Be Uniquely Yours
The problem with libraries is that they can be so large, so impressive, and so full of information that they unwittingly instill in us the belief that everything worth registering, everything valuable and true, must already be 'out there,' must already have been classified and placed on a shelf with an index number, ready to be discovered the moment we stop being so preoccupied with ourselves.
But what this modest, respectful, and quietly self-hating conclusion conceals is that each of us is an unparalleled and superlative center of knowledge in and of ourselves; our minds contain more ideas than are contained in the collective catalogues of the Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, and the British Library in London; and we possess vaults containing a greater number of moving and beautiful scenes than are contained in the collective catalogues of the Bibliotec We are simply failing to visit the stacks and galleries as frequently as we should, and we are failing to take attention of what we have seen in the process. We are so persuaded that discoveries of value lay beyond our grasp that we have neglected to consult the trove of thoughts and visions generated every hour by our endlessly bright, fatefully unexplored minds.
A quote from the American author Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:
It has been said that "in the minds of geniuses, we find, once more, the forgotten thoughts of ourselves."
Instead, geniuses do not have concepts that are fundamentally different from our own; they merely have the confidence to take their own thoughts more seriously than we do. However, rather than believing that their minds are nothing more than an insignificant speck on the horizon of the minds of infinitely greater thinkers who lived and died elsewhere long ago, they have shown enough reverence for their own existence to consider the possibility that one or two properly valuable ideas might plausibly choose to alight in the familiar aviary of their own intelligences. Thinking is a truly democratic activity, in a sense that we are not accustomed to thinking about it.
The only thing that distinguishes geniuses from ordinary people is their greater confidence in their abilities to study them effectively.