“I am a product […of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”
―C.S. Lewis
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I, like Lewis, am a lover of books. From around the age of 6, my grandmother, who read to me, began to help me and encourage me to read. by the age of nine I had read whatever books I could get, from a neighbor, from school, from the country library (that let us bring home boxes of books at that time). the books read by the age of nine, were long on Civil War Stuff, including, Douglass S. Freeman’s four volume work on Robert E. Lee and his three volumes on Lee’s Lieutenants. I also read Gone With The Wind at the age of nine and age 12 I had read it four times, hating the romance, but fascinated by the few but meticulously accurate references to Johnston’s brilliant execution of fighting battles, then withdrawing and establishing lines and fighting another battle (I forget how many times, now). Part of my interest was ancestors in those battles. In any case, I would later learn (having heard only in the past five years some historian who had written on Joseph E. Johnston that he was the one general Grant feared.
As the years passed and my fields of interested expanded, I collected in literature, history, theology, counseling, along with works in science, philosophy, and etc., a rather large library. Our son recently wrote to a church that helped us to move, “You really didn’t believe him, when he told you he had 15,000 volumes did you?” We think we should have heard the laughter some thirty miles away. My collecting of books was for knowledge. I cared naught for the value of the book. As a result I marked them up, a rather distracting practice when it comes to selling books that might be collectors items. What I sought was knowledge, having a thirst that could not be quenched.
During training in Black History, I was taught to think and to do research outside the box, a very valuable tool and habit for anyone really desirous of learning. In fact, scholars in any field will find that such a practice will be of aid in coping with the problem of the paralysis of analysis. Extrapolation in order to gain insight where evidence is wanting is likewise a valuable art. Amazing what one can learn from doing research in sources not generally considered to be in the provenance of acceptable investigations, precisely where the real causes of paradigm shifts lie.
Hats off to Lewis, whose sci/fi writings I read before e’er I came to faith in Christ. His other works would come into view in the years that followed. Which reminds me, Lewis’ works are worth exploring, when one is doing research in conspiracy theories. Not for plenitude but for a few, graphic, incisive comments that leave those who say there ain’t no such thing twiddling their thumbs or scratching their heads at being had.