1.01 And My First Post Will Be About...

Hold that thought.

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I was initially intending to post verbosely and eloquently about the prose and content of "The Historian", which I am currently lost within, but I found an article on women in the oikos in Athenian texts, and I had to run for Perseus to check the original greek in Medea. I do feel slightly heartbroken that I am still saving up for hard copies of most greek texts, and ashamed that the only Homer I have (in the flesh, as it were) is that ungraceful collection of pages in the J.A.C.T book I used as an undergraduate.

I wonder why we humans - or perhaps just us scholars - have such a rabid desire to possess ideas (for that is all that books and poems and essays truly are) in a physical form. Is it truly more efficient to print and pay and bind for what is merely an afterthought not hours after we have turned the final page?

Given the databases that we can create and consume and distribute much easier in an electronic form, what draws us back and back again to the solid page?

A friend of mine, a History student I think, talked to me one day long ago about the sudden advancement of trades, science and literature through the development of rudimentary literacy. Almost in a logical progression, the Roman occupation of Britain brought in higher literacy and thus greater transferral of knowledge; better bridges, better mills, more efficient copies of forging techniques.
With the loss of this literacy came the time we call "the dark ages". It seems to me as if we were on the edge of an age of light, of complete transparency of ideas and near absolute equality of mind. Pushing, almost bursting through into an entirely new format of words and visions.

I don't think that I can stand that thought. Let transcendancy lie in the bosom of spiritual thinkers, and let me lie down in my bed to sleep if I can. It is flanked currently by Haruki Murakami and Susannah Clarke, who sit on top of my constant companions, Euripides and Homer. I need the comforting feel of their rough old pages, and the scent of a hundred past readers, to truly settle into a good day's reading. Yes, even if Perseus is so accessible and useful, I think that I feel safer, perhaps, looking at the printed word.