Books Are the Gateway to the World

All progress on earth depends mainly on two inventions due to human ingenuity. The invention of the wheel, which rolls onward with dizzying revolutions around its axle, enables us to move about physically. The invention of the art of writing excites our imagination and gives expression to our thoughts. That nameless man who first, somewhere and at some time, bent the hard wood around the spokes, taught mankind to overcome the distances that separate lands and peoples. With the first wagon intercourse became at once possible; freight could be transported and men could travel and learn. It brought an end to the limitations set by nature, which assigned certain fruits, metals, stones and products, each to its own narrow home. Countries no longer lived by themselves but in relation to the whole world. The Orient and the Occident, the South and the North, were brought together by the invention of vehicles. Just as the wheel in all its various uses, as a part of locomotives, of automobiles and of propellers, overcomes the physical law of gravitation, so the art of writing, which likewise has developed far beyond the written roll, from the single leaf to the book, has overcome the tragic limitations of life and experience that hemmed in the individual human being. Because of books no one need any longer be shut up by himself, within his own narrow confines, but can share in everything that has happened or is happening, in all the thoughts and feelings of the whole of humanity. Everything or practically everything that takes place in the world of thought depends today on books, and that form of life, imbued with intelligence and raised above material considerations, which we call civilization, cannot be imagined without books. This power of the book to enlarge the soul and to build new worlds, which is active in our personal and private lives, very rarely obtrudes itself on our consciousness and then only in moments of special significance.