Books

The case for reading old books over new books: authors writing 100 or even 50 years ago speak to us from a drastically different world, and thus we have more to learn from them than someone who is deeply embedded in the same world that we inhabit.

In older works, we grow aware of both the unchanging universal aspects of human experience and the fleeting parts of our world. We recognize what is dated, what we are glad to be rid off, as well as what we tragically lost. They hold warnings and reminders, and immortalize the voices of artists for years to come.

When a book reaches across hundreds of years to touch us, to see us, to read us as much as we read it; we grow connected to an eternal human voice, and are challenged to revive it, reinterpret it for our modern world, and it inspires us to do the same for future readers.

It’s funny, I think that this is quite universal principle. The foreign and the “outside” may teach us more about a concept than something deeply embedded within the concept itself. I recently read Vinod Khosla say something about how industries are basically never changed by insiders…