Happy Leap Year from Copenhagen

February 29 is just as rare as the World Cup Final, the Summer Olympics torch ceremony, and U.S. Presidential elections. That makes every February 29 a good chance to take stock of a considerable chunk of life.

In the present case, it’s easy. I remember February 29, 2008 quite well. I was at a colleague’s house in Ma’adi (a southern suburb of Cairo where many AUC faculty live), and he had a barbecue going. I was on sabbatical all year but had recently returned from a semester of teaching at the University of Amsterdam. The move to the new campus hadn’t happened yet, so every memory I have of any event on the new campus has occurred since that last February 29. That’s nice, because it counteracts the usual artificial sense that time is speeding up to a maddening pace and your life is flying away. It’s an optical illusion based on our ability to remember clearly dates that are fairly distant while forgetting all the other things that have happened in the meantime. (The thousands of posts I’ve made on this blog have also all been made since that last February 29.)

For the 2012 version of Leap Year Day, I find myself in Copenhagen. My last time (and only previous time) in this city was in 1991. That’s mildly ironic, since my Saturday keynote will be about the 21st birthday of Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, published in 1991 as well.

Books have a much, much higher childhood death rate than people. If a book makes it to age 21 and is still being discussed and still changing career paths, then it’s obviously a huge success.

I’m a great believer in classic books, but not at all a believer in “immortal” books. Plato will not be read one million years from now, though under certain scenarios he might still be read in another 2000 or 5000 years.

You can’t do “immortal” work because that’s quite impossible. The human species will probably be turning into something rather different that won’t much care about most of our supposedly immortal books and empires.

That said, there’s still a big difference between writing a book that’s readable for 3 years versus one that’s readable for 20, 50, or 500 years. That’s the scale on which very high-quality work announces itself as opposed to more transient period pieces– not the non-existent immortal scale.