Among the vast number of human tools, the most breathtaking is undoubtedly the book, the rest are extensions of the human body, such as the microscope, the telescope is an extension of vision; the telephone is the continuation of language; the plough rake and the sword are the extension of the arm. Books, on the other hand, are completely different, they are an extension of memory and imagination.
In Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw once said that the Library of Alexandria was the center of human memory. Books are memories, and besides, imagination. What is a remembrance of the past? Isn't it the sum of a series of dreams? What is the difference between reminiscing about dreams and reminiscing about the past? This is the function of the book.
I have tried to write a history of a book, but not on a book basis, because I have no interest in the books themselves (especially the lengthy books of collectors). I wanted to write about the different kinds of evaluations people have about books. Spengler is one step ahead of me, and he has many wonderful statements about books in His Book The Fall of the West. In addition to agreeing with Spengler, I would also like to share my own views.
The ancients didn't respect books as much as we did—and that surprised me. They see books only as substitutes for spoken language. "The words spoken will fly away, and the things written down will stay." This often quoted phrase does not mean that spoken language is fleeting, but that written language is a persistent, yet dead thing, and that spoken language is as light as wings, and that, as Plato put it, is "brisk and sacred." It is strange that the teachings of many of man's great teachers are dictated.
Let's start with the case of Pythagoras. We know that Pythagoras deliberately left nothing written behind because he did not want to be bound by any written word. There is no doubt that he must have felt the meaning of the phrase "words can kill people and the spirit can regenerate people" that later appeared in the Bible. He felt this and did not want to be bound by written language. Thus Aristotle never mentioned Pythagoras, but only of the disciples of the Pythagorean school.
For example, as we were told, the Pythagoreans' lineage valued faith, law, and eternal return. These ideas were discovered by Nietzsche much later. This is the view that time is cyclical, as criticized by St. Augustine in the book City of God. St. Augustine uses a brilliant parable that says that the cross of Christ frees us from the circular labyrinth of ascetics. Time is a cyclical view, as Hume, Blanqui, and many other philosophers have said.
Pythagoras deliberately did not write anything, he wanted his thoughts to remain in the minds of his disciples after his death. This is the origin of "Magister dinit" (I don't know Greek, I can only use Latin to mean "my master"), but this does not mean that his disciples will be bound by what the teacher has said. On the contrary, this just emphasizes that they can play with the ideas pointed out by the guru with complete freedom.
It's not clear to us whether he pioneered the theory that time is cyclical. But we know that his disciples highly recommend this theory. Pythagoras is ancient, but his disciples have inherited his ideas through some kind of reincarnation (which is exactly what Pythagoras liked), and when someone accuses them of making some new claim, they will say: Our teacher once said this.
In addition, we have some other examples: the most striking one is Plato. He said that books were like portraits (maybe he thought of sculpture or painting at this point) and that people would see them as alive. But when they are asked questions, they do not answer. In order to change the defect of not being able to speak, he engaged in a platonic dialogue. In this way, Plato appeared as a many people. By Socrates, Golgia and other characters. We can also make this understanding. That is, Plato imagined that Socrates was still alive in the world as a way to comfort himself. Whenever he encountered any problem, he always asked himself: If Socrates were still alive, what would he say about it? This shows that Socrates is still alive and well. He did not leave anything written after his death, and was a master who relied on dictation.
Plato expelled the poets from his republic without being accused of ostracizing dissidents. We can also give an example of an ancient man who opposed the book, and that is the Sescar, and in his amazing letter to Lucirio there is a letter accusing a man of great vanity, saying that there are a hundred books in his library, and Seneca once asked, Who has time to read this hundred books? The situation is completely different now, and a large number of libraries are already valued.
It is difficult for us to understand some things in ancient times, where people do not respect books as much as we do, and they always see books as substitutes for spoken language. Later, a new concept came from the East—the idea of the Book of Heaven. Let us give two examples, starting with the later examples, namely, the Muslim view of logarithms. They believed that the Quran arose before the birth of the world and before the formation of the Arabic language. They think he is an inherent attribute of Allah, but not the work of God, like mercy and justice. The Quran speaks very mysteriously of the book's prototype. It is a Qur'an written in heaven, and it is the Platonic prototype of the Qur'an. The Quran says that it was thought that the book was written in heaven, and therefore it is an attribute of the Allah, which arose before the formation of heaven and earth. Muslim scholars or imams think so.
