When you walk into a proper study, you are confronted by an overwhelming surface of book-spines, all displaying more titles, all at once, than you can consciously read. And yet, you can soak them in rather quickly. They are mostly non-fiction. They are all related to a few topics which are gone into in-depth and overlap like a gradient.
It is clear that the owner has spent several decades amassing this collection, and now sits in this room like the focal point of the concave surface which these books converge into. Through methodical reading, through the gentle weaving of a tapestry of associations and resonances (and some connections), these books have provided a lever out into space, onto which the reader has gradually migrated the interiority of their being. They have, over much applied experience, developed a point of view …