"The librarian in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities only scans titles and tables of contents: his library symbolises the impossibility of reading everything today. The proliferation of lists of novels that you must, allegedly, have perused in your lifetime, reflects this problem while compounding it. On a recent visit to a high street bookshop, I ogled a well-stacked display table devoted to "great" novels "you always meant to read". We measure out our lives with unread books, as well as coffee spoons. (...) The problem, as Kierkegaard observed, is that "more and more becomes possible" when "nothing becomes actual". Literature was a blank canvas that increasingly dreamed of remaining blank." - Amira

"The most beautiful and perfect book in the world," according to Ulises Carrión, "is a book with only blank pages." Such books had featured in eastern legends for centuries (echoed by the blank map in "The Hunting of the Snark" or the blank scroll in Kung Fu Panda), but they only really appeared on bookshelves in the 20th century. They come in the wake of Rimbaud's decision to stop writing, the silence of Lord Chandos; they are contemporaneous with the Dada suicides, Wittgenstein's coda to the Tractatus, the white paintings of Malevich and Rauschenberg, as well as John Cage's 4'33". (...) This very same faith prompts Borges to claim that "for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible" and George Steiner to sense that "A book unwritten is more than a void." (...) [T]he literary is what can never be taken as read." - Amira

Samuel Beckett said of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake … 'It is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to.' - ufuk

"The most beautiful and perfect book in the world," according to Ulises Carrión, "is a book with only blank pages."--either that, or the exact opposite, like a mallarmean 'book of the world' type of thing. - clara glass

could not find that any blank books in Borges' library... perhaps he did not catalogue them, or maybe the reference links were voided :-) No, he meant for you to read the world-in-itself. - Adriano