Old books teach us that much of what we call new is not, and that the term modern often means a new wrapper on old mistakes.
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.
None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.
The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.
They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
CS Lewis
Paper editions, my friends.
Don’t trust our current age of liars to refrain from putting words in the mouths of authors long dead.
As Abraham Lincoln said, Don’t believe half of what they say about me on the internet.”
The Catholic League with Dr. William Donohue reports that the Department of the Treasury is weaponized against people who buy Catholic books calling us “Extremists”. The danger in that is that the government can freeze your bank account and assets until you prove your innocence. Dr. Donohue has written to Congressman Jim Jordan for redress.
“Don’t trust our current age of liars to refrain from putting words in the mouths of authors long dead.”
Thirty years ago books in the Public Library claimed that Michaelangelo, Da Vinci and Hellen Keller were homosexual LGBTQ+, and those are the only ones that I read.
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