My days among the Dead are passed, Around me I behold, Where’er these casual eyes are cast, the mighty minds of old. My never-failing friends are they, with whom I converse every day. – Robert Southey
One of the greatest inventions of humankind is writing. Cavemen drew pictures on walls, some probably made sculptures of creatures, but whoever thought of engraving or encoding, marking or etching thoughts and sounds, was a genius of the highest order. Alas, as with other great revolutionary discoveries of the distant past, we have no specific information on that extraordinary mind that came up with this incredibly potent idea.
The technique of writing surpasses in its impact counting and the computer: Knowingly or unwittingly, just with a few strokes, writing conquered space and time. For, what is written can be taken from place to distant place. We can read from wherever we are letters and lamentations scribbled hundreds and thousands of miles away. In this power, writing is the ocular equivalent of the telephone. Moreover, it can stay there forever for others to read, others of generations yet unborn. It is thus that we have come to know about Ashoka and Alexander, Archimedes and Aryabhata.
Written words do more than convey and perpetuate information. They have the capacity to entertain and educate, inspire and activate, expand and ennoble minds that read what has been inscribed. With the exponential growth of any invention writing took on various forms and modes, techniques and styles. The variety of alphabets that have emerged correspond to the Babylonian story about languages in the Book of Genesis: the creation of a variety of mutually unintelligible random symbols for sounds and shrieks. With paper and pith, on leaves and with nails, hand-written materials (manuscripts) were generated galore. Then paper was invented, and pencil, ink and quill, the printing press and much more.
Of the billions of pieces written and engraved, many have been bound into books between covers. These sweep topics ranging from stories, epics and essays to treatises, poetry, plays and more. Many books thick and thin come and many have gone for good, and a great many volumes are stored all over the world.
Many people have collections of books at home. But all over the world, in cities and towns, there are also buildings housing such collections. These are libraries: heavy concentrations of knowledge and insight treasure and trash, depending on one’s taste and background. The library at St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta was the first large library I went into. I recall browsing through some stacks of very old books, including a copy of Lavoisier’s Traité Élémentaire de Chimie. I had an eerie feeling turning the pages of a book that had been published in the year of the French Revolution and whose great author had been a victim of the guillotine. Later I went to the National Library in Alipore which was housed in a palatial building with majestic stairways. I was awed by its serenity and the thought occurred to me that the deep silence there was actually the subdued voices of the million authors that were imprisoned in those bounded tomes. Years later it was my privilege to be in the halls of the Bibliothèque Nationale on the Rue de Richelieu in Paris, the British Museum in London and the Library of Congress in Washington[VR1] . Of these, the last-mentioned had over a hundred million items when I visited it some decades ago.
Most people who can read have all read more than one book in the course of their lives. Some underline or mark in margins their favorite quotes or passages.
Right from my school days I developed the habit of writing short notes on the books that I read. When I began doing this in my teens more than seven decades ago I did not know that years later more than 500 of my book-reviews would be published some day in various journals. I have many more of them jotted down in various places.
In this blog series I plan to resuscitate and present some of them. Most of the books I will be recalling will be, to use John Ruskin’s phrase, books of the ages whose significance and impact have lasted for ages, and not books of the hour, which, however charming and entertaining, pass away like a night’s dream.
Classics are associated with every language and culture. These refer to books that have continued to have countless readers for several generations. More than five hundred books are counted among the classics of the Western World alone. In our own times it has been estimated that more than a million books are published each year all over the world. All the books I will mention are available in English which happens to be one of the few languages in which one can read at least 80% of the greatest books in humanity’s collective heritage.
Spurts of Thought 