The Library of the Mind

A Cabinet of Curious Thoughts from the Shelves of Professor Owain Morgan

Some men keep their treasures locked away in safes.

I keep mine in a room with high windows, a persistent draught, and shelves that bow gently under the weight of other people’s ideas.

Here, in this library, the living and the dead share space — Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume — their spines pressed shoulder-to-shoulder like old travellers in a railway carriage. Some are foxed and faded, others crisp and new. All have something to say, though not all of it is sensible.

From time to time I open one, and the room fills with ghosts. Aristotle insists on neat categories, Descartes explains the passions as though they were clockwork, Bain files sensation and perception in different drawers, and William James laughs at the whole business and invites me to take a walk instead.

This journal is my record of those encounters — some real, some imagined, all coloured by the places and people who have shaped me. You may find a lecture hall in Edinburgh, a walk along the Menai Straits, a London drawing room thick with gaslight, or the quiet turning of pages in Bangor. You may also, if you read closely, catch the occasional glimpse of a Welsh word in the margins.

So — choose a volume.

Open it anywhere you like.

The library is never closed.