Books That Survived the Move
On library curation, intellectual debts, and texts that outlast economic cycles.
Moving a personal library forces a ruthless audit of one’s intellectual attachments. Half of what one acquires in the heat of a season—the management fables, the immediate political memoirs, the forecasting manifestos—loses its pulse within two years.
What remains on the shelves are the authors who understood human nature and institutional durability: Ibn Khaldun, Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments, Albert Hirschman, and the spare, precise prose of modern African historians.
We read not to confirm our existing prejudices, but to acquire the vocabulary necessary to diagnose our present condition with honesty.