Thursday Thoughts...

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

Carl Sagan

Probably some of the best words ever written about the magic of writing and reading and books.

How clearly and simply he takes us from the flat object with some funny black squiggles to being inside another person's mind and having them, speak inside your head. 

The notion of having someone speak clearly and silently inside your head. Speaking silently - so true, yet how odd when you look at it like that!

I also like how he references time travel - how the words can be centuries old; how books break the shackles of time.

I'd never focussed on the time-travel dimensions of a book before - certainly I had thought about how you could travel in a book to far away places. I oftentimes think about the fact that these words were written a long time ago; how prescient they were; how relevant they still are; and I think I have thought of books as artefacts; nouns and objects rather than aligning them with the action of time-travel. 

Oh I am getting myself tangled in this meandering!

Nevertheless, I say yes to considering and pondering the role of books and writing in binding us together over millennia - what a marvel they are and how fortunate are we?

From 10 years ago - Australian Antiphonal, depicting magpie songs...