¡In the ‘Geist!
- Agent McSueño
- Nov 10, 2016
- 3 min read
It’s been a busy week for Guerrilla Bookgiving—all over the world.
Last week, Emma Watson started lending her always-creative goodwill and star power to the folks at “Books on the Underground,” hiding feminist books on the London subway with personal notes. Then, this week she did the same thing on the NYC subway on behalf of the folks at “Books on the Subway.”
But that wasn’t even the start of it. In October, there was a social media post that cut and pasted its way across FB and IG under the hashtags #savetheculture, #longlivebooks, and #bookexchange. In September, writer Michelle Anne Schingler published her “Happily Bookish Challenge” on BookRiot. In August, the “Free Book” movement made its way across Central and South America.
There’s several examples of this happening every month all over the world. Sometimes, my dear friends who have been kind enough to listen to me talk about the Guerrilla Book Club project a little too much will forward these along to me and say “Hey, they stole your idea!”
But that's not quite true. In the case of “Books on the Rail,” the effort that Emma is supporting, they’ve been doing this for years while Guerrilla Book Club has only been around for 6 months! They could claim perhaps that we’ve stolen their idea, but I don’t think any of us knew each other existed when we invested our time and effort in starting these movements. I think the truth is this: we all had smart and interesting ideas about how to accomplish this, and the public is becoming aware of these ideas at roughly the same time.
There is a word I really love: Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist is a German word that literally in English means “time-spirit”, or “spirit of the times.” When we think of the late 1960s, a very clear spirit or mood is conjured up within us. That’s the Zeitgeist. It’s a set of prevailing beliefs in a set period of time, and it influences our behaviors, the things we choose to do because it feels like the thing to do, for lack of even trying to understand where our motivations come from. They just permeate us.
What I love about all of these projects that have come into the Zeitgeist in the past few months is exactly the fact that all of these movements spontaneously emerged at roughly the same time. There are many unconnected moments when the individual seeds of a larger, cohesive idea germinated. So, what's happening there?
Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist and student of Freud’s, wrote profoundly about psychological concepts that were quite radical at the time, if not outright controversial. One of his best-known ideas (which is still controversial!) is that of the collective unconscious. His idea put forward the notion that the soul of humanity is held within our unconscious minds. In other words, the thing we all have in common—what makes us more similar than different as humans—is buried deep within this unconsciousness that we are all collectively tapped into. (Pardon my brazen tip-toeing through a psychological concept that deserves a much better and more accurate description.)
I think the idea of paying reading forward is an idea that has emerged from the collective unconscious—now into the collective conscious, and perhaps, it has happened for a reason. Our world has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years with the Internet and social media. The technologies that were supposed to bring us together probably did a lot more to drive us apart. Perhaps technology should be blamed for how hollow our connections have become, and only now are we realizing how much connection in our lives is sorely missing. Much more importantly though: we are the ones who can do something about it. Guerrilla Bookgiving is emerging as a form of connecting our hearts and minds with each other in those ways that have slowly gone missing.
Receiving a book that Emma Watson autographed must feel awesome, but also, Emma must feel awesome becoming so heart- and mind-connected with the strangers who receive those books. Don’t you want to experience the awesome feeling that Emma is feeling while surreptitiously giving away the books she loves?
We can all be the receivers of books.
We can all be the givers of books too.
The feeling you get on both sides of that equation is incredible.
It feels 10,000 times more rewarding than what you might expect.
The power to positively change someone’s world is literally in your hands.
And it can happen anywhere—from a subway to a park bench to a bar stool to a windowsill to a building stoop to a locker room to a break lounge to a lobby to coffee shop to a classroom to a bus stop to an ATM. Anywhere.
Join us—start Guerrilla Bookgiving today!
It's already in the Zeitgeist! What other reasons do you need!? #payreadingforward
