Ms. Schalansky, you were selected as the ninth out of a total of 100 authors by the Norwegian “Future Library”. How do you explain the project to someone who has never heard of it?
Judith Schalansky: The “Future Library” is an art project initiated in 2014 by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. The idea is to ask an author every year for a manuscript that will be kept for 100 years without anyone seeing it. At the same time, Paterson planted 1,000 spruce seedlings in Nordmarka Forest near Oslo. In the year 2114, these trees will be felled and made into paper on which the texts will then be printed.
Where are the lyrics then?
In a special room in Oslo’s new library, built from the trees that gave way to the 1000 spruces. A friend of mine who’s been there said it was like being in a sauna combined with the belly of a giant ancient animal. There the manuscripts lie on non-ageing paper, as it is sometimes called in English, “buried”. In translucent drawers on which the author’s name is carved. The shrine will not be opened until 2114. This is the materialized side of the project.
what is the other
This is actually the forest clearing. It can be reached on foot in thirty minutes from a bus station. It’s just a short trip from Oslo. It is interesting that they chose spruce, of all things. Spruces are not trees that have been revered for centuries like oaks or ash trees. They are absolutely useful trees that have been planted by forestry for 200 years to use their wood for construction, furniture or paper production. In the meantime, the local forests are starting to remove their monocultures because they need moist soil.
Is it possible that climate change will ensure that the 1000 spruce trees will not see the year 2114 at all?
Yes, or the bark beetle will come. I like that these little-respected trees are now taboo. You can visit and look at them, but you can’t cut them down for 100 years because they have a purpose. They are “consecrated”. It could be seen as a revival of old European tree worship. This is also supported by the fact that the handover takes place in May.
I saw a video of this handover. It is a real procession. The number of pilgrims increases year after year.
It’s a made-up tradition. You watch the trees grow and realize that even literature and imagination, as soon as we share them, need resources. Incidentally, the oldest tree in the world, Old Tjikko, is less than 300 kilometers away in central Sweden and is: a spruce. It is over 9500 years old and looks like a wrinkled little Christmas tree. But it’s about as old as the sedentarization of the human species.
Against this background, 100 years is not that much.
It still transcends our lives and our horizons of imagination.
“There is no redemption”: The writer Judith Schalansky in the Gotha Research Library
(Photo: Friedrich Bungert)
This is where lore comes into play. In 100 years, no one involved in the project today will be alive. But someone has to ensure that it actually continues as prescribed. Who will that be?
Margaret Atwood said that it is not even known today whether there will be anything like Norway or forests in 100 years. A valid objection. But there is a foundation that takes care of the project. That reminds me of the so-called “nuclear priests”. In the late 1970s there were semiotic groups thinking about how to warn future generations about the poison we left them. The skull and crossbones could mean something else a thousand years from now, and the excavations at the tombs of the pharaohs have shown that written warnings can be tempting. So how do you make it clear: Please don’t dig any further here?
A serious problem.
The idea was to found an atomic priesthood that would pass on the secret knowledge of the toxic substances from generation to generation. Half-lives of 30,000 years are beyond anything we can imagine, but looking back we see that religions have proven to be systems capable of preserving information over long periods of time.
Or poetry?
Ultimately, of course, it’s about myth, something we want to get rid of and yet secretly yearn for. The compelling thing about the Future Library is that the ritual is visible but the core is hidden. Nobody is allowed to read the texts, they are taboo.
Already the annual ritual of “handing over” is growing steadily, one day families in the second generation will go there. You yourself write of a “longing for the holy”.
Like all traditions, this one will develop a life of its own. Future authors will deal with it differently, perhaps one day there will be counter-movements and splits, or in fifty years it will be seen as a relic that hardly receives any more attention, an esoteric appendage from the recent past, which is only continued out of old attachment becomes. There’s already something historic about watching Margaret Atwood’s 2014 ceremony. After just eight years, the recording formats and image quality no longer look contemporary.
How far are you with your text?
I have not started yet.
How do you deal with writing a text that nobody you know personally will read?
I thought of Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity”, imbued with a vain desire to be read through time, but also very touching in its longing to communicate with a future “you”. Literature is of course a ghost profession. We’re all busy connecting the past to the future and talking to the people who haven’t been born yet.
Can the text be edited?
If you take it seriously, and that’s what I intend to do, then don’t. Writing is already a very lonely business, but in this case there is even no indirect, time-delayed fulfillment that otherwise occurs during the publication process. Icelandic author Sjón, who also took part, said it’s about “keeping a secret”.
He described this as an infantile, playful element, because children in particular always carry secrets around with them.
That made a lot of sense to me. Nevertheless, it is not foreseeable what that will do to you. All the authors who have participated so far are still alive, but what if they die? If manuscripts are found in the estate, how do you deal with them?
Did you receive guidelines for the text?
no You can submit a single poem or a thousand pages of prose. The question of what is appropriate always arises when I write, but especially so in this case. Because there will never be a moment when I can recite my text and realize: it worked, it was just right. It’s a tension I have to endure. There will be no redemption.