The Power Of The Book

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31256, 31 December 1966, Page 4

The Power Of The Book

<By GARDNER MIU.tR)

No greater disaster could overcome our civilisation than if some new disease were suddenly to attack paper. Our public and private libraries would become dust heaps, our bookshops with staring empty shelves would need to close their doors, our daily newspapers would cease publication until perhaps they could use another medium, say, onion skin. The human mind would be left to grope through memories of books read with advancing years diminishing, as they do, memory’s storehouse. Without our books and newspapers, life would become an almost intolerable burden.

It may be said that the answer to this really awful possibility is the computer. That would be a greater calamity than the innumerable heaps of dust that were once books. No computer could produce a book, even a child’s first primer, for the computer has no mind. It has its place as a provider of statistics, but it can do nothing original. A book Is the product of the human mind. It owes nothing to machinery—except as machinery makes a book a commodity—but owes everything to the strange miraculous operations of a thinking mind. Books have shaped history and they will probably reshape history if the portents of our day are anything to go by—and they are. The power of the book is more widespread than the two great disseminators of news and entertainment, radio and television. Books are ideas set to the music and tragedy of life. Here are four of them. A hundred years or so ago any little group eating their lunch sandwiches in the reading room of the British Museum, London, would see a grubby little man reading the philosophy of Hegel and constantly taking notes. They probably made fun of him among themselves. The grubby little man was Karl Marx (1818-1883). He wrote a book in 1867 and he called it “Das Capital.” In his ponderous volume he developed at great length his remedy for social ills, namely that private property should be abolished and the way to do that was by class-war. From it there came what we call communism. The book is now out of print but in its day it stirred men to think deeply about their social environment and its cramping effect upon their lives. The power of it was like a slow fuse leading to an explosion that has not yet died down—if ever it will.

I have stood at Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery, London, and wondered about this social genius to whom Britain gave sanctuary. The modern world has turned In its sleep because of the prodding of this little man who lived in poverty. Much later there came a book that set millions of men and women half crazy with half-baked ideas. Most of us know the book and many have read it. “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”). It was written by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) the head of the Nazi Party in Germany. It was compulsory reading for Germans. A turgid book with a false perspective, it is now out of print: but the raw power of the book and its consequences for almost every race are still striking the network of nerves that constitute society. It is strange that a book lives long after its print has faded, and its end a dustbin. These two books, “Das Capital” and “Mein Kampf,” were, each in its own way destructive. But they were powerful to a degree that demanded a great price in “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The really great books never die. Each succeeding generation finds inspiration in them, to live at the highest level. There is a writer who lived in the fourth century whose books have for 16 centuries inspired and influenced millions of people. He is Augustine (354-430) the Bishop of that part of North Africa we now know as Algeria. He was a black man of powerful intellect. His life story is fascinating; his influence on theology such that no Christian thinker could ignore his work. Augustine lived when the world stood at one of the great cross-roads of history. The Roman Empire was beginning to totter. He wrote many books and two of them are much read today. “The Confessions” and “The City of God.” For centuries “The Confessions,” the autobiography of Augustine, has affected the lives of men to a degree that cannot be calculated. One saying of his, an unforgettable saying, is known to many who know nothing else of his writings, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” There, Augustine uncovered the basic truth and need of mankind. In those sixteen words we have the autobiography of Everyman. The power of Augustine’s book is still at large in the world. From the fourth century to the seventeenth is a far cry but both are linked by writers of books. Few would deny that the book written by the tinker of Bedford is

unsurpassed in its appeal and magic. That book is. of course, “The Pilgrim’s Progress."

Written by John Bunyan (1628-1688) at a time in English history when liberty of conscience was struggling to become the right of all citizens, it is today the most widely read book next to the Bible. Bunyan wrote 60 books of which “The Pilgrim's Progress” is the twenty-fourth. It has been said, and truly said, that it “holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner.” It is one of the few books that adequately describes its contents on the title page, a custom that could be copied by contemporary writers with advantage to readers. Written in prison, “The Pilgrim's Progress” has been the comfort and solace of millions of pilgrims throughout the centuries. Dr. Johnson once remarked to Boswell that “Don Quixote,” “Robinson Crusoe" and “The Pilgrim’s Progress” were the only three books that a reader might wish longer.” Well said! A thousand books around me clamour for a mention, but space forbids except for a quotation from that grim philosopher, Thomas Carlyle. "The true University is a collection of books.”