Life as Art

Any culture where the art of carrying a book is more important than the ability to read one, is already dead.
Once upon a time, reading was a skill, a mark of the educated to differentiate themselves from the common rabble. Above that, writing was an even greater skill, producing works of calligraphic beauty painstakingly created by diligent experts in hushed rooms in secluded monasteries. Such works were treasured because they would be read by scholars for centuries, copied as holy writ even if they were the counts of sheep or collection of taxes. Such books come down to us with names that call through the centuries, like “The Book of Kells” or “The Domesday Book”. Now the books themselves have become art, & the words are irrelevant - like the languages they were written in.

Those books have a life of their own, a history, but they are stagnant. They were once vibrant & alive because the next copy would introduce an artist to the mix who would add something extraordinary or unique, or sometimes even incorrect, to breathe new life into an old work, for good or bad. But still, these books are now locked away, their images taken & reproduced with little care for the content, just the general feel of the book, its value as a rare entity. The art will fade, slowly, & no amount of care-taking or curating will stop the slow decay. Like all the works of man, they are temporary, to be gloried in for a short while, remembered wistfully, then mythically, then slowly forgotten.

Thus, the living book dies.

Who grieves? Umberto Eco certainly sees books as representative of the lives & cultures therein chronicled, & their importance because of it. But if we destroy or lose books, we have lost only the past. If we have the ability to write, then we don’t need to rely on the past to have captured all of the wisdom for us, because we can rebuild it from common knowledge. The past is not sacrosanct. The past is not perfect. We are not trying to return to a golden age of legend.

We need to move forward. We need to write of the now for the future, not of the past for the now. & we need to accept that, as we move forward, some books will be lost, or will die, or will be transfigured into mere works of art to be admired from a distance behind a cordon in the Louvre, or to pass through like the Sistine Chapel, as we journey on our own literary pilgrimage.

But most importantly, a good tourist is not someone who has merely been to a special place in the guide book, but one who has seen what is there & understood its cultural significance - not to be humbled by it or to worship it, necessarily, but to learn from it & grow.

Don’t simply carry a book in your head, but understand it, move forward with the knowledge, & give the intention of the author, the content of the book, new life through applying its wisdom in yours.