By Victor Greto
For those who think they may know a person through the books he reads, convicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s list of nearly 300 books and papers he wants returned to him are instructive.
For nearly two decades, Kaczynski, 61, mailed out 16 package bombs that killed three people and injured 29 others. In 1995, he blackmailed two of the most widely-respected newspapers in the country into publishing a 35,000-word “manifesto” that lambasted technology, leftism and the Industrial Revolution. He was caught a year later when his brother suspected he was the author of the manifesto.
He is now spending the rest of his life in a federal maximum-security prison in Colorado, from where he filed a 150-page, partially hand-written motion in late August, asking for most of the property the federal government confiscated from his Montana shack. He claims that the books and other papers will “help to reveal the true facts.”
Do books reveal the man? Do the books you bought, borrowed, read and pondered over the past couple of decades say much of anything about yourself?
You better believe it.
Books reveal our focus, interests, prejudices, fascinations. And so do lots of other everyday things. It’s why many people shudder at the idea of someone rooting through their trash, their history of video rentals, their bookstore purchases. More importantly, it’s the books we keep, that we just can’t seem to get ourselves to either trade in or give away, that may be the most telling.
I suppose a list of the books that Kaczynski stockpiled over the years is none of my business. But he’s the one who put the list out there. And when you want to understand the mind of someone, it helps, especially someone as ostensibly intellectual as a Harvard-educated mathematics professor who taught at the University of California at Berkeley.
Being a professor, it makes sense that he had more than a dozen dictionaries and grammar books that might help him read or translate Latin, German, Finnish, Russian, French, Chinese and Spanish; that he would have books on calculus, botany, chemistry and physics, electronics and nuclear weapons, along with various “field guides” to animals, birds and trees. He may have worried about his weight, because a few books deal with that subject.
It makes more sense that the majority of Kaczynski’s books deal with history, especially after you’ve thought about the content of his manifesto, a screed against technology and “oversocialization,” and his longing for decentralization and individual autonomy.
He has many books on revolutions and revolutionary ideas, including the French and Russian varieties, as well as books on Napoleon and Hitler and the Nazis. He also seems to like to immerse himself in the past, with books that talk about everyday life during a couple of different eras, as well as books that analyze radical strains in Western thought, including Marxism.
But it’s in his choices of imaginative literature that one may see him most clearly. His interpretations of history were guided by his personal vision, and his literary choices show the tenor of that vision.
They are all books that showcase individuals who have problems with society, or who define or find themselves in opposition to it, from James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; Orwell’s 1984, and Somerset Maugham’s Razor’s Edge; the bitterness of the Roman Juvenal’s Satires; the questioning, larger-than-life individuals who people Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
And a good number of books by Joseph Conrad, whose ironic fictions of Western imperialism stand — among other things — as explorations of turn-of-the-20th-century Western technological prowess.
I imagine Kaczynski identified readily with these characters, all of whom express various states of loneliness, independence and power. And I see him sympathizing with the mysterious Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, shuddering at the horror and debilitating nature of Western imperial power.
Kaczynski transformed Kurtz’s last words of the short novel, the character’s mysteriously damning but impotent, “The horror, the horror,” into a 17-year strike at the enemy. Although Kaczynski damned his civilization, unlike Kurtz he refused to be impotent. He emerged from America’s heart of darkness and anonymity with planned and punctuated blasts of individual power.
Deliberately or not, Kaczynski became the living messenger of the erratic, sudden and profound dangers of technology — not run amok, but in the hands of one who has. If this was ironic commentary, Kaczynski learned much from his books.
But I’m guessing it wasn’t. I’m guessing he has yet to look at himself in the mirror long enough and whisper, “The horror, the horror,” and understand to whom it really should be said.