A world without books…
by Christine Nolfi
…is a prison stripped bare of our deepest emotions, the primordial soup of flesh bound to synapses in a miraculous synergy that gives rise to human thought. What we think nestles in the arms of what we feel like a babe cradled to his mother’s breast. We prefer to live beneath the illusion that the higher order of our brains reigns supreme, as if our choices are selected then executed by the benevolent function of our minds. But we are animals still.
Books are humanity’s only perfect invention. You may marvel at the Internet’s speed or stand in awe of a rocket breaking free of earth’s jealous gravity; you should praise the lucky inventions of antibiotics and electricity and an internal combustion engine capable of turning agrarian economies into thriving meccas of commerce. Yet first lay a wreath on the altar of the written word, a form of communication rendering us immortal as it carries thoughts and emotions from one person to the next over years, decades and centuries.
We place words in a cocoon we call a book. This invention is more startling than spring’s first butterfly rising from dormancy in a burst of cerulean blue or fiery orange. Open a book, and you open your mind to a blending of logic and emotion sure to transform the way you view the world and experience every feeling we’re taught to suppress or cultivate or ignore.
Throughout the centuries, the hard and soft sciences conduct a lively discourse through books. Aristotle sits on a marble step while teaching the great Alexander about truth and beauty, or rhetoric and politics. Fast forward several thousand years to any college campus on the planet, and find a strapping youth dully flipping through a tome of the philosopher’s works. It’s a sunny day at university and our youth doesn’t wish to read another word; he certainly doesn’t want more homework. What he doesn’t know yet is that the words he will read carry fire, a straight shot of emotion spun with logic in a combustible mix sure to light something inside him waiting to be born.
Of all the forms a book may take one is the king’s scepter, the symbol of sovereignty marking the highest evolution of civilization’s most civilizing achievements. The novel may or may not draw from science’s sturdy frame—some novels do, and they provide a stunning glimpse into a world we will one day inhabit. But even the novel’s use as divining rod doesn’t capture whythis form of communication is supremely important. Its greatest gift, the largest of the gems scattered at our feet as we read, is the novel’s ability to transform us. The magic trick may be fleeting but as we turn each page, we align more completely with the author’s train of thought, we follow syntax and symmetry on a path to emotion so powerful we are suddenly walking inside a character’s skin.
If the storyteller is masterful, we carry the memory of the character’s thoughts and feelings, and her many adventures, for the rest of our lives. The connection allows us to fuse our animal nature with intellect in a form of community without equal. We come to know—and to feel—what it is to be someone else.
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Genre – Contemporary Fiction
Rating – PG13
More details about the author & the book
Website http://www.christinenolfi.com/
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