Carl Sagan wrote, “What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
The old pot-head knew what he was talking about.
This parallels Isaac Asimov’s essay on the future of books, “The Ancient and The Ultmate” (from Jan. 1973’s F&SF), in which he calls books, “self-contained, mobile, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private, and largely under the control of the will.”
The Good Doctor Asimov predicted basic paperback books could and would not be improved upon. They would remain inexpensive, easily distributed and carried, and widely popular regardless how far our technology and ereaders take us, and did this in 1973, when no Kindle or Nook or Sony Ereader existed.
Celebrate books and revere writing. They are your best hope of listening to Aristotle, or Socrates, or Plato, or of becoming one in their rank one day, long after you’re gone.
Writing is our voice, and books make our voices undying.
