El arte del saber ligero

Our unease in the face of information overload is not a new phenomenon. Long before the arrival of the digital world and the Internet, our reading ancestors worriedly experienced the effects of the infinite accumulation of books and writings. But along with the tradition that always wants to increase the library's collections there is another, minor and subversive, that warns of the dangers we run of seeing ourselves buried by the past. From Petrarch to Voltaire, passing through the first philologists, the baroque encyclopedists, the French revolutionaries, and Montaigne, the protagonists of this essay present contradictory traits. Here, the avant-garde and the anti-modern seal the opposite pact to that of Faust: instead of giving up his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge, the idea of how to put a limit on the desire to know everything is explored. Armed with scissors, these readers create portable libraries and other abbreviated, light and mobile forms of knowledge with the goal of removing knowledge from dusty shelves and practicing truly transformative humanism. His art of reduction reminds us that barbarism is reached as quickly by the lack of books as by their overabundance.