Knowledge & Imagination

Via

"Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere."

-Ray Bradbury

The Virtue of Unread Books

"...the array of books in our home is intended for ongoing, well-rounded usefulness. They're there to show us what's possible, not venerate what's already been. Even the history books, which are expressly about what has already been, are there to light an inquisitive fuse and point us forward into new exploits."

-Scott James

Although we didn't have a terribly sophisticated home library growing up, I can remember countless hours sprawled out on the floor, or in a chair, or on Mom & Dad's bed, paging through whatever 'looked interesting' on the shelves in various corners of our house. I spent a lot of time paging through our illustrated children's dictionary, our large family bible, and the many chapter books left behind by older siblings at college (A Wrinkle in Time, Anne of Green Gables, etc. ). There were also times where I picked up something that turned out to be less than interesting. And we must not forget the old, worn, copies of Fulton Sheen on the end tables that sewed the seed for a life-long reading adventure. Or the subconsciously comforting notion that the presence of Catholic books on marriage exuded-that they lined the head-board shelves in my parents' bedroom sent a clear message that Mom & Dad were focused on being Mom & Dad. (The same thing went for magazines-thankfully our house only subscribed to the 'family-friendly' ones...I now laugh when I think back on how miffed I was that other kids at my Catholic school were totally clueless and grossed out about things like NFP when I had been leafing through old copies of CCL magazine for years. Ha.)                                  

We keep books around as reminders both of what's been and the unknown to come. It's true that browsing is still one of the best ways of discovery. I'm delighted whenever a friend visits and finds something that intrigues them on one of my shelves, after which I usually insist that they borrow it. While not the bibliophile that I am, I was so tickled that my parents automatically took part in this great pastime on their recent visit, each picking out something that looked good, and then promptly reading themselves to sleep.

Read the whole thing here.

Bibliotheca: The Bible Re-imagined on the Page

Courtesy of Julie, I heard about this remarkable Kickstarter project today. Adam Lewis Greene, an intrepid book designer, has set out to produce an edition of the bible free from all the numbers and footnotes, fresh and pure like any other story in print. I've seen many neat Kickstarter campaigns before, but this is the first that I've felt compelled to directly be a part of. Bibliotheca looks like a truly awesome project, and I can't wait to see the beautiful results. As someone with a very marginal book-making hobby, I can attest to the sheer amount of work that goes into the production alone, not accounting for the truly ambitious design, type design, setting, and editing that Adam has set out to do. There is a lot of truth in his remarks about our modern bibles being very 'encyclopedic.' We typically experience the text in a very quantifiable, analytical fashion, with verse and chapter marked, asterisks everywhere. Although I've been reading scripture and hearing it proclaimed at Mass my entire life, I just remember the time a couple years ago when a change in my commute led me to begin listening to the daily readings, instead of just reading them on the page-and it was surprisingly striking. I am very excited to embark on a fresh reading experience when my copy arrives in a few months!

Bookish Art

Catherine Alexandre, The books are in search of readers

Worth More Than a Thousand Words: Project Yosemite

Yosemite HD II from Project Yosemite on Vimeo

Battle of the Books

Illustration from Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' (from 'A Tale of a Tub'), 1704.

In my leisurely stroll through Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History, I've just finished the chapter on Swift's fanciful story of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns-emblematic of the 17th-18th century public debate over whether modern learning had superseded classical tradition. Here we see one era of books jousting against another, as if the two ages of learning could not occupy the same space (notice the spider and the bee in the upper left). While our present age of enlightenment and 'universal tolerance' leaves more room for the coexistence of modernity and antiquity, we still see the creeping edge of plenty contemporary faddishness competing for, and in many cases, displacing, essential parts of the traditional liberal arts curriculum. It is becoming increasingly common for students to progress through high school and college without reading large chunks of Shakespeare, Dante, or even staples of American literary tradition, like Walt Whitman. Sometimes it leaves one to wonder if modernity has indeed won--not for its merits and might but instead because of its novelty.

Read more about Battle of the Books here.

Neil Gaiman: Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading, and Daydreaming

For the 'reasons to read fiction' files:

 "...the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using you imagination, create a world and people it and look out through their eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're becoming someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed. 

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals."

On the digital divide:

"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old; there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand; they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them."

And more:

"We writers -- and especially writers for children, but all writers -- have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were -- to understand that truth is not in what happen but what it tell us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all."

Read the whole thing here.

Related: MIT scientists discuss the importance of science fiction in nurturing inventors.

The Roman Canon, Comfort, and the Communion of Saints

Of all the variations of liturgy that we hear today, the one that puzzles me the most is a habitual over-use of Eucharistic prayers that omit the Roman Canon. I always tend to notice this acutely when I'm in a spell of loneliness, as I was recently. There are many things the mind and spirit strive to do when one is craving company, and at the right moments, the reassurance of needed friends can be found in the persons of the imagination, only found in the fictions of stories. Thus, books can sometimes be a welcome antidote to loneliness, providing us with an invisible sustaining comfort. But often books cannot cure the problem. I recently found myself in a funk that would not be appeased by stories of any kind, their comforts more illusory than ever. Both the beauty and curse of books (and television) is that they cannot talk back.

But without fail, I was relieved (as always) when I went to Mass and heard:

"...the glorious ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of our God and Lord, Jesus Christ, and blessed Joseph, her spouse, your blessed Apostles and Martyrs, Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon, and Jude; Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian, and all your Saints..."

And if that wasn't enough:

"...graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy Apostles and Martyrs; with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Macellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and all your Saints; admit us, we beseech you, into their company..."

And just like the crucial cheering party towards the end of a race, here is the roll call of the Church Triumphant, reminding me that I am far from alone. There are real stories-the most spectacular stories-of saints and martyrs, that we don't have to imagine. There is a certain virtue of the imagination that we need to practice faith and hope, but it is an in sufficient substitute. The written word can rightly act as a catalyst for true comfort, but in the end, the Word that became flesh gives us to most real reassurance.

Chesterton on Fairy Tales

"Fairy tales, then are not responsible for producing in children fear...The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tales provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terror had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God. That there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear."

-G.K. Chesterton

On a related note, check out this archived podcast discussion on censoring Harry Potter, from Julie and Scott at A Good Story is Hard to Find.