Books a Love Story (pdf with notes)

Books: a love story
Tim O’Reilly
@timoreilly

Ignite!:Unconferenz
February 26, 2012

Tuesday, April 17, 12
At first I planned to talk about some of the technical topics I’m interested in these days, but I thought it might be fun instead to talk about why I love
books, and to share some personal stories about books that have played a part in my life.

You may think of the kinds of books I publish

You might at ﬁrst think of the kinds of practical books I publish. At O’Reilly, we say our business is “changing the world by spreading the
knowledge of innovators” and that’s exactly what these books do. They are _tools_ for transmitting knowledge from mind to mind.

“Time-binding”
“Language is a map”
“The map is not the territory”

This is what Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, called “time binding”, that fundamental human activity by which
we embody knowledge in artifacts (starting with language itself) that enable it to be transmitted to other people and down the
ages. Korzybski’s notion that language is a map, and “the map is not the territory” also resonated, surprisingly, with my love of
poetry.

“The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.”

“said words of the world are the life of the world”

“searches the possible for its possibleness”

-from An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

Poetry too is a map, a way of helping us see more
deeply.

Take Wallace Stevens. I discovered his poetry in high school and it’s been with me ever since. He talks about the way a poem
“searches the possible for its possibleness”. Poetry too is a map that helps us to see more deeply. The same is true of ﬁction

“The smallness and the
meanness of the towns is a
testament to the courage it
took to put them there.”

Consider this lovely passage from Gilead, a love story that reﬂects on the history of the American midwest in the 19th century. A
spark jumps from mind to mind, and you see the world in a new way.

“The skill of writing is to create a
context in which other people can
think.”

-Edwin Schlossberg

Edwin Schlossberg summed this up beautifully when he
said ....

• The Open Source Paradigm Shift
• What is Web 2.0?
• Government as a Platform
• The Maker movement

And that’s what I was trying to do when I wrote pieces like ... I was trying to build maps that help people to see the world more
clearly, and not to take wrong turns.

“Rid of formalized wisdom and learning
People would be a hundredfold happier,
Rid of conventionalized duty and honor
People would find their families dear,
Rid of legalized profiteering
People would have no thieves to fear.”

This is also the right way to think about philosophy and religion, as maps to the moral side of our lives. This book is the heart of
my philosophy of life. I’m always ﬁnding something new in it, like this passage... It starts out like a formula for a successful
unconference, and ends with a good lesson for Hollywood and the music industry.

Culture is literature, art,
music, and philosophy as put
to work in your own life, as
opposed to “mere education”

And that brings me to another way in which books are tools, described by John Cowper Powys in The Meaning of Culture. He
talks about how culture, as opposed to education, is the way that you put literature, art, music and philosophy to work in your
own life. Let me give a very personal example. In 1969, I went to visit the north of England. I stayed at a B&B near the
headwaters of the River Derwent, and swam every day in the swimming hole there.

More than just a swimming hole: 1066 touches me in 1969
The headwaters of the River Derwent, the river that ran
red with blood when Harold, the last of the Saxon
kings, fought off Tostig and the Vikings before going
down to meet William at Hastings in 1066

But it wasn’t just any swimming hole. Because I was reading a historical novel called The Golden Warrior, I was swimming in...

But that book also ﬁred me up about a notion of leadership, which I also thrilled to in the opening pages of Frank Herbert’s
Dune, the idea that leadership is a compact of mutual loyalty between a leader and those who follow him. That’s a notion that
modern business leaders seem to have forgotten.

A powerful sense of the dangers
of predicting the future.

Dune of course was also about someone who had the power to see the future, and the dangers of locking in the futures you can
see. I went on to write a book - my ﬁrst book - about Frank Herbert and his ideas.

• “One of his central ideas is
that human consciousness
exists on--and by virtue of--a
dangerous edge of crisis,
and that the most essential
human strength is the ability
to dance on that edge. The
more man confronts the
dangers of the unknown, the
more conscious he
becomes.”
• Full text at http://
tim.oreilly.com/herbert/

The book opened with this thought:

A vision of a richer, more
measured life in an
imaginary country much like
old New Zealand

But I also was shaped by a gentler vision. One of my favorite books as a teenager was this utopian novel about an imaginary
country much like old Hawaii. it is part of what motivated me to settle in Sebastopol, and to articulate ideas about business as
something that supports a richer life rather than a frenzied goal of proﬁt for its own sake.

“Given that we can live
only a small part of what
there is in us, what
happens to the rest?”

And sometimes books strike you like a bolt of lightning. This line, in a novel about a man who changes his life in middle age, led
me on a path to deep changes in my own life.

But a personal culture of books isn’t just about the big stuff; it’s also about the little idiosyncracies that you stuff your head with.
I have a corn on my right foot, and every time I see that little hard callous, I think “maybe I have Mekstrom’s disease”, and if
you’d read Space Plague, you might think so too!

Anne of Green Gables

Or consider Anne of Green Gables, a children’s book that I read in my thirties that came to be one of my all time favorite books.
The heroine reminded me of my own daughter. But the book also has deep lessons. It’s a story about an orphan girl adopted by
an elderly brother and sister to help them on their farm in their declining years. They expected a boy, and when Matthew, the
brother,

Anne of Green Gables

“A girl! What use can
she be to us?”
“I was thinking maybe
we could be of some
use to her.”

Megan Follows and Richard Farnsworth

played in the movie version by Richard Farnsworth, brings her home, Marilla, his sister says ... and he says in his slow, kind
drawl ... This has occurred to me so often as a reminder of the values I aspire to. When I say “Create more value than you
capture,” it’s images like this that form the deep backstop of that in my soul.

• Delacroix paints the
Biblical story of Jacob
wrestling with an Angel

• Rilke treats this same
story in his poem
The Man Watching

Or consider Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, a painting by Delacroix that my daughter took me to see in Paris. I later read a poem
by Rilke about this same Biblical story, which I then put to good use in my talks inspiring hackers to work on stuff that matters.
Jacob can’t possibly beat the angel, but comes away stronger from the ﬁght.

I use it to inspire geeks to work on stuff that matters

and Rilke says something like this: “What we ﬁght with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be
defeated decisively by successively greater beings.” And that is a ﬁnal gift of books: they inspire us to reach further and deeper
to change the world.

Books a Love Story (pdf with notes)

More Related Content

What's hot (6)

Viewers also liked (10)

Similar to Books a Love Story (pdf with notes) (20)

More from Tim O'Reilly (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Books a Love Story (pdf with notes)