The importance of books
A simple book remains one of man’s greatest inventions. These little, compact pieces of joint paper, ink, and colorful covering are the closest thing we have to time travel. Upon the opening of a book its reader is connected, across several years, decades, centuries, and millennia, with the author and his ideas, views, emotions, and stories. One is touched by the same Spirit of the Time, the same Zeitgeist, in which the book was written while also finding something inside which transcends all bounds and remains relevant, even today. Regardless if it is fact or fiction, the reader will surely find something of value, either emotionally or intellectually, that adds to his being and widens his horizon.
It is said that a man dies twice, first when buried, and finally when his or her name is uttered for the last time. However, there exists a third death that not everyone has the privilege of experiencing. The ideas and emotions of authors, even when their names have been forgotten or misremembered, continue to influence new authors and readers through books. We can never be sure who originally came up with something, no matter how much we try. Even when, historically speaking, a set of ideas or stories are tracked down to an author from antiquity, we will never know if the author was perhaps amazed by the short remark of a man at the local forum, which inspired the writer to mold the comment into an idea. It is only when the last writer and the last reader refers to someone before him for the final time, his intellectual ancestor, that a man is forever forgotten, and slips into the annals of history - never to return.
In the end, stories transmitted through books teach man how to deal with the present and with the future from people who already experienced both. Stories of old do not say to you that dragons exist, but that they can indeed be defeated.
“As always books remain a consolation - these little light ships for traveling through time and space and beyond their limits. As long as there is a book at hand and leisure for reading, the situation cannot be hopeless, not utterly unfree.”
- Ernst Jünger