Books and my Flying Carpet

Worshipping in the temple of knowledge and my issues with Kindles

A colleague of mine Rotana Ty posted this video from Meredith Lewis on her substack about a young man whose father worked and lived in his library. The child thought that they were really rich (even though they were poor). The video is here but you can also read it on Merediths post.

I replied to Rotana which I’ve slightly extended

”Thanks for this. I grew up in South Africa at a time where there was no TV only radio and books. The library in school was my fortress of solitude. It was my gateway drug to knowledge and as the video says my flying carpet to worlds seen and unseen. I’m just over 60 and still have the thirst for new knowledge and ideas. It is something that my grandson is passionate about and I want to help kids to be passionate about exploring all aspects of the world and discovering new challenges.”

There is a feel and a smell to a book especially in hard cover that no e-reader can ever deliver. As Nick Carraway says in the Great Gatsby

“I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew.

My wife and I have many books on our shelves. They are our unchanging friends through good or bad times. The opinions they have within them are frozen in time and cannot be altered.

I have for example a book by Jonah Lehrer in 2012 called Imagine- I bought it early and then it was removed in July 2012 over some issues around fabricated quotes. However I have a copy with all its warts - it will not change or be removed from a Kindle store

Sandy and I both have Kindles primarily used for travel, but when I see the word ‘updated’ I do wonder what has changed from the original text. These may be words that were socially acceptable at the time of printing.

I have a book from Alistair Cooke - letters from America which uses the word Negro rather than African American as he wrote the original piece in the 1960’s. If that book was available via Kindle I suspect it would have been changed.

Having read 1984 - I often wonder if in Amazon or publishers, there is an army of Winston Smiths amending texts.

I was reminded by a post by Heather Cox Richardson last week in her substack Letters from an American Heather writes from a different perspective from my own but her posts are highly useful for a non American reader. She quoted some words from Margaret Chase Smith a Republican senator at the time of McCarthy and I think that reading books with an open and inquiring mind can banish these 4 horsemen she referenced.

”Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

The full speech is available here and well worth a read as it is relevant to the current level of discourse in politics in the US - but slowly creeping into other countries.

I was amazed as a child when a teacher highlighted that books were burned in ancient times but also in the 20th century. He highlighted to us that books were a way to combat our ignorance about the world to use it as a building block to new ideas.

However he was the strongest in his comments on books and their ideas as a means to challenge authority be it the divine right of kings through I would imagine to the increasing iconoclasm we see around us in the service of ‘woke’ ( a cliche word but we haven’t come up with a better one. He also saw books as a way to challenge ourselves. Charles Handy’s book “The Age of Unreason’ changed my life in 1992, how I worked and saw the world of work. I was at least able to have the opportunity to tell him so to his face.

Through books I was introduced to the world of Hayek, Machiavelli , Locke, Adam Smith, Hobbes and Rousseau as well as that of Tolkien and the beauty of ideas and language.

I will keep my hardcopy of books and make sure that my grandson can always read them so that the ideas contained therein are not ‘updated’ to reflect the mores of the time

I will always use it to ride that magic carpet over the seas to Cathay or into the vast reaches of space, armed with a notebook a comfy chair and a good cup of freshly brewed coffee.