Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel never wrote: “All theory is gray, my friend, but green is the tree of life.” Voltaire’s best-known line was not said or written by him: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Plato never wrote his most famous line: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”ĭon Quijote de la Mancha never said: “Let the dogs bark, Sancho. What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. Today, World Book Day, it wouldn’t hurt to recall that the history of literature is an unceasing paradox. In times gone by, the Onas worshipped several gods. She was the last one who spoke their language.Īngela sang to herself, for no one else, in that language no longer recalled by anyone but her: She was one of the last Ona Indians from Tierra del Fuego, way out there at the edge of the world. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts. Today is International Mother Language Day. Lady Gough’s Book of Etiquette, published in 1863, established some of the social commandments of the times: one must avoid, for example, the intolerable proximity of male and female authors on library shelves.īooks could only stand together if the authors were married, such as in the case of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the seat of her empire, works that taught good manners were required reading. Victoria, symbol of the British Empire, lady and mistress of the nineteenth century, imposed opium on China and virtue on her own country. A grand farewell was due the queen who gave her name to an epoch and set the standard for female abnegation by wearing black for forty years in memory of her dead husband. In 1901, the day after Queen Victoria breathed her last, a solemn funeral ceremony began in London. The camels were also the catalogue: they were arranged according to the titles of the books they carried, a flock for each of the thirty-two letters of the Persian alphabet. One hundred and seventeen thousand books aboard four hundred camels formed a caravan a mile long. This prudent and tireless traveler kept his library with him.
Throughout the history of humanity, only one refuge kept books safe from war and conflagration: the walking library, an idea that occurred to the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century. Bush’s crusade against an imaginary enemy, most of the thousands upon thousands of books in the Library of Baghdad were reduced to ashes. A pair of millennia later, after American legions invaded Iraq, during George W.
0 kommentar(er)
