I take off my shoes at the entrance to the Silent Room, on the top floor of Deichman Bjorvika, Oslo’s main library, and pad in stockinged feet across the smooth wood of the winding hallway that leads to a central chamber, curved like a belly, created by rows of smooth, undulating honey-hued wood, the air rich with the scent of timber.
I feel as if I’m in a forest. It also reminds me of stepping into the inner sanctum of a megalithic tomb – Newgrange, maybe, on the morning of the winter solstice, waiting for the light to penetrate the chamber.
The light in the Silent Room comes from slim glass compartments in the walls. They are lit from within, as if sunlight is spilling into a clearing in the forest. There are 100 compartments. So far, 12 of them hold manuscripts by some of the world’s best-known authors.
This is the Future Library. The plan is to add one manuscript a year; each will be stored here, unread, until the year 2114, when the compartments will be opened and the 100 manuscripts will be printed, a century after the first contribution, by the US author Margaret Atwood, was deposited here.
RM Block
Each manuscript – a short story, a poem or a novel – is presented to the library by its invited author in a ceremony in the Nordmarka forest, on the outskirts of Oslo. Trees in one area of it were felled to provide the wood to build the Silent Room; in the clearing that resulted, 1,000 spruce trees were planted to in turn supply the wood that, in 2114, will become the paper to print the manuscripts.
In August, Laurie Anderson was announced as the next writer to deposit a manuscript in the Future Library.
The 13th contributor, she’ll follow the Indian-American author Amitav Ghosh, who gave the Future Library his piece this year, as did the novelist Tommy Orange, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. (He had been unable to attend, as originally planned, in 2025.)
Rather than choose authors years in advance, the Future Library Trust has an organic selection process that is influenced year to year by world events and other considerations.
Authors who have already contributed to the project include the Cork resident David Mitchell, the Nobel laureate Han Kang, the Icelandic writer Sjón and the award-winning British-Turkish novelist and activist Elif Shafak.
I sit in the room and wonder what the words held here will mean to future generations when they are finally revealed. In a world where literacy rates are declining, where AI aims to do our reading and writing for us, will people even be able to read them? With wars raging and nature struggling, will anybody be left?
The project was conceived by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, who had been on a train on England, “just doodling on a piece of paper, looking out the window and letting my imagination run free. I drew a piece of a tree, with concentric growth rings clearly marked, and as I looked at it I had a vision of trees being future books, and I saw a forest growing books over a lifetime.”
The idea might have remained just that had Paterson not been invited to an artists’ conference in Oslo with the theme of imagining public art commissions that step outside the usual format of dropping external objects into public spaces. She realised her idea could meet that vision.
Her proposal was taken up by Anne Beate Hovind, an urban developer and curator who specialises in art in public spaces, and has worked on several creative projects for the riverside development in Oslo where the library sits.
This is the most ambitious to date, given its geographical stretch, from the library to the Nordmarka forest, and 100-year time span, which means it will outlive all its creators.
“With this project Katie has expanded my principles of time and space,” Hovind says. “But what is art for if not to challenge and expand us?”
Norway is the perfect place for the Future Library, Paterson believes. “I struggle to think of any other countries that would take this on. In Norway there is more of a drive towards future thinking. And there’s a great connection to forestry – and, unlike many other countries, they’ve taken care of their forests. And then there’s the literary tradition.
“I just felt like they really got it and embraced it. In many other places this project wouldn’t even have been considered, because it’s too risky and unknown.
[ Gunnar Staalesen on the mystery of novels and natureOpens in new window ]
“There are so many unknowns for this – things like climate change, will our forest still be standing in 100 years, and also changing societies, changing languages. Like our Icelandic author, Sjón, pointed out that Icelandic is a minority language, given the country’s small population, and of course we don’t know what it will be like in 100 years.”
According to Hovind, the project has been guided by themes of trust, rituals, hope, climate and nature crisis, democracy, community and resilience, among others.
“We need to produce something different or else nothing new will ever happen,” she says. “We can’t just do more of the same. We see art as a force for achieving something new and ask can art make the world a better place.”
Hovind travels all over the world to speak about the Future Library. Earlier this year she took part in a Sydney Writers’ Festival discussion of radical hope. ”In India they called this a slow march for peace. And everywhere I travel to, I am reminded how similar we all are. There are differences too, of course, but we have a shared core.”
This is a time for radical action in a world that is unstable and chaotic, she believes.
“This is about the brain’s capacity to imagine. If we stop imagining, we lose hope. That’s why art and culture are so important in our time. Art and culture come from the core of our imagination: it is so important to keep using this muscle.
“Young people must exercise imagination and create. It is important that young people can experience their dreams. I feel I’m on a mission. This has been life-changing for me.”
[ Does Ireland have the will to undo the disaster of plantation forestry?Opens in new window ]
In the part of the forest where the trees for the books have been planted, the project’s saplings are growing near soaring pines. I stroke one of them, thinking that one day it might become the words of an Irish author, maybe even somebody from Sligo, my home.
What sort of a world will receive it, and what in that world will remain of today’s literature, art and creativity? What in that world will remain, full stop?
Back in my hotel I touch a screen outside the lift to select the floor I want to go to. In a world where it can feel as if we’re no longer trusted to push buttons on a lift, how magnificent it is to imagine a forest slowly growing a library of unseen words, an act, surely, of radical hope and autonomy.
