Book taggers

Catching up on several KC blogs last weekend, I discovered that some of the kids are caught up in game of blogger tag - some would call it a meme - about books. Name a book that changed your life, book you've read more than once and so on. Nine questions in all, then you tag some other folks. I've enjoyed reading the results, mostly, and was glad not to have been tagged because I'd still be agonizing over my list.

Here are a few:
Emaw
Dan
Happy
Jessi

Joe's response to #7 ("Name one book you wish had never been written") took me back twenty years to my Survey of English Lit course.

I know Joe only through his blog and his Flickr stream but I've always admired his forthrightness and conviction and willingness to ask tough questions even of himself. So I'm guessing his answer to #7 ("I'm not like that") is actually a coy reference to John Milton's Areopagitica.

Back in the 1640s, the English Parliament had passed an order requiring all authors to submit their work to a board of censors before it could be published. The state was mostly trying to maintain its publishing monopoly but Milton thought it also amounted to the state control thought. So he wrote a defense of freedom of expression.

It's an issue that's still very much with us in these days of Net Neutrality and so-called moral so-called majorities. Just for laughs, here are a few salient bits, chewy syntax, upper-case gods, sexist pronouns and all, with thanks to Joe for the trip down memory lane.

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From Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing

...books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.