A short walk in deep time
The suburban train inched up the wooded hillside. Through the mist I saw glimpses of the city of Oslo, far below, sandwiched between the forest and the sea. At Frognerseteren terminus, gateway to the Nordmarka forest, the platform was deserted. Had I really travelled from London to Oslo, persuading a long-suffering friend to join me just to spend a Sunday morning on a damp walk in a dark forest with a bunch of strangers?
Fairy stories are rare these days. So, when I was invited, via Instagram, to attend the annual handover ceremony for Katie Paterson’s Future Library Project last June I didn’t hesitate. Full disclosure, I am obsessed with Katie Paterson’s work. She takes mind-bending concepts like deep time and distant space and brings them down to earth so that the rest of us can experience them up close. The Future Library handover promised books and walking - a two for one offer I couldn’t ignore!
Katie Paterson has described the Future Library project as ‘a gift to the future’. The seed of her idea, ‘a library of books unread for a century,’ took some time to germinate. During a week alone in a friend’s cabin deep in the Norwegian woods, she recalls; ‘I saw a library as a forest and a forest as a library.’ Many months of planning and negotiation followed and in 2014 the story began.
First an area of the Nordmarka Forest outside Oslo was cleared, and 1000 young spruce trees planted. The trees felled in the process were used to line the walls of the Future Library room, of which more later. The young trees, managed as part of the mixed species Nordmarka Forest estate, will grow until in 2114 they are felled and milled into paper used to print the books in the Future Library. So far so circular economy. Now here’s the magic part. Since 2014 a committee of Future Library trustees including Paterson have invited an author to write a book to be donated to the library. The manuscript is handed over each year at this ceremony in the forest clearing, and then sealed, unread in the Future Library room until the project’s end. The 2022 ceremony was the first since the Covid pandemic, and three authors; Tsitsi Dangarembga, Karl Ove Knausgård and Ocean Vuong were invited to attend. They had been the future library authors for 2021, 2019 and 2020. Sadly, Ocean Vuong contracted Covid shortly before leaving the US, and hopes to attend this year instead.
Stamping our feet on the station platform, we were relieved to see a small band of volunteers in Future Library t-shirts emerge from the next train. They directed us down a forest track to a carpark where several hundred people milled about sipping cups of scalding coffee, brewed in an iron kettle hung over an open fire on a fairy-tale-approved iron tripod. Soon we set off, following arrows drawn in white pebbles rather than breadcrumbs in the direction of the Future Library forest. Marching down the forest tracks in a fleece clad centipede of anticipation, we were a motley band - families with babies in backpacks, international Paterson fans, locals, volunteers, journalists, and no doubt a few Sunday walkers swept up in the flow. After about twenty minutes we turned right, traipsed over a narrow wooden plank, and arrived at the edge of a forest clearing planted with young spruce trees. Each one sported a red ribbon, and it was hard to shake the idea that they had shape-shifted seconds before from a herd of deer or a group of naughty children.
Clutching cinnamon buns pressed on us by another group of volunteers, we scrambled up the wooded slope and arranged ourselves as best we could among the roots and mossy logs, taking care to avoid damaging the enchanted trees. In front of us, on the only piece of flat ground was a long wooden bench. Katie Paterson, Karl Ove Knausgård and Tsitsi Dangarembga had been joined by Sjön and David Mitchell, two earlier Future Library authors, in Oslo for the opening of the Future Library room that afternoon. Ocean Vuong sent as his representatives a trio of Buddhist monks, who blessed the gathering with sonorous chanting and a ringing copper bowl. Their prayer coaxed the sun from behind the clouds and the ceremony began.
Tsitsi Dangarembga and Karl Ove Knausgård, spoke briefly, shared the title of their stories, and handed their manuscripts to Paterson, who solemnly passed them to the Diechman Library representative. After a short series of speeches, a mountain of a man, who towered over the group of petite monks stepped forward. Accompanied by a fiddle player and a female singer the musical giant intoned the medieval Norwegian folksong, The Dream Song of Olaf Asteson wrapping the handover ceremony in a protective blanket of sound.
Later that afternoon, the Future Library room was officially opened by the Mayor of Oslo and the authors invited to enter and place each manuscript inside its own backlit glass drawer. The Future Library room is a small space, you can reach its heart in a dozen shoeless steps, and the wooden slices that line the walls of this story dormitory give the room both minimalist scandi cool and ancient authority. The gentle curving wooden walls and low lighting make it feel like a prehistoric cave excavated from the heart of the rigidly modern glass Deichman library in which it sits. David Mitchell described placing his ‘baby’ into a cryogenic chamber. His fear is justified. Who’s to say if these books will ever wake up?
A fire might destroy the forest, or the spruce trees succumb to a species specific disease like oak death or ash dieback. When felled the trees might not provide enough, or the right kind of paper to hold all the books in the Future Library. Political and cultural priorities could shift and devalue the printed book as an artefact. So many things could happen. Trees are at risk everywhere from the Amazonian rainforest to our local pocket parks, and with them all the species that rely on them including humans. But the Future Library is a spell and every year the repeated ritual of the Handover gives it strength. It carries the hope that the people of the future who care for the trees, make the books, and read them will feel a connection to the people of the present who write the stories, tread the forest path, and come together every year on a summer Sunday to share a cup of coffee in the Norwegian woods.
Author’s note
The next handover takes place this Sunday May 21st 2023, when Judith Schalansky and Ocean Vuong 2ill attend the ceremony. if you can’t be there, it will also be livestreamed through the magic of the world wide web so you can join the ceremony.
