I agree that the inclusion of Moore’s book was probably intended to connect it with the story, and possibly comment on it in some way. It occurred to me that both Moore’s Utopia and Borges’s are arranged in a way that offends and confuses modern sensibilities and values.
But the theme of unnecessary books doesn’t seem to have anything to do with censorship at all. As I tried to explain in this essay, it seems far more in tune with the sentiment many intellectuals and readers have at least occasionally, which is that they are constantly reading book after book, or maybe Substack essay after essay, without truly absorbing everything that they are reading. Quantity over quality, essentially.
Think of the archetypal monk or scholar who intensely studies a handful of books that they fully learn from and memorise, then compare it with the stereotypical bookworm that reads book after book in a library, only reading each once or twice before forgetting about it and moving on to the next thing. The people of Borges’s “Utopia” are a culture who not only value the former archetype far more than the latter, but consider the “Bookworm archetype” as evil in some sense.
I suspect Thomas More’s utopia was selected deliberately as a form of intertext. The talk of unnecessary books makes me think of censorship.
I agree that the inclusion of Moore’s book was probably intended to connect it with the story, and possibly comment on it in some way. It occurred to me that both Moore’s Utopia and Borges’s are arranged in a way that offends and confuses modern sensibilities and values.
But the theme of unnecessary books doesn’t seem to have anything to do with censorship at all. As I tried to explain in this essay, it seems far more in tune with the sentiment many intellectuals and readers have at least occasionally, which is that they are constantly reading book after book, or maybe Substack essay after essay, without truly absorbing everything that they are reading. Quantity over quality, essentially.
Think of the archetypal monk or scholar who intensely studies a handful of books that they fully learn from and memorise, then compare it with the stereotypical bookworm that reads book after book in a library, only reading each once or twice before forgetting about it and moving on to the next thing. The people of Borges’s “Utopia” are a culture who not only value the former archetype far more than the latter, but consider the “Bookworm archetype” as evil in some sense.