A lone reed?
Sep. 3rd, 2006 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vollmus"Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life—well, valuable, but small—and sometimes I wonder: Do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer, I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So—goodnight, dear void."
This is a lovely quote from one of my favorite movies, You've Got Mail. I have a fairly firm opinion about part of this, and for some reason I felt like pausing the movie and writing sharing that opinion with all of you.
I am actually not all that fond of the end of this email. The part I like the most, the question about reading and seeing and connecting—that's the part I plan to address.
A book is a hard copy of someone's idea for the way a person could look at life. A book is an author's way of expressing his opinions on life, death, society, nature, and civilization. Each book contributed to our vast library is meant to share thoughts, feelings, values, and ideas about everything under the sun and beyond, and no one person could even hope to self-produce all the thoughts that have ever been preserved in books.
A book is both a teacher and a comrade. If you cannot see the ideas presented to you by literature appearing, contributing, connecting all around you, every day, you are leading a life limited by the fact that one cannot expand his mind without outside help. What better way to fix that than to turn to over a billion teachers? The written word often survives its author, and its author generally thinks on it more than he does it's spoken friend. Is it not obvious that this form of infomation is valuable? That it is, in fact, the most valuable?
The idea that a person relating life to books is a horrible thing is simply outrageous. It defies logic, in all honesty. Without books, where would we be? What could we possibly know? How would ideas and information from the past have kept on? They wouldn't have. We would be nowhere, knowing nothing but what our own minds could discover without the ideas of the ages behind our backs.
Books are not meant to remind their readers of life. Books are meant to broaden the horizons of their readers, to teach them things to apply to their world.
Books are not meant to be memories alone. Books are for growing.
This is a lovely quote from one of my favorite movies, You've Got Mail. I have a fairly firm opinion about part of this, and for some reason I felt like pausing the movie and writing sharing that opinion with all of you.
I am actually not all that fond of the end of this email. The part I like the most, the question about reading and seeing and connecting—that's the part I plan to address.
A book is a hard copy of someone's idea for the way a person could look at life. A book is an author's way of expressing his opinions on life, death, society, nature, and civilization. Each book contributed to our vast library is meant to share thoughts, feelings, values, and ideas about everything under the sun and beyond, and no one person could even hope to self-produce all the thoughts that have ever been preserved in books.
A book is both a teacher and a comrade. If you cannot see the ideas presented to you by literature appearing, contributing, connecting all around you, every day, you are leading a life limited by the fact that one cannot expand his mind without outside help. What better way to fix that than to turn to over a billion teachers? The written word often survives its author, and its author generally thinks on it more than he does it's spoken friend. Is it not obvious that this form of infomation is valuable? That it is, in fact, the most valuable?
The idea that a person relating life to books is a horrible thing is simply outrageous. It defies logic, in all honesty. Without books, where would we be? What could we possibly know? How would ideas and information from the past have kept on? They wouldn't have. We would be nowhere, knowing nothing but what our own minds could discover without the ideas of the ages behind our backs.
Books are not meant to remind their readers of life. Books are meant to broaden the horizons of their readers, to teach them things to apply to their world.
Books are not meant to be memories alone. Books are for growing.
