The power of the written word..
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.
If information could be passed on merely by word of mouth, how little we should know of
our past, how slow would be our progress!
Everything would depend on what ancient feelings we had accidentally been told about,
and how accurate the account was. Past information might be revered, but in successive
retellings it would become progressively more muddled and eventually lost. Books permit
us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us
with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds
that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of history,
to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the
collective knowledge of the human species.
Carl Sagan
An American Scientist
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