Ring Eight — The Library

02034

Turn it up loud enough for the unborn to hear.

In 2014, the artist Katie Paterson planted a thousand spruce seedlings in the Nordmarka forest outside Oslo. In 2114 they will be felled and made into paper, and on that paper will be printed one hundred manuscripts — one collected each year, for a hundred years, from a living writer. The project is called Future Library. Framtidsbiblioteket.

Each manuscript is handed over in the forest, sealed, and read by no one — not an editor, not the writer’s family, not the writer ever again. They wait together in the Silent Room at the top of Oslo’s public library, a small chamber lined with wood milled from the trees that were cleared to plant the new forest. The titles are displayed. The pages are not. Most of the people who will read the first one have not been born.

The first writer to hand hers over was Margaret Atwood, in 2015 — a manuscript called Scribbler Moon, about which nothing else is known. She called the whole undertaking a vote of confidence in the future.

Your rings are a library of one hundred and twenty months, sealed the same way. Two more remain.

Who is the not-yet-born reader of what you are doing this year?

Knock once next September

This page will never ask you for anything.
No account. No list. It only gives.

— Ian ✦