In today's Media, Has the Soul taken a Hiatus

“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness.”

"On Classic Literature" from Ideas and Opinions – Crown Publishing (1954)-Albert Einstein (page 64) originally published in the Jungkaufmann, a monthly publication of the “Schweizerischer Kaufmaennischer Verein, Jugendbund" (Feb, 29, 1952)(Thanks Phil)

Some ideas are being past around that have got me thinking. Media had always been a concern to me, because of what one could assume without taking a clear stand on what is proposed or presented.

Statistical valuations on the trends of reading habits amongst countries and their population. Internet accessibility and information overload.

The question to my mind has to do with how we are numbing ourselves by adopting a unresponsiveness to information and acceptance as a value toward truth. If one did not have this introspection how is it that one could endeavour to realize the state in which they themself have been placed. It requires "no thinking and acquiescences" to powers beyond us. We are then in essence, sleeping?

To Remember: Eskesthai

Trinity College Library, Dublin. (Photo: Candida Höfer.)

It is sometimes with reverence that we can walk through the old buildings whose architecture breathes. We are transported somehow. All that knowledge, and here it resides. As written word read, can resonate deeply, so too an affinity with places can bring some deeper connection not really understood.

So you go into the library with a purpose in mind. You are looking for something in particular. All these books. It's as if, that what ever you hold in mind becomes the link between what awaits to be remembered, waits, until it was asked.

So you are setting the stage then and you may not have realized it.

Quote from Scienceblogs,"Shifting Literature by Jennifer L. Jacquet?

Ursula Le Guin

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

So you are most likely setting the stage yourself whether you like to think so or not. Sometimes books will come into view that might never had, had you not gone for one in particular.