How have Books Impacted our World?
Without books where would we be?
The answers to these questions are truly mind boggling! If you really thought about the extent and reach of books it would blow your mind!
Almost everyone
can think of books that have changed their lives in some way or another. They have confirmed
things in us we didn’t know we knew; led us on new pathways, given us exciting sparks
of insight from a host of new ideas, brought encouragement and understanding, or simply taken our stress
away for an hour or two.
Books mediate human culture; carrying within them, and spreading the imbibed particular fashion of that particular era in which they were written. Carriers of the present they soon become the bearers of the past as mankind's basic assumptions and ideas change with the times. Books are
the means of the evolution of society; initiating all forward movement according
to the loving will of God and the universe.
But we need not indulge in any chronological snobbery, and think that the books of the present are superior to those of the past. It is in seeing through the eyes of the authors of the past, as they saw their present, that we are able to step back enough from our own immured, unquestioned assumptions - of our own innate, imagined superiority - to glimpse beyond ourselves and initiate the things of the future.
Authors help to inspire other authors. One book is a stepping stone to another as unconsciously writers influence each other. In an enlarging of basic understanding and knowledge one book will build upon another; inspiriting and enthusing other writers to expand upon the concepts or imaginative ideas they read of, and digest; to present them again to the world, in words of another shape, and form, in another book.
So the progress of joy, and life, which is ever steeped in current wisdom and knowledge grows, and turns; and being ever refined, turns further corners, and grows again, and from one generation to the next. And this, whether it is fiction or non-fiction; even to the stretching and expanding of our comprehension of genre, as broadened subjects overflow their boundaries, gradually branching into new kinds of books not previously seen or thought of. But these new book-ideas will seem foolish to us at first! Just as this delightful Chinese proverb intimates:
'People are open to new ideas . . . as long as they are identical to the old ones.’
But we need not indulge in any chronological snobbery, and think that the books of the present are superior to those of the past. It is in seeing through the eyes of the authors of the past, as they saw their present, that we are able to step back enough from our own immured, unquestioned assumptions - of our own innate, imagined superiority - to glimpse beyond ourselves and initiate the things of the future.
Authors help to inspire other authors. One book is a stepping stone to another as unconsciously writers influence each other. In an enlarging of basic understanding and knowledge one book will build upon another; inspiriting and enthusing other writers to expand upon the concepts or imaginative ideas they read of, and digest; to present them again to the world, in words of another shape, and form, in another book.
So the progress of joy, and life, which is ever steeped in current wisdom and knowledge grows, and turns; and being ever refined, turns further corners, and grows again, and from one generation to the next. And this, whether it is fiction or non-fiction; even to the stretching and expanding of our comprehension of genre, as broadened subjects overflow their boundaries, gradually branching into new kinds of books not previously seen or thought of. But these new book-ideas will seem foolish to us at first! Just as this delightful Chinese proverb intimates:
'People are open to new ideas . . . as long as they are identical to the old ones.’
Where
did the Idea of ‘a Book’ come from in the first place?
How did the idea of ‘a book’ originate?
How did the idea of ‘a book’ originate?
Continued/
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