The Fullness of the Half-Empty Shelf

By Reuven Kotleras on July 1, 2025

Resident Bright Insight Blogger, Reuven Kotleras, is a profoundly gifted ex-child and polymath. He has published professionally on European political history, Eurasian economic development, epistemology of science, and mathematical logic, among other topics. His skills include decision analysis, organizational design, and strategic foresight. He is also a poet, pianist, runner, and dog-lover.

The Fullness of the Half-Empty Shelf

I did not remark the sensation until the morning I woke up, the evening after putting the books in the bags: white plastic kitchen-garbage bags, tied at the top, not for donation but for removal. That evening, my motivation was not any aesthetic program, or any decluttering impulse, or any performance of intentionality. The act was merely procedural; yet standing in front of the shelves, half-empty for the first time in decades, I felt something I did not expect: not lightness, nor relief; but /liberation/.

The shelves and the books ensconced in them had, for years, functioned as a kind of symbolic exoskeleton. Titles accumulated as if along a spatial syntax in which every seemingly complete sentence became, in its turn, a now-multiply embedded noun clause seeking another predicate. They represented earlier selves, possible futures, adjacent fields; long defended, they had slowly ossified into mute, unstated convictions.

But now, for apparently too long, I had not lived amongst them but only retained them as skins that I resisted fully shedding. It had been a long time since I had read or re-read any of them. They stood as proof of a once-necessary coherence. They scaffolded the echoes of unvoiced continuities. Some had become mute, while some others had never fully been articulated. Still others had performed their function long ago accomplished, but never declared to be complete. Their persistence was never in question, until they became de-reified.

That was the moment! They did not cease to matter, but that I no longer needed their mattering to hold its form, or mine. Whatever internal function they had once supported was long absorbed and interiorized. The system that they had structured no longer needed their visible reinforcement. What was their spatial distribution had consolidated itself and stabilized into something that did not require the presence of their physical mass. The bags in which they now found themselves were the exteriorization of an already-completed internal movement.

Many gifted adults carry architectures of preservation forward into different futures, both real and potential. This behavior, following on from cognition and affect, does not produce itself out of sentimentality but out of structural vigilance. An early sense of being out of phase with one’s environment can lead to unconscious overcompensation: retaining too much, in order to safeguard the possibility that some deeper internal order might later be understood.

Iteration of this periculous habit becomes pernicious, producing the over-accumulation of a hypertrophied symbolic ecology: too many texts and too many files, representing many paths never fully pruned. Yet when a system reaches internal coherence, such redundancies begin to become, at best, superfluous and, at worst, obstacular. If they do not yet collapse, like the house in E.A. Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," then at their most anodyne they shed relevance; that shedding creates more space, beyond the space that they had once defined and sketched.

I stood there looking at the half-emptied shelves, and they were mute: they did not ask to be refilled; they even breathed more easily. These books were not looking to be replaced. The shell that they became has ruptured like a chrysalis, and split open; now I am shedding them, and they are releasing me. They had already been resolved by a movement accomplished before their clearance, managed at the level of unconscious symbolism. In systems terms, the system had undergone a meso-level resolution of symbolic subtasks.

The system had recursively re-integrated a class of stanchion-like categories that had once structured its coherence across once-transitional intervals. The result is not abstraction but a liberation of structure that can now re-form itself anew, by engaging once more the environment that it had closed out. The books had not been in the way; they had only remained beyond their phase of the cycle; it was past their time to crumble.

Their removal is not a sacrifice but only a late registration of the fact that keeping the system continuous now requires nothing external. No diagram is required; no schema needs to be preserved. The phase-shift is complete and is propelling me further on my way. The shelf, half-empty, has become readable again, and it reads: "Nothing is missing."