Windows to the Past

One of the most remarkable gifts that God has given mankind is the power to communicate through words. From the moment that primordial men attempted to scribble their first crude figures, images and pictographs on the walls of caves to the present time when their descendants continued to communicate their thoughts, feelings, and experiences through cyberspace, nothing has separated men from the lower animals but this unique capacity to express their innermost thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences through words.

And men are not limited by the medium of sound, in their capacity to convey message through words, but have invented other impressive ways such as by sign language and by use of written symbols (such as we find in our alphabets and numbers), as means of communication. It's the creation of alphabetic and numeric symbols (and others like them) to convey words that revolutionized the way men communicate to their fellowmen.

The making available of these language symbols, in their written form as a necessary element of communication, made possible the preservation of ideas and messages in concrete records such as could be found in ancient inscriptions, stone tablets, ostraca, coins, papyri, scrolls and parchments.

Before the invention of modern printing, all such written records were made by hands. Hence, most of them are termed manuscripts, from the Latin manu scriptus, meaning, written by hand.

Books, as we now know them, as a set of written documents bound into a volume or volumes, go back to the ancient codices of the late 3rd or early 4th century A.D. Most of these documents in their earliest form were written without spacing, with no punctuation marks, and all in upper case letters.

These ancient books could be difficult to read and decipher for modern readers, but how much we owe to providence for the preservation of their contents throughout the ages, for the priceless information, data, and knowledge that are treasured up in them are more valuable than tons of gold and silver. Modern scholarship and research have been of great service in decoding most, if not all, of these ancient treasures, providing modern readers with contemporary translations and editions of these literary jewels.

Among the treasures of information that are waiting to be mined from these books are historical, political, religious, cultural, economic, mythological, traditional, and scientific lores that provide insights and answers to important questions concerning the past. Understanding the past is important to have an intelligent appraisal and discernment of the present.

Those who say that there is no value in knowing the past and that we must be concerned only with the present are living in a make believe world. Such a belief won't work in actual practice in daily life. This is like discovering a man murdered just outside one's doorway and just shrugging one's shoulders while saying, "Well, past is past. I don't know this man. Whatever happened to him last night, or when, doesn't concern me. Past is past. I am concerned only with today!"

That one may ignore whatever happened to the murdered man in the past, but not the relatives of the murdered man! Much less the police! That one also would be forced to do quite an explaining of his whereabouts the night the man was murdered. It's obvious that the past is inescapably important.

You see, what you observe today is a result of whatever happened yesterday. It's not true that the past is unimportant. The present is inseparably connected with yesterday, as well as with the future. We need a right understanding of the past to really comprehend the present, and also to have a correct perspective of the future.

This is one of the reasons why books are useful. They serve as windows for us to view the past. Books even provide us a way to walk through many lives as we enter into the experiences of the people by means of their pages. Through reading books, we're able to join those people in their happiness and woes, success and failures, laughter and cries, comfort and pain, love and hatred, faith and doubt, life and death!

This is the use of books as a source of information and knowledge. By reading intelligently and with discrimination, by divine grace, we learn to sift the grain of wisdom from the chaff of stupidity. Reading of mistakes committed by others, we could develop good judgment to be able to distinguish ideal principles in contrast to that which is of no value and without virtue. By learning to put into practice what we've learned as excellent and good we become better persons swayed not by capricious emotion or blind superstition but by sane principles of truth.

Books are like windows. Someone has said that a house without books are like rooms without windows. True enough, but windows must be opened and closed at the right time, likewise books should be read for one to have a breath of some fresh air and not just left unread in their shelves to gather dust!