Catalogue

Screw it. Despite all the modern ideas about 'avoiding labels', I can't help myself. I love classifying things. Everything has its own place – everything – and that's why labels are far more important than any perceived unity through a lack of definition.

Whoever you are, I want to know exactly who you are. I want to classify you to a point that you are completely different from any other entity in the library. And then I want to place you on the right shelf. I want to give you a home where you can feel completely at ease beside those most like you.

Don't get me wrong. I understand that part of the fun is in mixing things up a little and in venturing off the shelf once in a while to see what else there is out there, as surely as I believe that books are meant to be read. Labels don't mean that you're fixed in one place (unless, granted, your label reads 'fixed in one place'), just that you always have a place to return to when you need a break, or a little comfort, or just your own space. Everybody should have that option.

Ah, options. I'm going to swing elsewhere for a moment, because ever since I wrote that little line about options and freewill (wheneva) I've been dying to explain it a little more clearly.

Freewill is, essentially, the continual existence of more than one option. In some cases these options may not be very fun, such as 'eat or die', but in every case I think we can appreciate them, as surely as we are horrified to imagine what life without freewill would be like. (Eat something solid and watch Gamer.)

But it has recently come to my attention that I'm not so much grateful for the fact that I have freewill as I am grateful to have options. It should have been pretty obvious in the beginning, as is clearly illustrated by the insertion of the option 'live without eating' to the above quandary: I am immediately more grateful with the insertion of an option, while technically speaking my degree of freewill remains the same.

In the same sense, forming a catalogue including all the labels in existence doesn't detract from freewill, but makes all the options discernible within the library. Without labels, we would just have two options: perpetuate or change.

And that, dear reader, would be very confusing.

I think its kinda fitting that the word 'Librarian' shares a root with the word 'Liberty'; in Latin, 'Liber' means 'tree bark'. As I am not any sort of genius (and have yet to construct or receive a time machine. Sigh.) I have no idea how the two became entangled, though I imagine a fair deal of legislation was involved.

The point I have just about failed to make is that paper is freedom. Words are options, and only by knowing all the words can you know all the options.