Dorothea Brande

     Books are not pills to be swallowed because they are “good for you” and fit some dietary regimen. Neither are they brooches made to show what class or trend or category you belong to. They are certainly not there to masturbate your ego by confirming the truth and superiority of everything you already believe, or to endlessly ditto the tastes you’ve already developed. A book is a world in amber. It is a universe to be explored. A universe of thoughts, colors, sounds, and people. External realities may be checked at the door. Some vibrant soul has dreamed this thing and passed it on to you. Will you really treat it like a disposable commodity? Like a bit of scrap metal you can take or leave? Do you feel this indifferent about your own work? How can you feel this bored about other people’s writing and expect your own work to be of any interest?

    If you are going to be a writer, or any kind of artist, you must reject and eject all prejudicial notions of fashion, usefulness, or preference from your mind. You owe it to your readers and your predecessors to drink as deeply from the well as possible, to flourish and flower completely, without prejudice, indifferent to fashion, in defiance of the mincing comforts, trite truisms, and unexamined values of the mindless, personless mobs. There are beautiful experiences to be had in all avenues of life, and in all categories of art and literature.

    And it is all moving into the open. If you live in America, you are probably within twenty miles of a state college library. If you’re a state resident, all you need is a driver’s license or state ID. Millions of books and films and sound recordings are available online, as more and more Universities post their content through Google and The Internet Archive. Usenet and BitTorrent are now pushing the extremities of quality and availability. We are very near the centuries-old dream of true democratization of knowledge, where you don’t need a certificate program to be in the know. In our new millennium, the door is open, tuition is free. You have only to show up with an open mind and a desire for enrichment.