If you had three books to take with you should you ever be stranded on a deserted island, what would they be?
When you are a child, little things make a big impression on you. One of the first things I can remember as a little girl was huge. My father was always surrounded by a great pile of books that seemed to reach all the way up the vine-covered wallpaper of our kitchen, to the ceiling, and higher. From my vantage point of maybe two-and-a-half feet off the floor, the stack of books seemed to be if not an actual part of my father, one of the things about him that made his presence a wonderful place to be.
Growing up in the Great Depression as he did, my dad's one luxury was the public library where, by the age of ten, he had devoured every offering in the little alcove that housed the children's books, and so he was granted special permission by the funereal library matrons to access the hallowed inner sanctum where adults could breach all the mysteries of the universe. He never lost his sense of wonder or gratitude that he was deemed worthy of this chance to penetrate the immortality that seemed to attach itself to the printed word.
And so I commenced a love affair with books before I could even heft one, let alone delve into its surely sacred contents. As I grew older, I loved the look, the feel and even the smell of books. I thought that the best end I could ever reach was to die in the midst of rafts of books lining the shelves of my own private library. Forget about husband, family or property; to me, to own an author's words was to own him, in a way. This, I thought, was the path to a true connection with eternity. Later on, of course, this took on a different meaning in the words of St. Mark's Gospel, where Jesus said: Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
So much faith, joy and knowledge at one's fingertips; a constant companion, always ready to teach, entertain or inspire. But in addition to these benefits, there is the very feel of a book, especially a heavy tome — something like "City of God" by St. Augustine — that imparts a particular sense of accomplishment to those valiant enough to breach its walls. Or a thin volume of poetry; its pages fanned by the smaller fingers of the hand, something that Hamlet might carry upon making an entrance. Life without these treasures would be unimaginable for me and for countless folks like me.
And so it was with trepidation that I read last week that Amazon.com announced that for the first time, sales of titles for their Kindle e-readers outpaced those of hardcover books. Now, I'm no luddite when it comes to the advance of technology, but I hope I'm not wrong in predicting that the surge in the sale of e-books is merely a fad and not a trend. As we grow more and more into a technologically based society, we are losing touch with the sensible world around us. This push-button lifestyle brings us further and further away from simple pleasures; those which may be enjoyed even without electricity.
A few of my friends own Kindles and have pointed out some of their obvious advantages: primary among them the ability to be in possession of a limitless number of titles with a device weighing less than a pound. Pardon me, but I actually enjoy the bulk of books; the most difficult packing decisions for me are not those of clothes or makeup, but which books will be lugged by my husband in the over-sized suitcase that we call "the green monster." A Kindler will also tout this advantage in regards to summer reading at the beach, but it's my guess that they'll soon miss their favorite paperback when it comes to protecting the bridge of their nose as they lazily doze amidst the dunes.
As did my father when I was a little girl, I encourage children to read: read anything that catches their fancy and if Kindles are the only means to this end, then fine. But my suggestion to the young is to pick up a real book, love it and reread it until its pages are yellow and dog-eared and then pass it on to someone else. Then none of you will have cause to pause when someone asks you that popular question: If you had three books to take with you should you ever be stranded on a deserted island, what would they be?
3 Books on a deserted island!
1) Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.
2) The Boy Scout Handbook (it could help!)
3) The complete collection of everything written by Heinlein. Ok, i know it would be huge, but bear with me.
Yes, I did not choose certain books. Please allow me the moment to explain why:
The Bible (old & new testaments). Much of the advice and commentary relates to living in a society. Thankfully on a deserted island I won’t have to deal with too many other humans, and can recite the Mass from memory whenever i want (benefits of growing up Catholic).
Shakespeare – it was either old William, Neal, or Heinlein. Chose 2 of 3. Sorry, old boy, but it just didn’t happen this time. Next deserted island, you are there!
Dan
Gotta have the Bible. The Bible is not about living in society, it is about God’s relationship with people.
Bible, The Devils, The Rebel. The latter two lead me to read the first in depth and come to accept grace. In truth I can’t imagine being without a lot of books. Age has reduced my reading, but increased my appreciation. I find the idea of a desert isle particularly loathsome, a mountain cabin however…
Not to kill the nostalgia, but I think this is just a case of generational bias. Being 23 years old as of this writing, I’ve never known a world without computers. The world wide web was invented when I was 4 years old. I received my first hand-me-down computer from my dad when I was 10 years old. I’ve had broadband internet access since I was 13 years old. I graduated from on online university having never taken a single hand-written note or turned in a single hand-written paper. Excluding textbooks, I’ve read more books in electronic format than paper. I think it’s a bit dramatic to romanticize something as trivial as the material a book is printed on. Words, printed or spoken, are intended to convey meaning and ideas. Whether they are scrawled on the wall of a primitive cave, hand-scribed on parchment, machine-printed on 100% recycled 96 brightness 8.5×11, or rendered on a screen by a sophisticated graphics processor, they are able to do precisely that. The content of a written work is much more important than the form it takes.