We have another example close at hand: the Bible, or to be more specific, the Judaic Code and the Five Books of Moses. It is believed that these books were dictated by the Holy Spirit, and it is indeed interesting to say that books written by different authors at different times were written by the same Holy Spirit. The Bible says that God is everywhere. The Hebrews wanted to synthesize various literary works from different eras into a book, the title of which was "Tora" (meaning the Greek Bible), all of which were attributed to a common author: the gods.
Once, when Asked Whether George Bernard Shaw believed that the Bible was the work of the Holy Spirit, he replied that all books worth reading repeatedly are the works of the gods, that is, the meaning of a book must exceed the intentions of the author, whose intentions are often shallow and sometimes false, but there are always more meanings in the book. Take Don Quixote, for example, it is not just a book that satirizes the knight's novel, it is a pure book, and there is nothing in it that can be easily grasped.
Let's imagine the meaning of such a poem. For example, I say: the babbling water is transparent and bright, the green trees on the shore are hanging in the green grassland in the water. Obviously, each line of these three lines is eleven syllables, which is loved by the author, is the embodiment of his will, and is artificial. But what is the point of comparing the works written by the gods to this? There is nothing in the book written by the gods, everything is reasonable, and every letter is thought out in advance. For example, the Bible begins with Bereshitbaraelohim, whose first letter is "B" because it corresponds to the word Bemdecir ( blessing ) . It's a book without anything in your hand. This situation reminds us of the Mystical Philosophy, which prompts us to study the written word, to study the books written by the gods, contrary to the ideas of the ancients, whose view of inspiration is more vague.
Sing, poetry, Achilles is furious. Homer said this at the beginning of the epic of the Iliad. The poetry he said was inspiration. If one thinks of the gods, one must think of something more specific and powerful, and this thing is the God of literature. God has written a book in which there is no such thing as a rhetorical word, and there is a certain rule for the number of words in the book and the number of syllables of each verse. Because of this, we can play with words with letters, and we can measure the value of each letter, because it is all deliberated in advance.
This is the second view of the book, which is the work of the gods. Perhaps this view is closer to what we think now than the ancients thought. The ancients believed that books were a substitute for spoken language, and later they considered books sacred, and then they were replaced by other views. For example, some people think that a book represents a country. We remember the Muslims referring to the Israelites as the book people, and we also remember heine's words that the homeland of that nation is a book. That nation refers to the Jews, and that book is the Bible. In this way, we have a new view of books, that every country is represented by one book, and perhaps by authors of many books.
It is surprising (and I do not think this has been discovered so far) that the elected representatives of various countries do not have a very similar image to those of these countries. For example, one might think that England should elect Dr. John as its representative, but this is not the case, england chose Shakespeare, and Shakespeare (we rightly say so) is the least British Writer. English writers are characterized by implicit meaning, that is, meaning to be unspoken, while Shakespeare is the opposite, he is good at using exaggeration in metaphors. It would not surprise us at all to say that Shakespeare was Italian or Jewish.
The same is true of Germany. This is a respectable but extremely fanatical country. It chose as its representative a man of magnanimity, who was not fanatical, who had an extremely shallow sense of the state, and who was Goethe. Germany is represented by Goethe. France has yet to elect an author who can represent itself, and people are leaning towards Hugo. There is no doubt that I admire Hugo very much, but Hugo is not a typical Frenchman, he can be said to be a foreigner in France. Hugo's endless metaphors and flowery rhetoric suggest that he is not typically French. An even more surprising example is Spain. Spain was supposed to be represented by Vega, Calderon or Cviedo, but this was not the case. It is represented by Cervantes. Cervantes was a man of religious persecution, yet his attitude was gentle and tolerant, and it can be said that he had neither the virtues of the Spaniards nor the vices of the Spaniards. It is as if every country wants to have a different person to represent, to remedy its own shortcomings, to make up for its own shortcomings.
We should have chosen Samiento's Farondo as our book of state, but we did not. Since we have a history of war, a history of swords and swords, we take as a representative of the epic poem "Martin Fierro", which narrates a deserter, and although this book was chosen for a reason, how can we imagine that our history will be represented by such a deserter who conquered the wasteland? However, this is the case, and it seems that every country feels the need for it. Many writers have brilliant statements about the question of books, and I would just like to touch on a few of them. The first thing I want to talk about is Montaigne, who in a treatise on books has this famous quote: If I am not interested, I will not write. Montaigne considered compulsory reading to be a false idea, and he said that if he saw a puzzling passage while reading a book, he put it down, thinking that he would read it as a pleasure.
