"Lost knowledge waits for the curious and the bored." This is a phrase that my grandfather used to tell me. I was still young and even though I didn't really understand the meaning at the time, I did grasp the underlying significance of it.
When I was a kid I was often bored, so to relieve it I used to play with Lego bricks, building cars, skyscrapers or - in the days I felt reckless - guns that shoot rubber bands. Another fact about my childhood that (actually) shaped who I am now is that I was arguably always the most curious in our friend group (I was the annoying kid that kept asking “but why?”). Now I don’t ask an insufferable amount of questions anymore but I have maintained the need for a constant stream of new information, usually fueled by documentaries or books.
It is about books that I want to talk about, precisely old books, because I find in them something captivating that I can't really motivate or explain rationally. A possible explanation I found is that it might be about lost knowledge. Imagine knowledge as a vast, initially empty sea. Once the first inventions and discoveries are made, such as fire and the wheel, the water level rises slightly. In this metaphor, books are bottles of water that get passed around, such that everyone gets to enjoy wisdom. The great thing about books is that they can hold the knowledge indefinitely without ever using up all their capabilities. Now imagine that summer comes. An extremely hot summer that dries up a substantial amount of water from the sea. In such times where the sea is no longer accessible as its water is extremely saturated, the older bottles with the original water become essential for survival. In the same way, when new books tend to summarize and to lose the details needed to reach a deeper understanding of the topic, we can find the rich and elaborate knowledge still intact in older books. Moreover, if we abandon these books in some old library or stashed in someone’s basement, all that information is left to die, destined to rot away. The very idea of this happening annoys me. The thought of all those bright writers and scientists that poured all their genius and discoveries in those pages feels like a betrayal of their legacy.
Every era has had its geniuses, each with unique ideas and approaches to research; I also believe that people had more time to think compared to now, since there was less to do and because they had less distraction. This is why I read so much from old times. Think about Leonardo Da Vinci: even though some of his creations may have been unrealistic, we can still learn a lot from them, like his creative and empirical approach that characterizes his engineering. Last year I was really struggling with understanding a physics topic: my solution? I bought a university level manual written in 1962. It was astonishing how the author explained complex phenomena like magnetism with such easy terminology, making me understand it in a matter of minutes. Probably the reason is that it was meant for people that actually wanted to study the topic, and not only high school students who were forced to do it. This was the epitome of what I was referring to. A book that encapsulates the interest in the subject it is written about.
While I find old books fascinating, the pursuit of new knowledge is still a central part of my personality. By studying both old and new, we can continue to move forward without leaving anything behind.