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We get letters
The internet is a strange and wonderful place.
A while back, there was a conversation about how soldiers are seen. It drifted, as such conversations will in that group. Someone posted a Wilfred Owen poem.
I like Wilfred Owen, somewhere I have his complete works, as annotated by Sigfried Sassoon, working with Owen's notes, letters, and drafts. It's an amazing book, because Owen did a lot of crafting. He didn't just knock them out, he worked at them.
So someone (an instructor, I believe) sent me a note about that subject. He had some questions/recollections about a line in Dulce et decorum est.
I'm pleasantly shocked. It isn't that he sent me a note, to mention it. It isn't that he sent me a follow-up, after he'd found an answer.
No, it's that in doing research (on a semi-obscure, these days, poet of The Great War; and one who deserves to be better known, but I digress) found a throwaway comment I made.
I love libraries. One of the sadnesses, to me, of my not having a degree, is that I can't be a reader at the Huntington (well, I suppose that, were there someone doing research who told them I was their reader, I might be allowed onto the rolls). I love them because they have books.
And books are no small part of what makes H.Sap. different from the other animals. We can collect the things we've learned in our lives, and pass them on to others. Spoken language is good for that (and with a good oral culture, the time which information can last is thousands of years. The Aboriginal people of Australia have accounts of a meteor which landed there sometime around the year 1000), but print media are better, because the repository is passive.
All of us who blog, we have (so long as the internets last) entered into the company of Aristotle, Li Po, Basho, Donne, Machiavelli, Dante, &c, &c, &c..
That's amazing.
A while back, there was a conversation about how soldiers are seen. It drifted, as such conversations will in that group. Someone posted a Wilfred Owen poem.
I like Wilfred Owen, somewhere I have his complete works, as annotated by Sigfried Sassoon, working with Owen's notes, letters, and drafts. It's an amazing book, because Owen did a lot of crafting. He didn't just knock them out, he worked at them.
So someone (an instructor, I believe) sent me a note about that subject. He had some questions/recollections about a line in Dulce et decorum est.
I'm pleasantly shocked. It isn't that he sent me a note, to mention it. It isn't that he sent me a follow-up, after he'd found an answer.
No, it's that in doing research (on a semi-obscure, these days, poet of The Great War; and one who deserves to be better known, but I digress) found a throwaway comment I made.
I love libraries. One of the sadnesses, to me, of my not having a degree, is that I can't be a reader at the Huntington (well, I suppose that, were there someone doing research who told them I was their reader, I might be allowed onto the rolls). I love them because they have books.
And books are no small part of what makes H.Sap. different from the other animals. We can collect the things we've learned in our lives, and pass them on to others. Spoken language is good for that (and with a good oral culture, the time which information can last is thousands of years. The Aboriginal people of Australia have accounts of a meteor which landed there sometime around the year 1000), but print media are better, because the repository is passive.
All of us who blog, we have (so long as the internets last) entered into the company of Aristotle, Li Po, Basho, Donne, Machiavelli, Dante, &c, &c, &c..
That's amazing.