Over and over again, writers who are entirely separated by time and space have sought answers to the same fundamental questions. I’ve always been struck by the direct connections between the answers they offer: differing in language, cultural scene and personal circumstance, their insights always enrich one another’s – sometimes penning the exact same thoughts in their own distinct ways. This is one of the greatest joys of reading – observing these patterns and slowly making sense of the ‘cloth that binds them’. After all, surely there must be some meaning in the way that so many independent minds arrive at the same conclusions, value the same elements of being, point their readers in the same existential direction...?
In these ‘musings’, I want to reflect on some such passages that I've come across --- poems, letters, books, journals, quotes and the like. Beautiful bits of art that have profoundly resonated and kept the joy of reading going for me. To set the tone, here are some favourite quotes on the topic:
Galileo Galilei (1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican): “But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page! Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of mankind.”
Carl Sagan (11th episode of 1980s Cosmos series): “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.”
Mary Oliver (1994 A Poetry Handbook): “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision -- a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed."
Susan Sontag (2001 Where the Stress Falls: Essays): “Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.”
2006 History Boys: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."
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