Saving the world, one book at a time

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.”

The above quote is one of my all-time favorites, spoken by the brilliant Barbara Tuchman, a celebrated American author who boasts a Pulitzer Prize for her book, “The Guns of August”. I had this quote going through my mind the entire time I read “Lucifer’s Hammer”, particularly during the scene where Dan Forrester meticulously selects books to rebuild human civilization. In fact, I thought it was one of the most important scenes in the entire book, and I wished we had talked about it more in class. I am not often lucky enough to be around people who appreciate books to the extent that I do, so to see the reverence that Forrester uses while handling and carefully protecting the works that would re-build civilization was very significant to me. There was something beautiful in the fact that Dan Forrester saved humanity so humbly and silently. He received little thanks from anyone in the book, but he was the only person who realized that humanity stood a chance with the proper materials.

Books have always been a prominent fixture in the upward advance of civilization. In fact, one of the most significant moments of human development was the invention of papyrus in ancient Egypt. The ability to record history and events completely revolutionized the way that humanity functioned, and from that point on the written word was treated as almost holy. Only religious men were permitted to study written works and to write in the Middle Ages, and this trend continued for a very long time. In fact, it is only in recent times that literacy has been so prominent.

Bearing this in mind, it seems much more poignant to remember the way that Forrester purposefully selected the books that would build the world back up. Literacy is so prominent that it is easy to take these collections of knowledge for granted, but when you really reflect on what humanity owes to the Egyptians who developed the earliest forms of paper, the scene with Dan Forrester becomes almost overbearingly powerful.