Future Library: a library with unreadable manuscripts

Have you heard about a Library with unreadable manuscripts?

It was totally new to me until a few days back. So recently there was a ceremony, in a forest north of Oslo in Norway, 2022, the Future Library ceremony.

What makes the library strange is “it is a collection of stories for the future”.

A library with unreadable manuscripts!!

Future Library: A forested room holding unread manuscripts from famous authors, not to be published or read until the year 2114!

(see it on Google Earth).

Ceremony attendees sit among the growing trees that will provide the paper for the library.

Everyone who were present for the ceremony knew they would not live to see that happen, nor would they ever get to read the books.

(Credit: Future Library/Jola McDonald)

A literary manuscript will be placed each year for 100 years in the Silent Room in an Oslo library.

This is a project started in 2014 by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. Each year, an author writes a manuscripts and gives it to the library to be buried. Then, a century after the project began, they will all finally be published. A newly planted forest of 1,000 trees near Oslo will be tended for 100 years which will provide the paper for a special collection of books.

Oslo’s city leaders have also signed a contract formally committing them and their successors to protect the forest and library over the next 100 years.

(A few extracts taken from Future Library).

This is a bridge across generations, a time capsule!

In fact I feel so thrilled to read about this time capsule and the brain behind it, Katie Paterson who has created projects like All the Dead Stars that maps 27,000 dead stars and Future Library. Her work engages with deep time – an idea that describes the history of the Earth over a time span of millions of years.

I feel Future Library is an invisible thread transmitting energy to even the unborn.

What attracted me a lot in this artistic time capsule are,

• Gifting yourself selflessly to the future generation.
• The sentiments are transferred to future not just some materialistic possessions.
• The relationship with time… making a bridge across generations
• And above all nurturing the unborn together as a community

I wish

I had no reason to think it. But I can wish, nah..?

“They will chose me and one day my manuscript would find a place in that time capsule. And my future generation would be proudly reading me when the glass drawers in Oslo’s main public library are unlocked and the book published in 2114”

But this is for sure, “One day I will spend time in the Silent Room, which houses the manuscripts”

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