by Jo Alyson Parker
In the Middle Ages, cathedrals could take nearly a hundred years to build, and the early builders would never see the end results of their labors. This idea of cathedral-thinking—that is, thinking beyond one’s own lifetime to the generations that will come after––brings me to an important present-day initiative: Future Library. As its evocative website explains: “A forest in Norway is growing. In 100 years it will become an anthology of books. Every year a writer is contributing a text that will be held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. The texts will be printed on paper made from the trees, only to be read a century from now.” Since 2014, texts have been contributed by some of the world’s most renowned writers from across the globe—Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kang, Karl Ove Knausgard, and more.
Conceived by the gifted Scottish artist Katie Paterson, Future Library compels us to think beyond our own limited existences on Earth—to think in terms of a future we will not see but that we should want to be a livable future for those who follow us. Paterson explains her idea for the project thus: “Future Library is not a directly environmental statement, but involves ecology, the interconnectedness of things—those living now and those still to come. It questions the present tendency to think in short bursts of time, making decisions for those of us living now. It’s an artwork made not only for us living now, but for a future generation, in an unknown time and place” (Paul Harris, Katie Paterson, and David Mitchell, “Archivists of the Future,” in Time’s Urgency, The Study of Time 16, edited by Carlos Montemayor and Robert Daniel, Brill, 2019, pp. 38).
To think in regard to a future generation who will read the books written today is ultimately a hopeful enterprise. Addressing this idea, David Mitchell, who contributed the second manuscript to the project, notes, “I began to think about the beauty of launching a little bottle with my message in it onto the sea of time, knowing that people not yet born will receive it and read it, and think about the long-dead sender of the bottle. . . . It also feels like an affirmation that they, and books, and trees, and Norway, and civilization, will stand there in a hundred years. After the last couple of years, I need that affirmation. . . . In demonstrable everyday senses as well as some strands of Buddhist theology, the future is crafted by thought. The Future Library Project is a manifestation of this idea” (“Archivists,” 38).
We Third Actors will not live to read Mitchell’s novel, alas, but the Future Library initiative encourages us to think—and act––in terms of a future in which our descendants are thriving in a healing world, engaging in their own cathedral-building, and taking pleasure in reading David Mitchell’s From Me Flows What You Call Time.