Throughout my younger years, as a student, whenever the book list came out for the next year and it had literature, I would read all the literature books over the course of the summer before school started again, and then I would read whatever else I could find.
My father’s novels were pilfered of their words, from Robert Ludlum to Louis L’amour to James Clavell to… well, he didn’t read as quickly as I, and soon enough I was reading his engineering texts, or randomly flipping through the encyclopedias that were in the bookshelf of the office of the print shop. I was tasked to find typos often enough, reading what others had written. Every word expanded my universe that much more, even though I was locked in a prison of someone else’s house in my mind. Every sentence was a slide of escape, every paragraph a rocket that took my mind elsewhere.
When the PC revolution was happening, we got a PC in the print shop and what I read changed. I found myself reading DOS manuals, BYTE magazine, Compute! magazine, and all sorts of other things because the future was exciting and it smelled like books. There was an article I remember – I think it was in a BYTE magazine – and it spoke of hypertext, and I thought this would be a wonderful thing because when I was reading I sometimes would have to venture to a dictionary or thesaurus when I encountered something alien to me. Hypertext, I thought, would be awesome – and decades later, the only website that truly uses hypertext the way that article described is Wikipedia.
For about a decade, all I read were various versions of tech manuals, programming language manuals, hardware manuals and a lot of game programming manuals because, back then, an individual could write a game for a PC. Programming allowed me to exercise my knowledge through experimentation, about how to collate information in different ways. My grades weren’t great in school because the syllabus didn’t have interesting stuff, mostly, and the science syllabus was more of a leash than an exploration.
It was only when I returned to that same house a decade and a half later that I started reading literature again, thanks to Gutenberg.org. Friends had tried to get me to read literature prior, but I was busy working as a software engineer and needed to stay not just current but in a lot of ways prescient. When working in that field, at least at the time, one had to always build new skills and new ways of doing things.
The whole process was a process of growth, and what you read had a lot to do with that, and so I fell behind on all the stuff about being human and had to catch up. Every book, though, added value because it gave me parts of an expanding universe in my mind to draw upon, and when I wrote I drew upon them too, even in technical documentation for my own amusement.
The process of getting the knowledge had value because every book filled me with new questions to press on with – something I noted many people educated did not do, since they had attained their degrees and were satisfied. They stopped in place, some of them, and simply did what was required. They may have been educated, but some of them had stopped learning, something which I do not understand to this day. How can someone be satisfied with unanswered questions?
The world is full of questions unasked, answers untold, and each question answered gives new questions.
We read. We write. To write, we have to read more than we write, but unlike a generative AI, we internalize it and compare it to our own experiences as a human being, and as our experiences grown the same books can hold different questions and answers.
I wonder at a world full of people who do not understand this.