Now indulge me in a perhaps equally-romanticized alternative view: Imagine if all of the books your father ever read in that old library as a boy could have been stored in a 1 inch square box and accessed instantly, any time he wanted, for as long as he wanted. I’m sure if the same technology existed then that exists now, you would have been admiring the glowing screen of his computer and the dainty little 2 inch hard drive inside containing thousands of libraries worth of books rather than a room full of deteriorating tree pulp containing a mere fraction of a percent as many works.
And so, if you’ll forgive the terrible pun, you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover – even if it hasn’t got one.
Patrick
That’s an interesting history. I give you mine. It was 1969 and computers were still big machines in an air conditioned room mounted on an elevated floor with the cables running underneath. I was 40 miles away, but connected by a twisted pair. We called it “time sharing” and used it for engineering problems. A year later I was writing a book (an operation manual) and one of our seniors showed me a program called “Report” that did page justification and pagination. This predecessor to MS Word was a great tool for it’s time. In 1982 I bought my own Radio Shack Model 3 and spend all day playing and learning to use it. TRSDOS and Basic were imbedded.
After all these years using computers I still like books. There is something “Permanent” about them that cannot disappear with two clicks of a mouse,and besides I can’t imagine yet holding a Kiddle while I’m lying in bed.
My answer to the question is the Holy Bible, The Constitution of the United States of America, and something from Ayn Rand. I would like to study the first and third to resolve the conflict.
Haha, see, that proves my point about the generational bias. I think it’s more a matter of perception and expectations. I’ve grown up essentially during the transition from paper to electronic format for virtually everything, including books, news, and information, and so my expectations are obviously different from people of my parents generation who spent much of their lives reading books, reading newspapers, reading magazines, and generally getting their information from printed material. I’ve never had a strong psychological association of books and information with the printed page. Given another 20 years of technology proliferation and electronic formats chipping away at traditional bound material, I’m sure my children will have virtually no expectation that books and information be associated with printed pages. But the important thing is that regardless of whether current or future generations read from printed pages, from an LCD screen, or from a retinal microchip implant that provides a real time heads-up display, it won’t take anything away from the ideas and meaning that the words convey, and that’s really what’s important.
If you can resolve the conflict between Rand and the Bible you may earn a place as a prophet in your own right!
Pat
A. I have no desire to be a prophet, but I would like to tie conflicting ideas together for my own sake.
B. The gap you speak of is bigger than you think. I get the impression that you and many other young people believe in the hockey stick idea, not of AGW, but of human progress. I came into life on the uptick, but I have experienced several downturns so I’m skeptical of your view. I expect that some day there will be a book that fits alongside the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Third Reich, the USSR, ending with USA or Western Civilization.
All I meant to say is that those works are so fundamentally disparate that it may take divine insight to reconcile them.
I think in terms of technology and overall standard-of-living the “hockey stick” graph of human progress is unquestionable, with the bend occurring at the turn of the last century, but if you’ve read my comments at this website you know that I have no youthful delusional exuberance about the state of this particular republic or of Western culture in general. Quite the contrary, by the end of my lifetime I expect to be living in a society so wholly irreconcilable with the classical liberal principles I hold so dear that I look back nostalgically at the Obama presidency as the good old days when cooler heads and moderation prevailed.
Pat
I suppose many would say the same thing about Rand and God, but if I’m to be stranded on an island I would be looking for divine insight even more than I am now.
Unquestionable? I’ve never been one to label anything as unquestionable. A study of the Roman Empire , for one, would show that technology and SOL can be reversed quite quickly. Last century? Are you referring to 1900 or 2000. In any case I think the upturn occurred much earlier. Adam Smith lived 1723 to 1790. James Watt 1736-1819. Karl Marx 1818-1883. Dostoyevsky wrote Brothers Karamazov around 1850 and the thing that amazed me was it could have happened yesterday. Now the only question is “When will the crash happen?”
Re: your last sentence: Replace Obama with Bush and I’ll agree.
I was speaking of 1900 and the period immediately preceding it, during the second Industrial Revolution, although you’re right, I should have gone back to around 1800.
All I’m saying is that I don’t think there’s any doubt that in a graph of history the upward trend of technological and human achievement is steeper from, say, 1800 to now than any other 200 year snapshot. It’s truly mind boggling to think of the transition in such a brief period of time from an America in which antibiotics and electricity have not been discovered yet to a time when the average family living below the poverty line has at least one automobile, television, air conditioner and broadband internet access.
But of course it would be naive to think that these gains are impossible to reverse. I don’t think a crash on the order of the Roman Empire is likely, short of a nuclear engagement between 2 or more superpowers, but economically and politically speaking, I suspect I’ll see at least “a” crash, if not “the” crash, within my lifetime here in the States.
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