What would you write to the future?

In a library in Norway, there’s a room with books by famous authors that you can never read. That is, unless you plan on living till 2114.

Slow down

We don’t think about time enough. It’s a habit our society tries to squeeze out of us.

The instant gratification of social media, the blaring headlines of 24-hour news channels, the commercials and billboards and banner ads that jostle for our attention—all this has the effect of compressing our sense of time. If your attention is entirely consumed by what’s happening now, you have no mental space left over to contemplate anything else.

As a result, the controversies of today—most of which are as ephemeral as clouds—seem to become magnified in importance. We start thinking of the current order of society as immutable, as the way things have always been and will always be. We cease to believe in change, because it happens at timescales we’re not used to perceiving. The future recedes from view, becoming hazy and uncertain.

READ: To learn patience, plant a garden

The accelerating hype cycle of capitalism encourage this tendency. Corporations want your money today, not years from now. Capitalism thrives on impulse buying, on same-day shipping, on products you use once and throw away and have to buy again. There’s no profit to be had in thinking about the far distant future. Generations as yet unborn aren’t buying stuff, so no one is marketing to them or thinking about what they might want or need.

We need an antidote to this temporal nearsightedness. We need more works of creativity and imagination that inspire us to slow down, to take the long view. We need to practice thinking like a tree, like a river, like a mountain.

Voices in tree rings

In 2014, the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, whose work plays with space and time, conceived of an artwork called the Future Library that’s planned to unfold over a hundred years. As she said about the project:

“I was on a train doodling and drawing tree rings and I just made a very fast connection between the rings and chapters in a book, and the idea of trees becoming books in the future and growing over time… And so I imagined this forest, that embodied time and the authors’ words, growing over a century. And each author’s voice became like a chapter inside the growing rings of the trees.”

“Margaret Atwood and other authors have penned novels that won’t publish for 100 years.” Jacopo Prisco, CNN, 22 November 2018.

Each year, one author is invited to submit an unpublished manuscript. Those manuscripts will be held in trust until 2114, a century after the project’s launch, when they’ll all be published and given to the world.

The government of Oslo agreed to support Paterson’s project, signing a hundred-year agreement with the Future Library Trust. (As with the Svalbard seed vault or the Onkalo nuclear-fuel repository, the Scandinavian governments seem unusually foresighted and amenable to long-term thinking.)

In the Nordmarka forest north of Oslo, Paterson and Norwegian foresters cut down a grove of trees. They used the wood to build an annex to the city’s public library. That annex, called the Silent Room, is a quiet, meditative space with an artfully sculpted design that suggests tree rings. In glass display cases, it holds the manuscripts submitted to the Future Library. Visitors can see them, but can’t touch or read them.

In place of the trees that were cut down, the foresters planted a thousand spruce saplings which will grow undisturbed for a century. In the year 2114, those saplings—which, by that time, will have grown into mighty trees—will be harvested. The Silent Room will be opened up, and the manuscripts will go to the printer. The wood from those trees will be made into the paper they’re printed on.

The first writer to submit a manuscript to the Future Library was Margaret Atwood. It’s titled Scribbler Moon, but that’s all we know about it. Other authors have joined since then, one each year, casting their work into the future like bottles thrown into the sea. There’s a ceremony held in the forest every year where each new author formally hands over their completed manuscript.

An author’s act of renunciation

Contemplating this project forces us to envision the future, and that’s what I like about it. A century is far enough to be distant from our perspective, yet not so distant as to be unimaginable. It’s just beyond the veil of where we can reach.

If you were writing to the people of a century hence, what would you have to say? Would you try to craft a story with timeless themes, in the hope that future readers will still find it relevant? Or would you write something intentional in its particularity, aiming to give those readers a window into what it was like to live in our era?

Either way, contributing to the Future Library is an unusually selfless act. As authors, we naturally want our work to be read and appreciated. There’s no greater reward than hearing from readers who found truth and beauty in what we had to say. Public admiration and acclaim is like a drug, one we secretly crave (even if we rarely admit it).

The Future Library makes satisfying that craving impossible. It’s a kind of renunciation—almost a monastic act—to spend your finite time and energy writing a book that no one will read in your lifetime. It’s undoubtedly an honor to be chosen, but it’s also an exercise in setting aside your own ego.

An offering to the future

In a way, this project is a time capsule like any other. It’s a one-way message to the future.

However, most time capsules are purely passive. They’re impervious to time, like fossils, sealed in the dark and left for the future to dig up. By design, they ask nothing of us until the day we unearth them.

The Future Library is more dynamic than that. It’s a living time capsule, one that requires the care and active participation of the people who will eventually inherit it. The trust has to find willing authors; those authors have to write and contribute the manuscripts. The city has to maintain the library where the manuscripts are stored. The foresters have to watch over those growing saplings, protecting them from fire, drought, pests and logging. When the project is complete, someone has to cut down the trees, make them into paper, and arrange for the books to be printed and distributed.

Like precious relics being passed from hand to hand, the Future Library asks each generation to contribute to its upkeep. The founders of the project and the initial authors who contributed won’t live to see it to completion. Even humans in their infancy today most likely won’t be around by then. People will come and go from its board of directors over the decades, helping to keep it going with no expectation of sharing in the reward.

It’s an act of supreme trust: an offering to the future, asking nothing in return. But then, that’s the only way we can relate to the future. We have to trust that those who come after us will make wise choices.

We plant trees whose branches we’ll never sit beneath, hoping that someone else will care for them and delight in their shade. We preserve resources in the hope that the future can make better use of them than we were able to. And we write books and tell stories because we want our descendants to know us. We hope that something of us will endure and pass on the lessons we learned. That’s the mission of every library, whether its books are destined to be read tomorrow, or not for another hundred years.