Inside a book are arranged these twenty-six little marks in ways that can make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder, and understand. It's truly astonishing to see what these twenty-six little marks can do.
In Shakespeare's hands they became "Hamlet". Mark Twain wound them into "Huckleberry Finn". James Joyce twisted them into "Ulysses". Gibbon pounded them into "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". John Milton shaped them into "Paradise Lost".
The alphabet is arguably mankind's greatest invention but because we use it ourselves on a daily basis, we somehow take it for granted. Just think how much information you have acquired and dispensed through the writing of words made up of letters. Imagine if you had been restricted to communicating only with those who were in the same place at the same time as you? That was the reality for the human race until only about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, a tiny percentage of our time on earth. It is perhaps no coincidence that the evolution of the human race from just another band of hunter-gatherers competing with many other species for survival to the dominant one on the planet has occurred during the period in which we have developed the ability to communicate complex concepts over the limitations of space and time.
My favourite quote is from Carl Sagan's book "Cosmos": "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 one thing that bothers me is that I’m going to die with so many books still unread that I have always wanted to read.
