Skip to main content

The Book Tomb -- Writer's Poke #275

I had the rather hair-brained scheme that I would read all of the books in the library; well, not all of them, but all of the books in the History section -- a few thousand books at most.

With a little quick (and optimistic) math, I figured I could read a book a day; and after four years of college, that would equal a lot of books. Okay. Maybe not the entire History section, then, but why not dive into the books in the shelf in front of me? Surely I could read all of those.

The Stacks. What a wonderful place. Musty. Dusty. An elegant tomb full of books and artificial lighting. I could stay deep in its depths. It's where books come to die, but it's where I would go to live. I was going to record the Word on each individual brain cell.

Admittedly, I'm not normal, but I've always known that. Understand: college, after all, isn't a time for learning. It's a time for drinking mass quantities of booze, and chalking up carnal conquests. At least that's what the majority of my peers seemed most interested in. The question one most heard around campus was not: "What cool things are you learning?" Rather, it was: "Are you going anywhere this weekend?" Or, "You want to hit the Uptowner tonight?"

Have you read a history book lately?

"The only history that's worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today." -- Henry Ford

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...