My Life and the Written Word

My daughter, Heather, posted a quote from a book she was reading on Facebook about books and what a gift they are.  It made me think about the role books and other pieces of written words played in my life and still does.

I laways say a book is a doorway and when you open it you can go anywhere in space and time.  You can experience any culture, past or present.  You can be at the siege of Troy with Odysseus or at the very end of time with Poul Anderson.  You can delve into knowledge past and present and theories on what tomorrow will be like.

You can be a detective, a spy, a scientist, a reporter, a priest or anything at all in a book.  Of all mankind's achievements language and the written word have to be the greatest of all.  On a purely practical level it allows one generation to pass accumulated learning to the next so they don't have to follow all those tedious intermediate steps.  It passes on what was learned before and it allows those with vision to speculate about what will come in the future.  Some of those speculations are wonderful and some are not as are all the possibilities of humanity.

We may go on to conquer space and time and spread humanity among the stars or we may simply blow ourselves up in a cataclysmic nuclear war.  Or, perhaps, nature herself will take care of us with a massive comet or asteroid with our name on it.   Books can take us there, there to all these places and times.  I can't imagine a world without books and without the written word.  Stories of the past, today, the possibilities of the future.  The drama, the comedies, the tragedies and the pedestrian and hum drum of every day life.

And that is just prose.  We have not yet even thought of poetry.  It is odd how one can say in a poem things that are so much more powerful and meaningful than the same ideas could be expressed in prose.  Prose is a language of pictures of reality while poetry is a language of dreams and ideas about how things were, are, should be, might be, will never be but things, none the less, we feel inside us somewhere prose will never touch.

I cannot imagine a world without books for it would be a cruel and barren place and one in which I would not care to exist.