Fire and Knowledge

Long ago, scrolls were used for reading and writing. They were better than stone, but they were still cumbersome and limiting, and were eventually replaced with books. Books were better in practically every way. Now with our amazing feats of computing progress, we are back to using scrolls.

Computer screens will not replace books any time soon because scrolling is less functional than physical pages. Printed books are easy to use – the medium is practically transparent. Flipping pages are the best technique of browsing we have yet invented. Also books are more environmentally friendly: they are made from renewal resources, do not require electricity for each viewing, and are biodegradable. They are easy on the eyes, easy to write notes in margins and underline sentences. And so on.

A recent NYT article says that “no trees are destroyed to make e-books.” They forget to mention that oil and coal are burned instead, and that the electronics in the “e-reader” will (practically) never biodegrade and will instead release toxins into the soil (or, if burned, into the atmosphere).

Until a computer can make reading a book more usable, enjoyable, and ecological, the printed book will reign for serious readers. When they make a computer that looks like a book, feels like a book, is easy on the eyes, biodegradable, and uses no electricity, I might be interested. Until then, I’ll be using something far more advanced than an e-book reader: a real book.

Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990), p. 11

The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists—people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

–Wendell Berry, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character” in The Unsettling of America (1972), p. 19

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

—René Descartes

Is a story interesting without drama? Without good guys and bad guys? Without both good and evil? Drama, tragedy, complication and other such techniques make stories interesting.

Why is that? Natural disasters are horrible – yet we like to read about them, talk about them, watch them on television. Murder is one of the worst things a person can do – yet we enjoy reading books and watching movies about murders. We are obviously very complicated. Or insane.

Perhaps we do this because good and evil actually exist, and we understand that evil is necessary. Life wouldn’t be interesting without evil. And goodness wouldn’t seem so good. Spring is beautiful, but it would not seem so beautiful if winter did not precede it. Or, to use Augustine’s famous analogy, a painting would not be so beautiful without a balance of dark colors and light colors.

Or perhaps we do this because there is no good and evil, and we project our experiences onto stories in order to cope with them. Since we have to deal with death, we like to read about death. It comforts us and helps us understand this crazy world.

I’ll take the answer that has good and evil.

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself.

–Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Some Verses of Virgil” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 67

“Read not the Times. Read the Eternities,” Thoreau said. Ezra Pound wrote that “literature is news that STAYS news.”

–Wendell Berry, “In Defense of Literacy” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 167

We should accustom the mind to keep the best company by introducing it only to the best books.

—Sydney Smith