Precious

To ancient civilizations, the exchange of ideas wa

s facilitated through word-of-mouth. Father to son, mother to daughter, master craftsman to apprentice: the older generation taught the younger. Socrates taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle; Plato rejected Socrates’s last actions, and Aristotle influenced a religion for centuries. Eventually, though, the written word took precedence and gained influence, and by the Middle Ages, great thinkers were read and emulated. The printing press allowed the dissemination of ideas at a rapid pace and relative affordability. By the late 19th century, the ideas of Kafka and Nietzsche and Marx dominated an age.

What now? Words today are disseminated more rapidly and affordably than any printing press could imagine. Words, thoughts, ideas, and plans are typed by the thinker without asking a copy-editor’s input; contractions and letter combinations take the place of actual sentences. Twitter and Facebook, blogposts and wikis make purporting one’s ideas easier than ever. And people re-tweet and share and comment and change with abandon.

Sometimes with the abandonment of common sense.

But although Gutenberg might not recognize the tools of the printing trade in the 21st century, the written/edited/printed word is still upheld within certain circles.

I recently found an old book in the library. You know the kind: a crinkling, disintegrating dust jacket that has protected the words within from decades’ – half a century’s – worth of dust. The book was Robert B. Downs’s Books That Changed the World. It started out with the Bible, and although he approached its value from a completely secular point of view, he still acknowledged its strength, influence, and longevity. He moved on to Aesop’s fables and several works by Plato and Aristotle. St. Augustine, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Sir Isaac Newton, and others. Most of these works I have never read, and it makes me sad.

What makes these works great? What keeps my reading material from that category?

Thought.

A book I read as a teenager, Torrie by Annabel and Edgar Johnson, was basically a sweet historical romance for teens. Nothing tawdry or ugly. One of the characters, Jess, is illiterate, and when he begins to learn to read, he comes across a word he doesn’t know how to pronounce, and he asks Torrie for help. “Here, Torrie, I found a real humdinger. What’s t-h-o-u-g-h-t spell?” “That’s thought.” “Must have put all those extra letters in there to make it look more worthwhile.” As a priviledged daughter of a schoolteacher, she cannot understand why he finds that so important, and he explains to her where he came from, a backwater farm town where nobody ever talked about anything important, only about who he saw at the store and what they bought and what they talked about, “More nothing.” And he wanted to get away from that, so he traveled first to the capital in Washington where he saw the men of Congress talking in a way he had never heard before. “Real t-h-o-u-g-h-t,” he said, and smiled as if at a joke that wasn’t quite funny.

That’s a paraphrase, obviously, but the scene was important enough that it has stuck with me all these years.

Unlike those generations before the printing press, I do not find myself reading the thoughts of previous generations. I find myself reaching for the latest edition of my favorite mystery series or a new best seller. While this is not necessarily wrong, I am not participating in the exchange of ideas. I read quite a bit of non-fiction, but even that is not necessarily stretching my thoughts to the important and the worthy.

I want to write about what is important. I want to read what is important. If I am going to change the way I write, I must first change what I read! I must inundate my mind and my vocabulary with works of substance. Feasts fit for a king rather than marshmallow fluff.

If only I could forget that the written word is so easily accessible.

Then I could remember that words are precious.