So... an update on aquaintance with letters. I have recently begun reading "A Tale of Two Cities" by the extraordinary Charles Dickens. I have also been reading (at the same time, incidently) Harry Potter, and a few other books here and there. Something I have noticed about all of them, whether published in the eighteen hundreds or in the last ten years... is that something about the way that they are written draws a person in. I know there are people that HATE reading... but if you think about it for a second... everything we know about the past comes from books. Even if those books were fictional works... they were written by people about people in similar surroundings as themselves. We learn about how they spoke, what the major issues were in day to day life, and what the public was interesting in reading.
So how then... do books written in 1867 still remain popular today? There is something that we have in common with those books... something that we still notice-- our own humanity. That is why reading is so important. Because it teaches us something that we cannot learn from science. It shows us the ideas and the values that thinkers of any age wanted to be heard. Funny thing... we can take what they have written and go to the next step. We can analyze... and write things down too. The study of what people have written before us gives us the chance to move our ideas beyond theirs. What an idea!
In short... reading makes you a better person. And if every person person read... we might just have a better world.