On encyclopedic urges

Four quotes:

"I see. You desire a catalog of all imaginary creatures from the dawn of time until the present day. From the ancient Greeks with their Minotaur to the Norsemen's All-Father." Dr. Flowers smiled, cherishing the absurdity of the request. "From the Fair Folk to the leprechauns. From the mermaids of the deep to the vampires of Serbia — "
— T. Baggins. Soulless. 2013.

“In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.”
— Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar. Monster Portraits. Brookline, Mass.: Rose Metal Press, 2018.

“Encyclopedias provide factual information, but they, like all texts, are authored, constructed so that subjects become captured. Things can be held under a magnifying glass one entry at a time, forever. Does that permanence give them a sort of truth that they are still existing? How, I wonder, does a writer account for the ways time is written into entries? Surely, definitions shift. Things change, and therefore so do meanings—but on the page, the words are impervious to adaptation, to learning. Maybe I can gain something from that sort of cataloguing now. After all, it was those books I went to so often back then, when I wanted to understand something.”
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 33.

"We as a culture have been content to analyze melancholy and intellectualize depression since we had the words for either, and likely even before this walls were strewn with highbrow marks about some hunter’s lost prey. Not being above that, there is doubtless some desire to utilize academic means or the analytical part of me to understand why my brain seems to want to set itself on fire. However, knowing mere analysis will only lead to further analysis, some dimension had to present itself to disrupt that tendency. Thus, much of the work here has been rewritten, and unwritten in an atypical approach to nonfiction. I don’t think that I believe in nonfiction. Language is as subjective and impossible as depression itself, so I have not attempted to reach anything like objective truth. I've sought a means of transmission, and what remains of it in reception seems beyond my grasp. I have warped old journals and papers and rewritten them because that is depression to me, that is anxiety and addiction and the only true means I’ve found of escape is through, as the old poem goes. So through the documents, the feelings, the intellectualizing and not, the anger, the sorrow, the misery, the piss, the blood, the wasted days and weeks and months and lives in seas of ugly rotting sentiment, or sediment, the only means that seemed to make any sense was total inclusion, and abjection in turn."
— Grant Maierhofer. Peripatet. Inside the Castle, 2019. pp. 295 – 296 of PDF

"Ecologists have reoriented their field as a 'crisis discipline,' a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same."
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024

If these ideas interest you, you may want to know that I wrote a biography of a man with encyclopedia-writing tendencies. The book is Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.

On the unhappiness of the frustrated writer more generally

Elif Batuman (Jul 08, 2026):

"...the part of my own book that I’m working on right now, which is about Selin in the first few years after college...

...why am I still writing about that? But my core belief is that that very avoidance is worthy of examination. I mean, so many people feel that way about their 20s—and at the earliest opportunity they escape it into the dignity of actual adulthood, a stable relationship, etc.; and then that has a way leading into parenthood (“I have way too much to think about now instead of just obsessing over my dumb self”)—and then their kids are in their 20s and then they can’t wait to not think about it anymore. So I want to think about it.

Anyway, for me (and Selin), the defining “problem” of those years was wanting so much to be a novelist, and having no idea how to do it. And that’s just what The Magician and Famesick are about, at least at the beginning: someone in their early 20s who desperately wants to be a writer/ artist, and can’t produce at the level of their desire, and has no clear career path or trajectory, and how bad it feels. And then there is the “relationships and sex” B-plot, which is also depressing, and becomes part of that same “unhappiness” that later they don’t take seriously.

I recently had coffee with one of my best friends from that time in my life, and she said, of our 20s, “Remember how unhappy we thought we were?” As if what we had then was only an idea of unhappiness—not actual unhappiness, which we didn’t know yet. And to an extent that is what it now feels like: like that was such an “innocent time.” But I don’t think this feeling now is more true than that feeling was then.