But I finally have good news to share. I have a positive case study—and we can learn from it.
Here’s the surprise: This company has been a failure at digital media, and has succeeded by embracing the most antiquated technology of them all: the printed book.
That’s quite an achievement. So let’s look at the turnaround at Barnes & Noble.
In the Tarot, the Star card represents the gift of hope, though the naked figure on the card is most often depicted emptying two pitchers of water in the void of night. This visual trope is hundreds of years old, having been replicated by makers of the Tarot since the mid-seventeenth century. In Arthur Waite’s deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith (1909) and now a standard among Tarot readers, the figure on the Star card drains one vessel into a rippling pool, the other vessel onto a grassy bank. Seeking to reconcile the card’s image with the card’s most simplistic meaning, I consider how the process of emptying might be hopeful, how draining one’s resources might inspire optimism. How can a void be perceived as a gift?
At the start of his latest book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility,” the philosopher Costica Bradatan notes without chagrin that when we consider our origins and our ultimate fate, humans are not very impressive. We are designed to fail, he emphasizes, and death is the framework for all our attempts to make something of ourselves. In a previous book, “Dying for Ideas,” he considered how philosophers across the ages wrestled with mortality. In “In Praise of Failure,” he looks at how various thinkers — Seneca, Mohandas Gandhi, Simone Weil, Emil Cioran, Yukio Mishima — detached themselves from an obsessive drive for worldly success by reckoning with failure and death. Bradatan wants us to grasp how striving to succeed prevents us from dealing with our mortality and hence from living a more meaningful life.