Inspired by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s excellent and entertaining post at Omnivoracious in which they pair Stone Brewery’s 13th Anniversary Ale with random samplings from books they have received in the mail; and further inspired by Aerophant’s lovely post “Little Homecomings,” which struck a chord with me and which I will henceforth use to slap across the face those who ask me why on earth I would keep a book after reading it, I conceived of an experiment in which I would explore among the books on my own shelves a concept I have noticed while in libraries and subsequently heard described by another writer, which supported my observations: to wit, that when one walks randomly around the stacks one will invariably find what one is looking for, books connected to what one is currently researching or wondering about, or connected to each other, without having first looked them up in the computer index.

I first thought I would explore random quotes from books on my shelves after imbibing an alcoholic beverage to see if they were connected to each other or to my state of mind, books with appropriate titles to such a course of action, such as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Heart of Darkness and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I then did a test run BB (Before Beer) with half-hearted results, but the results were supposed to be unexciting without beer anyway; nevertheless, my fear grew that the experiment, which clearly was about the quantum mechanical nature of things, would actually work under the influence, and I did not want to appear to condone quaffing adult beverages in the interest of furthering researches into quantum mechanics, for then science professors in our higher institutes of learning would feel obligated to become inebriated whilst flinging about their formulae, or have an excuse to do so. Besides, I do not believe the experiment works except under the influence of coffee.

So I conceived of the Library I Ching instead.

Hexagram meaning "Center Returning"

Without going into too much detail, when one uses the I Ching, one forms in one’s mind a question and then casts coins or yarrow sticks to produce two hexagrams. One meditates on the changing of one hexagram into the other. Each of the six lines of the hexagram are either yin or yang, and they transform or stay the same to produce the second hexagram. The answer to one’s question, or actually the reflection of one’s self to help you find the answer, lies in the second hexagram. One reads the text that matches the changed lines, and so on.

With my Library I Ching, one takes a book from one’s bookshelf, perhaps one with a title that reflects one’s state of mind or question, and randomly — blindly — selects two quotes.

Once again, I did a test run, picking Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I had not quite settled on how to pick a section of page once I randomly opened the book. With one, I randomly stabbed with a finger, eyes closed, and with the other mentally chose a section before opening my eyes. I also realized I did not begin with a question in mind. So I did the whole thing again, randomly opening the book and choosing the right or left page and what section by finger, eyes closed, and choosing the sentence it landed on as my quote (with a subsequent sentence or two as optional).

The fact that the first quote I randomly chose during the second run matched exactly the second quote I randomly chose during the first run (no lie) is either a complete coincidence or a full-on confirmation of the experiment and the non-coincidental quantum mechanical nature of the universe (though even with the I Ching one is expected to come up with different results even when performing one casting immediately after another: dip your toe into the river a second time and it is not the same river.)

Here are the two quotes.

First cast:

“The actress spoke about suffering children, about the barbarity of Communist dictatorship, the human right to security, the current threat to the traditional values of civilized society, the inalienable freedom of the human individual, and President Carter, who was deeply sorrowed by the events in Cambodia. By the time she had pronounced her closing words, she was in tears.”

Second cast:

“She would push her body up to the border, let it stand there for a moment as at the stake, and then, when the engineer tried to put his arms around her, she would say, as she said to the man with the rifle on Petrin Hill, ‘It wasn’t my choice.’”

Did this help with the question I posed to the Library I Ching? Very subtly at first, yes; and then more strongly, indeed, yes — concentrating, as with the I Ching, on the second cast.

Hmmm. I might have to do this again soon.

Come to think of it, there are 64 hexagrams in the I Ching ….