Now what?

you are so right

Conversations in Italian, circa 1996 - 🍄🍄36

Truth is a god in the way that gravity or magnetism is a god. He's just a manifested force of nature. He's sapient on some level, sure, which is a neat trick, but we managed to make meat think and we're not extraordinarily special about it either. He didn't invent humans and he didn't spawn the universe the way that Rose would have expected the god of her religion to have done; he has minimal to no interest in the day to day lives of any creature and only intervenes when someone actively wanders into his grip of influence. He's not a Capital-G God. Truth is to matter what fire is to flammable objects. He's a metaphorical (and perhaps even allegorical) chemical reaction.

Ed isn't an atheist because he saw god and cussed him out irl; Ed's an atheist because he doesn't believe that the brute force of Truth qualifies as a god. Quite frankly, I think that's a hell of a lot ballsier and a much more complete understanding of the situation. This perspective insulates him against idolizing the Truth as an ultimate divine force and makes Truth something that can be reasoned around or through, rather than with, which would never have worked.

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

Little fish eats his foods