I remember many years ago someone did a poll about what a painting is. When asked about my sister Jorah, she said: Painting is the art of pleasing people in form and color. I can say that literature is also a form of pleasure. If we read a book that is difficult to understand, then the author of the book is a failure. So I think writers like Joyce are fundamentally failures because reading his books is extremely laborious.
Reading a book should not take a lot of effort, it is uncomfortable to work hard. I think montaigne makes a lot of sense. He also listed several authors he liked, and he spoke of Virgil, saying that for the Agricultural Poems and the Enit he preferred the former, while I liked the latter. But it doesn't matter. Montaigne always talks about books with passion, saying that although reading books is a pleasure, it is tinged with melancholy.
Emerson's view was very different from Montaigne's. He also made an important statement about the book. In one lecture, he described the library as a magical exhibition hall in which the human elves fell asleep like demons, waiting for us to use spells to free them from their slumber. We have to open the books, and then they will wake up. He also said that after reading books, we can be with the best people of human beings, but we can't just listen to them, it is best to read the book reviews at the same time.
I was a professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aires in the Department of Literature and Philosophy for more than twenty years. I always tell my students to read less reference books, not just reviews, and more original books. They may not understand all of the original works, but they hear the voice of a certain writer and are not pleased. I think that the most important thing about an author is his tone, and the most important thing about a book is the author's voice, and this voice reaches our ears through the book.
I have spent part of my life reading. I think of reading as a pleasure, and another smaller pleasure is writing poetry, which we may call creation, a process of combining memorization and forgetting of what we have read.
Both Emerson and Montaigne argued that we should only look at what makes us happy, and they both thought that reading books was a kind of happiness. We have high hopes for books. I have always advocated reading repeatedly, I think it is more important to read repeatedly than to just read it once, of course, repeated reading must be premised on the first reading. I'm obsessed with books, and it's a little emotional to say that, of course we don't want to get too excited, I'm just talking to you about my heart, I'm not talking to all people, because "all people" is an abstract concept, and each person is concrete.
I still don't see myself as blind. I continued to buy books and keep piling them all over my home. Someone gave me a set of encyclopedias published by Brock Press in 1966, and I felt that this book was in my home, and I felt that it was a kind of happiness. This set of encyclopedias in neat font, with more than twenty volumes, is in my house, but I can't read them, and there are many maps and illustrations that I can't see, but nevertheless, this set of books is always in my home, and I feel that books have a kind attraction to me, and I think that books are one of the means by which we humans can attain happiness.
Someone was talking about the disappearance of books, and I thought it was impossible. You can talk about the difference between a book and a newspaper or a record, the difference between them is that after reading a newspaper, it will be abandoned, and a record will be forgotten after listening to it, because it is a more mechanical thing, there is no serious content, and reading a book can make people never forget. The notion that books are sacred—such as the idea of how the Vedas created the world in the Quran, the Bible, and the Vedas—may be outdated. Yet the book still has something sacred that we try not to let it lose. People take a book and open it, which in itself has aesthetic implications. What is the point of having words lie in the book and making symbolic symbols freeze? Meaningless. If we don't open it, what is the use of books? It's just a roll of paper or a roll of skin. But if we read it, something new will appear, something new that I thought would be something that would be there every time we read it.
Heraclitus once said (and I have quoted many times) that no one can walk into the same river twice, because the river is constantly changing, and we are no less changed than the river. Every time we read a book, the book also changes the meaning of the words. In addition, each book is imbued with the meaning of a time that has passed. I just said I don't agree with reading the book reviews, and now I want to sing the opposite tune with myself (it doesn't hurt to say a few contradictory words). Hamlet is no longer exactly the Hamlet that Shakespeare portrayed in the early seventeenth century, Hamlet has become the Hamlet of Colütte, Goethe and Bradley, a character that has been reshaped. This is the case with Don Quixote, the fate of Lugones and Martínez Estrada, and the martin fiero is no longer the martin fiero of the past, because the reader is constantly enriching the content of the book.
When we look at an ancient book, it is as if we see all the years that have passed since the date of its writing, and we also see ourselves. Therefore, it is necessary to show reverence for the book, and although there are many errors in some books, we may not agree with the author's point of view, but he always contains something sacred and respectable. Although we cannot be superstitious about books, we are really willing to find happiness and wisdom in them.
Jorge Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine poet, novelist, essayist and translator who is known as an archaeologist among writers. Born in Buenos Aires to a family of lawyers of British descent. Attended secondary school in Geneva and university in Cambridge. Master English, French, German and other multinational languages. His works cover a wide range of literary fields, including essays, essays, poems, literary criticism, and translated literature. It is known for its timeless writing and profound philosophies in Latin.