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 out of this world on which to stand and look back into it, from which they can acquire the force to even move it.

This perspective is embodied in their every movement, every interaction in life, as second natural. It is their articulation of every scene, and motivation for gesticulation within it. When they stand in line to make a purchase, or hail a vehicle for transport, or look someone in the eye, they are operating from out of this point out in space which they have migrated their essence to. They operate as this point.

While in conversation, in their study, they can deftly grab any title from off the shelf and wave it in subtle reference, as a foundation for whatever point they are in the midst of making. They’ll lay a stack of books in front of you as a visual trace of the logic underlying the surface of their extemporaneous speech. This isn’t for their benefit — they have already internalized, through study, the gist of the books. This is for yours — a symbolic offering of the long-pathway toward fully comprehending their journey into being, into comprehension. “Here, if you like, would be how to slog your way through formulating on your own the way to where I am at.” To read this as an explicit demand that one go home and stay up all night consuming a half-dozen tomes misses the purpose of this action. It isn’t a dare, but rather a promise of authenticity. The books, as exteriorizations of their interior self, are a reveal of transparency, an offering of vulnerability, a full disclosure.

The collective impression one gets from the spines of the myriad books which line the walls of the study is that of a few topics delved into deeply. A short, shallow arc, precisely ground, which casts its focal point far away, and implies the completion of the circle, in negative, in their ignorance. By polishing the curvature of this arc, all the more clearly can what is not known be roughly projected out to a distant space on the opposing side of the imaginary circle. Having found grounding, through grinding, the whole is dimly perceivable as a lack, a great opening of never-to-be-mastered perspectives which the rest of humanity must, and does, complete for them. What the owner doesn’t know would fill great halls far eclipsing their modest study, and yet their study’s position within such a hall is easily placable — and that is all that matters. A dim perception of such a hall, at all, is all that can be hoped for, and is achievement enough for a single human lifetime. They do not stand where their arc of well-studied topics is — they dwell far from it, at the focal point, meeting the rest of the world half-way.

This is the immediate impression one gets from walking into a proper study.