I'm
a bibliophile.
Books are the most friendly concentration of knowledge
and entertainment that the human mind has yet
conceived. Sure, CD's and DVD's can cram more wordage
into a more compact package than any bound, paper
book can manage, and that annoying catchphrase
'multimedia' presentations can impress the viewer
with text, pictures and soundbites...But nothing
else feels like a book that you can hold in your
hand, to read in haste or at leisure, in almost
any lighting, without batteries or power cables.
Nothing else allows the mind and its imagination
as much freedom to stop and start, to pursue
a random thought, to skim the surface or be
completley immersed as does a simple book. Good
books, In my view, do not come and go. Like
the trees from which they're made, good books
come into existance, they grow, they change,
sometimes they send offshoots from which new
books spring. They may go through different
editions. A first edition may go out of print,
and become a collectors item, but the words
themselves, the knowledge, stays avaliable.
Officially, Western libraries
are said to have begun with the Greeks, around
the 6th Century BC. The Lyceum was established
in Athens in 336 BC. Subsequently, Athenians
buried and badly damaged their collection,
to prevent its acquisition by rival librarians
of Pergamum. Romans took the remnants
of it home with them in 40 BC.
In 40 BC, Anthony sent his
lover Cleopatra in Alexandria the entire library
of its archival, Pergamum (where parchment
was invented). In
part, he was punishing the Pergamumites for
siding with his rivals during the latest Roman
civil war. He may also have intended
to compensate Cleopatra for Julius' unrecorded
act of vandalism.
Rome destroyed and rebuilt many cities. It
uprooted homegrown cultures and replanted entire
populations elsewhere, more or less at random. Rome
was an insignificant contributor to Library
scholarship. It specialized in villa
libraries for the rich. No scholars were
assembled when Rome established its first Public
Library in 33 BC, unlike centuries of common
practice in the ådecadentπ East. The
Romans sacked Thebes in 29 BC, ending a thousand
years of its prosperity.
Dates listed hereafter are
Anno Domini. (AD), unless otherwise noted. The
giant library at Antioch burned down in 37,
along with its city. Before her defeat,
native Queen Boadicea burned down Roman Londinium
(London), in 50. Rome conquered Jerusalem
in 63, flattened it in 70. It massacred
the inhabitants of Caesurae Palestinae, Jotapata
and Massada
by 73. Subsequent revolts targeted Jewish
colonies in the great imperial cities. This
massacre cost the Roman Empire hundreds of
thousands more lives, and equivalent treasure. Rome
conquered the island of Anglesey in 78, the
last known refuge of the Druids.
Eighty AD saw the first destruction
of one of the greatest Buddhist centers, Anuradhapura
in Ceylon. Founded in 437 BC, it would
be annihilated by Tamil invaders, this time
for good, during the 8th Century AD.
Meanwhile, almost every book published since
the 1800's is quietly self-destructing. Their
cheap, high-acid paper reacts to light, heat
and moisture by crumbling to dust. Fahrenheit
451 has reached room temperature
these days. The wonderful world of chemistry
has relieved Ray Bradbury fascistic,
science fiction dystopians from the thankless
chore of destroying every book. Ephemeral
electronic media are even more vulnerable. Any
massive breakdown of civilization will see
most of them perish. In addition, our
recording mediaπs engineered obsolescence
affords our literature repeated opportunities
to disappear.
Herculean efforts to transfer print media
onto digital databases, (mostly meaningless
megatons of accounting documents), will only
mitigate this devastation. In library
after library, reluctant staffers dump truckloads
of perfectly fine books and bibliographic materials
into the nearest landfill. Meanwhile,
their MBA-certified weapon managers crow that
theyπve achieved cost-cutting goals. In
the future, preserving old ideas especially
idiosyncratic and culturally specific ones
deviating from the mass media norm shall
become private, oral and website responsibilities
much more often than public, paper-published
ones. Since the technocrats refuse
to do their obvious job, we will require many
more bards, witches, griots and shamans, to
assume these adult responsibilities.
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