The Power of the Pen

The snow and frigid temperatures have turned my blood to ice and my brain to slush. I haven't been able to focus on reading a book since the Arctic freeze began a couple of weeks ago. I've just been slogging through life. So, to cheer myelf up- I decided to treat myself to a CD from the Great Courses of The Teaching Company. They have all sorts of university courses on CD. I can listen in the car. I don't have to thaw my eyeballs out. Acknowledging my desperate need to go far, far away I picked "Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations" . It covers early civilizations in the Near East from 3500BC to about 500BC. The course goes thru the first cities in what is now Iraq, the rise of society, and the invention of the written word. The instructor was commenting on how the ability to read, write, and pass information changed the world. It is intriguing to the think that language evolved partially due to laziness. People must have gotten tired of carrying all those clay tablets around- and sought ways to shorten the information. They wanted to get their point across in the least amount of words. They went from using pictograms to represent a concrete object to using pictograms to represent ideas. The instructor pointed out that by using the written word they had created a time machine. And I thought "Yes"- a time machine. Literature is a time machine. Without it -we'd be stuck here in the present in our (hopefully) ordinary lives. But, open a book and voila! New time, new place, new experiences. With renewed hope- I plan to climb into my time machine and set the dials to Anywhere But Here and Anytime But Now and take off.
Talk to you next week... maybe.