Pen Pushers – Now and Then
Like many, I love books. I particularly love old books. I get excited when I see a faded thirties dust jacket, and even more so when it is an older leather-bound. I love holding an early edition of John Harvey Kellogg’s medical text I own and noting the yellowing pages that bear the nutrition wisdom of another generation. And to hold a rare pre-war single volume edition of the Talmud (which normally sports twenty oversized tomes) with its microscopic Hebrew text of wisdom two thousand years old, is sheer ecstasy.
What is it about old books and me? Sure I appreciate and admire the amazing twists of story lines of a Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, and the intense romance of Tolstoy’s War and peace, and Anna Karenina (considered by Dostoevsky and Nabokov to be the perfect novel). Yet, put a twelfth century numerology book into my hands and I will absolutely swoon.
The written word is an act of history. Oral traditions can be reinvented and restated. But a word once committed to paper can never be taken back. For most of history that act of commitment was inevitably a piece of wisdom-writing or a narrative describing a new dimension of reality. The novel is a very recent innovation and ironically, the democratization of the world of publishing has assured us that the magnificent and the very ordinary are sometimes indistinguishable.
Interestingly, works of fiction were unheard of in the annals of the oldest civilization – the Jewish people. Works of fiction cannot be found in a history of a people spanning over three thousand five hundred years. Only in the most recent century, when the global village has allowed cultures to rub shoulders with each other, has the worldly influence also exacted a price of the Jewish novel.
Why the bias against fiction? The elders inform us that writing carries a very heavy responsibility. And to waste that opportunity showing off one’s imaginative prowess is an abdication of the duty to engender wisdom into the world.
I know that one can easily propose an argument that fiction is a worthy metaphor for life – and even more powerfully, an agent of creative change. And indeed there is merit in that argument. But who has the temerity to boast the capacity of authoring the profound parables as those of the past – to be the latter day Solomon on the best selling charts? Hence my admiration of the heroic pen pushers of old who dared shape the minds and hearts at a time when the pen was indeed mightier than the sword.
Some people arrange to meet in foyers of major hotel chains. But if you are looking for me, try a register of reputable second hand bookstores. That’s my haunt.