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The problem with libraries is that they can be so large, impressive, and filled with knowledge
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that they unwittingly embed in us an idea that everything worth registering, everything
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valuable and true, must lie ‘out there’, must already have been classed on a shelf
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with an index number to await our discovery the moment we cease to be so preoccupied with
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ourselves.
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But what this modest, respectful and quietly self-hating conclusion disguises is that each
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one of us is an unparalleled and superlative center of knowledge in and of ourselves; our
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minds have more ideas stored in them than are to be found in the collective catalogues
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of the Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New
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York and the British library in London; we have vaults filled with a greater number of
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moving and beautiful scenes than those of the world’s greatest museums put together.
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We are just failing to wander the stacks and galleries as often as we should; we are failing
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to notice what we have seen.
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So convinced are we that insights of worth lie beyond us, we have omitted to consult
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the treasury of thoughts and visions generated every hour by our endlessly brilliant, fatefully
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unexplored minds.
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The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked: ‘In the minds of geniuses,
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we find - once more - our own neglected thoughts.’
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In other words, geniuses don’t have thoughts that are in the end so very different from
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our own; they have simply had the confidence to take them more seriously.
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Rather than imagining that their minds are only a pale shadow of the minds of infinitely
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greater thinkers who lived and died elsewhere long ago, they have been respectful enough
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of their existence to conceive that one or two properly valuable ideas might plausibly
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chose to alight in the familiar aviary of their own intelligences.
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Thinking is – in a way we generally refuse to imagine – a truly democratic activity.
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We all have very similar and very able minds; where geniuses differ is in their more confident
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inclinations to study them properly.