“PERSONS OR THINGS which are regarded as taboo may be compared to objects charged with electricity,” observed the anthropologist Northcote Thomas. Taboo, a Polynesian word that Sigmund Freud translated as “holy dread,” most often referred to an action that was both sacred and forbidden, consecrated and dangerous. It is an apt description of the Future Library, which grafts an environmental taboo onto an artistic one: trees that are planted to be cut down; books that are written not to be read.

The manuscripts are electrified by these taboos. In 2020, they will be moved to the New Deichmanske Library, currently under construction in Oslo, where they will be displayed in a “Silent Room”: a womb-shaped chamber facing the forest, lined with wood from its trees. Visitors will be able to enter, one or two at a time, to gaze at the manuscripts lying under their protective glass cases, waiting for the years to pass. More like a prayer closet than a reading room, Paterson describes the Silent Room as a “contemplative space.” Her hope is that it will prompt the visitor’s imagination to journey through “deep time” to probe the mysteries of the forest.

What Paterson’s description of the Silent Room makes clear is that the books of the Future Library were never meant to be read, certainly not in our lifetime, but not even in the future. They are meant to be worshiped, to be desired — a desire that draws all its strength from the impossibility of reading or reproducing them: Theirs is the fetishization of the singular, the uninterpretable. Like the 48 surviving copies of the original Gutenberg Bible, the manuscripts are devotional rather than functional objects, the geneses of a new practice of reading and writing. The correspondence they stage between writer and reader is not the immediacy of address Shafak attributes to a book as it circulates in the world but the projection of a literary kinship so deep, so transcendent, that it is worth waiting for — worth dying without.

It is no coincidence that the re-enchantment comes at a time when books as objects are treated like endangered species, their vitality threatened by the rise of new media ecologies and economies. This is a false panic — there are more books published and printed now than ever — but it is an infectious one. You can hear the defensiveness in her voice when Paterson insists during the Handover Ceremony that, in a hundred years, “There will be life! There will be books!” and it is surprising to note that her inflection falls harder on the latter than the former. What she means is that there will still be certain kinds of books: books written by authors already consecrated by the Western, white literary establishment; books which will be exempt from the vicissitudes of the market and preserved in what David Mitchell, referring to the Future Library, called “the Ark of Literature.” But the ark does not preserve those who are most in need of preservation. It is firmly committed to those authors who have already proven themselves the fittest, at least according to the tastes of the current literary marketplace.

What seems more naïve is how the mystical valence of the book is tied to the fate of life on earth, as if the manuscript’s totemic powers could somehow ward off ecological devastation. The hope that underwrites the Future Library is, in turn, underwritten by a near apocalyptic sense of doom. Ecocide is a frightening, complicated political issue, and yet the members of the Future Library Trust allude to it with a strange air of placidity. “This is a simple place,” Hovind says of the clearing. Paterson echoes her sentiment. “This is an ordinary forest,” she says, as if the simplicity or ordinariness of the trees meant that protecting them did not have to be complicated, as if everything that threatened them could be wished away.