Words Are More Than Just Ideas

As I write this, I have just finished unpacking a collection of books left behind by my grandparents from their passing earlier this year. Despite the generational gap between us, much of what I found myself placing on bookshelves were things I have read before. Classic works of fiction such as Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues, a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, Frankenstein, and The Wind in the Willows, greeted me as old friends, as did the poetry of Robert Frost and Longfellow. While I already have digital copies of most of these on my Nook, I found that holding the old, printed copies was evocative of a whole different set of emotions and memories than those gained through simply reading the stories themselves.

For a great deal of human history, the written word has been the only way to be sure that your words would be heard by future generations. We may credit an unknown man named Homer for the creation of some of the greatest and most renowned stories ever told, but most historians agree that each bard would tell the stories differently, while keeping only the major points the same. One can only imagine how many stories and oral traditions have been forgotten over the ages simply because they were not written down. While we may never know who the man William Shakespeare was, or even if he was the definitive author of all the works attributed to him, the words he wrote have been copied, reprinted, read, and even re-imagined by countless people. While we may consider the availability of such well-known texts trivial, many societies, both historical and modern day, have used censorship to deny writings to their people.

I consider myself a fairly modern person; I grew up in a house filled with computers, (both working and in pieces) I was born into a world where we can communicate and share information with each other effortlessly, and I dream of a day when mankind can do the same on other worlds. I believe that the ease with which we can share and access information is one of the defining aspects of my generation, and that such availability, if properly used, is beneficial to all those involved. Seldom do I enjoy looking back at our own history, content instead to keep looking forward, but as I flipped through their delicate pages, I could not help but wonder at the history contained in the books themselves.

By far the oldest of all the books I recently unpacked was the collection of Longfellow poems, which was printed in Cambridge in 1882. It was an odd feeling to hold in one hand a thing which was created more than a century before my own birth, odder still to imagine how many people had held the very same book. How many had been touched by the words, or even just the illustrations within, and how many of them carried this influence with them to share with others? When was it first read with the assistance of an electric light? When was it first transported by an automobile? Even sitting on a shelf in a single room for all that time, how many memories long ago forgotten might it have seen? I can't speak for the book's history any more than it can, but I do know that simply by being there it has more history than any digital copy ever could. While I love my Nook for allowing me to carry an entire library around with me wherever I go, I seriously doubt that one day my grandchildren will also gaze at its screen.

I often find it hard to imagine a world without the technology that we take for granted every day. As I said, I look forward to the future; I prefer to imagine a further evolutions and applications of the things we are just beginning to understand now. At the same time though, it scares me to think that one day, not long from now, there will come a time when all books are considered relics such as the Longfellow now sitting on a shelf in my room. Will our own histories be typed, written, or simply forgotten? Might a future society look at the practice of printing words on paper as we look at hieroglyphs on stone tablets: not just obsolete, but barbaric? What will we leave behind for them to remember us by?

If these words are found years, decades, or even centuries from now, may they be in some way physical and not just pixels on a screen.

R.I.P. Charles and Anne Reid