Reading is telepathy, and a book is the most powerful technology invented. Homer, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Woolf, Hemingway — these are names without a living body. We can’t talk to them, nor touch them, but their thoughts are immortalized through the written word. Aristotle’s logic, Kepler’s astronomy, Newton’s physics, Darwin’s biology, Wittgenstein's philosophy — these are memes without living originators. They no longer champion their ideas, and yet, we still talk about them. Without books, humans would never have escaped the boundaries of space and time. Each new generation would have had to learn the realities of life for themselves rather having the luxury to build on the past; knowledge accumulation would have quickly dimmed towards an asymptote. Everything that we value in the modern world has its root in invention of writing. Everything that we have accomplished has come from reading. Even on an individual level, one of the most effective way...
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