“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.”
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
If only Carl had been around for computers, lap tops, the internet, and AMAZON; now that really is magic.
The other day I was trolling the internet for quotes.
Like you do — you guys know I love me some quotes, I have a whole page devoted to the brilliant musings of others.
Anyway, I came across this one by a hero of mine, Carl Sagan, and it stopped my little scrolling hand, and made me think.
I love him and I so admire his big…brain, his expansive, (and ahead-of-his-time) thinking, and his book Contact is still up there as one of my all time favs.
You see, if you know me (which you do) you know that eclipsing my love of writing, and even my love of singing, may be my love of Science fiction. (I’ve actually started writing some.)
I always say: In my next life I’m going to be a singing, Egyptologist – in space — who writes a blog on some crazy, futuristic device, about her adventures.
You know where I developed all these interests? In books.
And that’s why that quote really got to me.
Books are Magic.
Carl is gone, but when I read all his ideas about space and the Universe; his thoughts are suddenly in. my. head.
The Egyptians, with their hieroglyphics, are able to catapult us back to their time, and into their lives.
Napoleon’s letters to Josephine talk of passion and love.
Poetry written over one hundred years ago can move us to tears.
The words of Shakespeare can make us laugh or break our hearts.
The one thing all these works — these WORDS — have in common is the theme of the week — our commonality, the fact that even through the millennia, we are more alike than we are different.
Think about it. Books and words are like a time machine, they can carry us into the future, explain the past in the participants own voice, give us an intimate glimpse into a person’s heart — or let me speak to you from my lap top in LA.
That’s fucking magic you guys.
Carry on,
xox
