Books connect our future and our past, teaching us about what came before and encouraging us to imagine what might yet be. Because of this, reading and libraries remain essential even in our technological and multimedia future, Neil Gaiman recently insisted in a lecture for London’s The Reading Agency:
Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different. […]
Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.
His full remarks are available at The Guardian. We’re grateful to Mr. Gaiman for his enthusiasm and support of reading and libraries – he’s been a huge help to our own effort to build a library: our Manual for Civilization, which will live in the currently-under-construction Long Now Salon.
