frustrated; it is the greatest lesson we have to learn.” In my middle years, I am realizing that I’m not even going to get through all the book lists I would like to, never mind all the individual books in their sometimes perplexing multiplicity. However, I can agree with Eco that having the lists helps me feel like I’ve got at least a tiny handle on infinity. At any rate, I’m not going to stop making them any time soon.
If I made a list of books I should read, I expect I’d get through one or two of them and then go out of my way to find something good that wasn’t on the list. Imposition of order on the universe inevitably means self-confinement; after all, our selves–and not the universe–are really the things upon which we are capable of imposing order. Of course mental self-confinement has some very appealling advantages (its absence is presumably ADHD), but also its share of disadvantages.