January 8, 2008
- The Book -
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06wwln-lede-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Writing was a way of keeping knowledge accessabile, transportable, and preservable. The idea of God’s word in a book is great, when God’s word was only felt. It gave people a basis removed from themselves, it created a source of information outside of man’s environment or man’s brain. If you needed to know something, you no longer had to figure it out or ask somebody to do it for you. It is a purification of knowledge, or rather, a distillation of knowledge.
In conjunction with what I was writing in my notebook last night, if man reaches a subjective conclusion in his head, the only way he can share that experience with people outside of space time (which is what insight/inspiration is, outside of space/time) is to write it down. Writing is to create both the great idea and the road leading up to it, in a way that is (at least marginally) repeatable with everyone, everywhere.
The idea of Moses, bringing down the 10 commandments, is important not because THESE are God’s Laws. In his debate with Dinesh DeSouza, Christopher Hitchens says something along the lines of Don’t Kill, Don’t Steal, etc etc. How Original…. Why did we need these laws from God? It’s not like people were going around killing and stealing before, and thinking it was OK. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that for the first time (for the Jews, anyway) the Laws of God were expressed in a physical form that could be accessed and applied to all. It wasn’t what the laws said that was important, it was that they existed at all. The 10 commandments concretized god’s laws for the first time.
