I ran across these words attributed to C.S. Lewis, from his essay, “Learning in War-Time.” It makes me think of the stuff spewed out by our media every day. The anti-pollutant, according to friend Lewis, is simply to read old books.

We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet we need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much what seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

If we read only our contemporaries, Lewis warns,

where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

The golden oldies on my bookshelf are there for a reason, I find.

Dave