So many of our assumptions of what constitutes work (and associated notions of value) have been seen for the shams that they are, systems and structures without real significance, hamster-wheels of production without purpose, resource-gobbling without reflection, and extraction without equity. Our reminders of communal humanness and participation in the world have been battered as well - sociability, collaboration, spontaneity, and the art of ramble-travelling are just a few examples. At a more critical level, the pandemic has affected the already-vulnerable and precarious far more than those who have the means to create buffers between themselves and the world.

This project has, at its core, always attempted to dismantle, or at least pierce, some of these buffers, these swaddling layers insulating people and communities from each other. In some way, the challenge is more acute, and though it may seem indulgent to continue grappling with issues around the book, the library, and the futures of knowledge, these are still urgent battlegrounds, where the factions of disinformation and cynical greed hold sway.

In the end, like so many of us who work over longer spans of time in cultural fields, I am more unsure now than I was at the start of this project. Or perhaps I mean my younger self. After all, the melancholy of ageing is sometimes the sense of being overwhelmed by an accumulation of the years and the detritus of life lived, and yet paradoxically, it is also a denudation. As we are eroded, we try to re-exert control, we gather about us our precious memories, hold tight our dearest convictions, hardening them all into a few, paltry certainties. The simplest counter to this calcification is varying one’s encounters, allowing strangers to enter into our intellectual and emotional circuits. With the melting away of rigid certainties, there is a disorienting, but delirious, sense of unsureness. And this is where I believe I must be – in this state of not-knowing – to accept that there are no easy solutions or glib escapism. The only sure knowledge I seem to have, is of being constantly aware of the perilousness of our futures, and more importantly, the future of this planet. But this is not a fearful or lonely way to live, because after all, so many of us share this knowledge. To me, this provides us with the necessary kick-in-the-pants, it is the urgency behind pushing for necessary change – for more parity between people and communities, and an end to the rapacious interactions we have allowed to dominate our interactions with each other, and with the planet. This knowledge is vital, this knowledge is call to action, and yet it is so easily absented from our daily existences, from the media, from governance and from our stories. We are the book, this is the banishment, and we know what we must do.