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Bettejo has lived on Kaua'i over 30 years and is a people lover, animal lover, lover of life and strikes a dashing yoga pose... Today she talks about her love of books! Enjoy... |
A World Without Books
Chris Hedges indicated in his book Death of the Liberal Class, if we didn't find a way to change things-'rebel don't revolt'- we will end up in a world in which we would not want to live. I agree.
I could not live, I would not want to live, in a world without books. I am surrounded by books. On just about every subject: History, Nutrition, Psychology, Math, Fiction, Poetry. You name it. There is very little I need to know about the world that I can't find in a book here somewhere.
I don't read books. I consume them. I turn down the pages, write in the margins, fight with the authors on a variety of different subjects. I can go back to this very same book, sitting on a dusty shelf, sneeze, open it up and peruse the margins. The arguments. I can actually see how I've grown, or changed, or gone down a different path.
Books are my friends. I've-I should say my family-has carried them about in our travels for years. Fifty. Sixty. Books beloved in my childhood. Alice in Wonderland. The Jungle Book. My husband was n love with Kipling's poetry. I was in love with Rikki Tikki Tavi. Shere Khan. Mowgli.
I took an acid trip-one-in the sixties and went down Alice's rabbit hole. One of the most beautiful. mind-blowing-experiences in my life. So beautiful I never took another, Thinking: what if it were as bad as this one was good? Actually, I don't think my mind would send me on a bad one and, maybe, like Timothy Leary- the father of LSD-I'll go out on one.
I'll set the scene. Out in my jungle, under a blazing blanket of stars, a setting moon, overwhelmed by the scent of Sanseseria and Plumeria, sung to by a whisper soft breeze, a cricket song, surrounded by my beloved animals-my horse, I'll aways have one- my dog. Maybe Duke, my macaw-who will outlive me- standing vigilant guard, a silent winged guide. I'll clutch in my hand my favorite book, maybe the battered and tattered Thurber Carnival. Sip slowly a glass of cold Chardonnay- how will that go with acid, I wonder-and hele on.
But I digress.
I have in my reference library a MCMLXX MCMLXXV (my computer does not even recognize this) copy of Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia in which in volume P, there are ten pages about Palestine and a beautiful picture of Dorothy Rothschild, better known as Dorothy Parker, (1893-1967). Maybe I'll take that, too.
Dorothy's dead and gone. Once I had a very nasty generals wife tell me there was not, nor had there ever been, a country named Palestine. She lied through her teeth.However, I do have a recent copy of one of the silly modern paperbacks-The Far East for Dummies,whatever-that never even mentions it. An entire country down the memory hole.
Goebbels said, "...if you lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it."
Aldous Huxley said, "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Understandable why Hitler burned books.
Maybe I'll have a Viking's Funeral with my books as tinder.
Hell no. I'll leave them behind for dumbed down brown-shirted Americans to roast what's left of their empty brains in.
A world without books? No thanks.
Hana Hou, (Encore) Shared from Facebook...
