“You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us…”
I finished reading this book recently. It was my second time through, and I found it struck even closer to my heart this time around.
I also just finished reading What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920 – 1933, by Joseph Roth, a collection of articles written for a variety of newspapers. The last essay, standing alone in a section titled, “Look Back in Anger,” is called, ”The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind.” Unlike the previous articles in the collection, which appeared in Berlin newspapers, this one appeared in a Paris paper. It opens with these words:
Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with gas masks and airplanes, the return of the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of the Cimbri and Teutoni—all this means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize: It must be understood. Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation.)
He wrote that in 1933, by the way.
I’m thinking it’s an ancient problem, really. What we love, what we fill our hearts and minds and bodies with, how we choose to use our time and resources, especially when we have a wealth of it at our disposal. It is so easy to be lulled and think that being occupied is something else, entirely. Sometimes when my kids are clamoring to watch another movie or play more video games all I can think is that really what they need is to be bored and alone with themselves, because the world is filled with things to do and infinitely un-boring, and it is far too easy to spend all our energy filling ourselves up with emptiness to even notice.
I’m not against being busy. But what with?
There have been times in my life when I was convinced I did not have time to read “for pleasure.” At some point I decided, to heck with it, I’m going to read anyway. Now I’m convinced I can’t afford not to.
Teachers, artists, musicians, writers—so many of my friends, so much of my family, so many of the people who have touched me, fall into these categories in one way or another. They are people with messages burning in their hearts. They work long and hard to spread the word, to light sparks in other hearts, to "stitch the patches of the universe together", and they deserve more appreciation than they get most of the time.
More and more, I think of them as prophets, crying out in the wilderness.
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