Transcript

Reading #1139 · From Chad

0:00
When the library died, no one lit a match.
0:03
There's a story behind that. This is your daily message from
0:07
Chad #1139 to upgrade your mental game today by telling
0:10
yourself a better story. Because the most important story
0:13
you hear is the story you tell yourself.
0:15
And this message is dedicated to Lisa La Chapelle on her
0:17
birthday. You can get a free copy of my
0:19
book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to from
0:21
chad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message
0:25
and hundreds of others are always available at
0:27
www.fromchad.com. Here's the upgrade.
0:31
You think the great Library is safe.
0:33
But upgraded thinking knows a library doesn't die when it
0:35
burns. It dies when no one bothers to
0:37
read it. Here's the story we tell
0:42
ourselves. The Library of Alexandria was
0:44
destroyed in a fire. Julius Caesar a stray flame
0:48
40,000 scrolls up in smoke. It's dramatic, it's memorable,
0:53
and it's mostly wrong. 2300 years ago, King Ptolemy set out
0:57
to collect every written work in the world.
1:00
His men searched every ship that docked at Alexandria for scrolls
1:03
to copy. Scholars lived inside the royal
1:06
complex, paid to think it was there that Eratosthenes measure
1:10
the circumference of the earth, that Zenotidus added the first
1:13
true manuscripts of Homer. It was the the greatest
1:16
gathering of human knowledge in the ancient world ever built,
1:20
and it didn't go out in a blaze. Historians now say the greatest
1:24
library in history died a quieter death.
1:27
Neglect. The papyrus was fragile.
1:31
Mice and humidity and rot chewed at the scrolls, and every
1:34
generation the scribes had to copy the old text by hand before
1:38
they crumbled into dust. For a while they did, and then
1:42
the will ran out. The copying slowed, the funding
1:45
dried up, the scrolls decayed faster than anyone bothered to
1:48
save them, and the knowledge of Euclid and Eratosthenes simply
1:52
faded, 1 unrecopied page at a time.
1:56
As the classicist Roger Bagnall put it, the fact that the
2:00
library was allowed to die showed that the Dark Age had
2:03
already arrived. The darkness didn't cause the
2:06
loss. The loss revealed the darkness
2:08
was already here. Now look at us.
2:12
Last week, The Atlantic ran a piece called The End of Reading
2:15
is Here. Fewer than half of American
2:18
adults read a single book last year.
2:21
The Cher who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28%
2:26
to 16%. Just 2% read to a child. 20% of
2:32
adults now account for 80% of the books read.
2:35
Reading 1 historian says, is becoming a niche hobby like
2:39
stamp collecting or growing orchids.
2:42
We are becoming in the writer's word, post literate.
2:46
But here's the twist. And it's the whole point.
2:49
Our library can't burn. Every book written now fits on a
2:53
chip. Google Books, the Internet
2:55
Archive. The sum of human wisdom backed
2:58
up, searchable, 1 keystroke away.
3:00
No perilous voyage across the Mediterranean.
3:03
No mice, no rot. The scrolls are safe forever.
3:07
What's decaying isn't the paper, it's the wanting.
3:10
The threat was never fire. The threat, then and now, is
3:15
apathy. A library doesn't need an enemy
3:18
to fall. It just needs to be ignored.
3:20
The scribes of Alexandria didn't decide to destroy the world's
3:23
knowledge, they just stopped copying.
3:26
They let it slip. And that's how it goes for us to
3:29
not a decision, just a drift. You get busy, you scroll before
3:34
bed instead of reading. Your attention wanders every few
3:37
pages. You tell yourself it doesn't
3:39
matter because the book will always be there.
3:41
You can pick it up later. That's the lie the scribes
3:44
believe, too. Carl Sagan put it best.
3:48
What an astonishing thing a book is.
3:50
It's a flat object made from a tree, with flexible parts on
3:54
which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.
3:57
But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another
4:00
person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years across the
4:04
millennia. The an author is speaking
4:06
clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.
4:10
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding
4:14
together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant
4:18
epochs. Books break the shackles of
4:20
time. A book is proof that humans are
4:23
capable of working magic. In quote, the better story to
4:27
tell yourself is when I hold a book, I hold magic.
4:32
That's the inheritance sitting on your night stand right now.
4:35
It survived the fall of Rome in the Dark Ages and the whole long
4:38
March to reach you. It will still be there tomorrow,
4:41
which is exactly the trap. Because it awaits so patiently,
4:45
it's easy to let the reading in you go quietly dark, one
4:49
unturned page at a time, until one day the library inside you
4:53
is just an empty room. So don't wait.
4:57
Don't be the scribe who stopped copying open a book tonight.
5:01
Tell me a story of a book that changed you to from
5:04
chadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell
5:08
them read this one it's worth it and then name the book.