Stephen Hawking spoke of “cathedral projects” – ambitious, long-term undertakings inspired by cathedrals, built for a future their creators, knowingly, may never live to see. While such patience feels almost unimaginable in a world that’s changing by the day, one such project has been quietly taking shape in Norway, called the Future Library.
A 100-year project founded in 2014 by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, a writer is invited every year to submit a manuscript, which is sealed and locked in Oslo’s main public library, and will remain unread for 100 years. The 100 manuscripts, by globally acclaimed writers such as Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, and Elif Shafak, among others, will only be revealed and published in 2114, for readers who do not yet exist.
And Amitav Ghosh is the 12th, and latest, author to join, who will submit his manuscript in June at a ceremony in the Future Library forest.
This forest, in Nordmarka on the northern edge of Oslo, is crucial to the project. A thousand spruce trees were planted here in 2014, at its inception. In 2114, they will be felled and pulped to make the paper for the hundred manuscripts—until then, sealed inside the public library’s ‘Silent Room’.
Given Ghosh’s extensive writing on climate and forests, most notably the Sundarbans in ‘The Hungry Tide’ (2004), the project appears to fit perfectly and a continuation of his work.
‘An incredibly difficult, amazing challenge’
“It’s an incredibly difficult and amazing challenge, more complicated than I imagined,” said Ghosh during ‘Writing for the Future: A Dialogue Across Time’, a discussion with Anne Beate Hovind, director of the Future Library, at the Norwegian Embassy in Delhi earlier this week.
“I thought to myself, what kind of challenge it would be to try and think a 100-year cycle for myself in relation to my work.
And it was such an intriguing idea that I had to say yes,” he added.
‘Until we dared’
It’s natural to wonder how much the world might change in a hundred years: Will we have flying cars? Will humans have colonised Mars? Will books even exist in 2114? When the project began in 2014, Hovind was asked the last question “quite often.”
“Everyone thought digital books would take over. But now, nobody asks that question anymore,” she said.
Interestingly, not “whether there would be books in 2114?”, what was a bigger worry at the start was whether authors would want to be a part of the project. “And we didn’t know until we dared to start off with Margaret Atwood,” Hovind said.
Along with Atwood, Kang, and Ghosh, other authors who have contributed to the project include David Mitchell, Sjón, Valeria Luiselli, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Tommy Orange.
And with the forest, while the team started off with planting spruce trees, “this year, we planted another type of tree – pine. We had to plant it because of climate change. A diverse forest is more sustainable and resilient,” Hovind said. And who knows: a project rooted in a forest could one day serve as a repository of how the climate would change over these hundred years.
And as Ghosh puts it: “When writing for the future, your first inclination is to be a futurist. But if the immediate past is any indication, the future is literally unimaginable.”
