when words lose their meaning (2)

The problem with most good things is that they can become so easily perverted.

Books that offer a fount of understanding, enjoyment and knowledge become another form of distracting entertainment. Sleep that restfully strengthens us becomes an activity for withdrawal and escape. (And laughingly in my case, the productive craft of knitting becomes a substitute for self-centered consumption.)

We are so easily turned from agents, individual who choose, to passive recipients, individuals whose lives are controlled by their fears and their environment. Arguably in that case, we are no longer individuals.

“Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master.”

~ Alexander Dumas

“Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in. They speak to us like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence. They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them. They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again. They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, gives us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape.

Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them. They teach us to know ourselves better by recognizing ourselves in another.

Books that speak like the noise of the multitudes reduce us to despair by the sheer weight of their emptiness. They entertain us like the lights of the city streets at night, by hopes they cannot fulfill.”

~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude