C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books • Hacker News Board

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#51

Post by whatshisface » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #31

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #18

I rather enjoyed this essay, not because I am into theology, but because I also see the value of old books. I think that I am a bit of a heretic (if I can use that word in a theology thread) because I strongly believe that there is advantage to be gained by reading old books of... science! It is often presumed that because we learn new things as time goes on, and old theories are discarded as new information comes to…

Some old articles in physics are surprisingly concise. There is no point in reading a modern 300 page book on special relativity when you can just read "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies" which is 23 pages and self-contained.

I can't speak for the specific book you're talking about, but there are definitely a lot to say about relativity that has been discovered since the time of Eisenstein.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#52

Post by jolmg » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:15 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #19

Time is a fantastic filter. When I was cleaning out my grandparents attic I found a few dozen old books from the 30s and 40s. Wanting to see if they had any value I searched Amazon Ebay and even Google. I could find no record of them having ever even existed. I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.

Many (probably most) books today suck too. Not to say there aren't a lot of modern, quality books out there, but I think there's a boundless amount of new, bad books.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#53

Post by kurosawa » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #28

davebryand wrote: post #10

This was life-changing for me. I wanted to learn about spirituality through a different lens than the Catholic upbringing that constrained my mind and the rampant "spirituality is synonymous with Christianity" that I find in the U.S. I went out and read a handful of ancient religious texts from all of the world. This led me to see that throughout the course of human history, tribes from all over the world have espous…

In the same way, every Catholic around me reads "Catholic" books written in the past 20 years that are 90% watered down and 10% quotes from older books. So imagine my surprise when I found all those old books they were quoting were easily available on archive.org and easily installable on my phone (the PDF copies only) and in easy to understand English translations, despite being written 200, 500, 1000, 1700 years ag…

I find the same for books for the relationship between contemporary and classic works in other major traditions

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#54

Post by tenaciousDaniel » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #46

chrissam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how I look at it. To quote Orwell: "Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival".

There's a lot of survivor bias there, however. A lot of works that were under-appreciated during their time had their extemporaneous advocates and promoters that had their own motivations that often had little to do with appreciation for the work. If Kafka's editor had listened to Kafka and burned his works instead of making sure they got on as many bookshelves as possible, or if Van Gogh didn't have the close relati…

Of course. Although this begs the inverse question: are there any long-gone heralded geniuses of literature who actually just wrote crap? I doubt it.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#55

Post by inimino » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #46

chrissam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how I look at it. To quote Orwell: "Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival".

There's a lot of survivor bias there, however. A lot of works that were under-appreciated during their time had their extemporaneous advocates and promoters that had their own motivations that often had little to do with appreciation for the work. If Kafka's editor had listened to Kafka and burned his works instead of making sure they got on as many bookshelves as possible, or if Van Gogh didn't have the close relati…

It would be survivorship bias if we assumed, based on the old books we have, that all old books on average were better than modern books. I don't think that's the argument being made here.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#56

Post by genghisjahn » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

amasad wrote: post #21

jxcl wrote: post #4

I can entirely relate to what Lewis writes about reading Plato. I was interested in philosophy but found myself gravitating to reading and listening to podcasts about philosophy rather than reading it directly. Once I actually picked up a volume of Plato's works I was surprised how approachable it was to me, a complete layman of philosophy.

Same for me with Stoicism: I read everything modern book on it and while it was useful nothing comes close to when I actually decided to pick up the classics, starting with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

Read Epictetus if you liked MAs Mediations.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#57

Post by rossdavidh » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #18

I rather enjoyed this essay, not because I am into theology, but because I also see the value of old books. I think that I am a bit of a heretic (if I can use that word in a theology thread) because I strongly believe that there is advantage to be gained by reading old books of... science! It is often presumed that because we learn new things as time goes on, and old theories are discarded as new information comes to…

I have read several of the original books of Charles Darwin, and found it both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Still definitely worth reading, even though (because?) a lot has been learned since then.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#58

Post by watwut » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:35 PM UTC

chrissam wrote: post #36

noonespecial wrote: post #19

Time is a fantastic filter. When I was cleaning out my grandparents attic I found a few dozen old books from the 30s and 40s. Wanting to see if they had any value I searched Amazon Ebay and even Google. I could find no record of them having ever even existed. I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.

This is exactly how I look at it. To quote Orwell: "Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival".

Sometimes books speak to people having certain lifstyle and experiences and culture. We are not part of that anymore so they suck to us. But, being for someone else is not necessary lack of merit. Whether it was pure enjoyment or something more people took from it.

There are bad books nobody liked at time and never again. But when seemingly bad book was popular, then it likely filled some need or said somethig they wanted or needed to hear.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#59

Post by verbify » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:36 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #48

verbify wrote: post #44

I'm going to take a contrarian view on this. About 1/15 humans who have ever existed are still alive. And that includes the period before writing. I think it's not unreasonable to think that most books have been written in the past 125 years. I do not see any reason to deify the past. I say this as someone who has read the Bible in the original Hebrew and the Talmud in original Aramaic. They're of interest as a windo…

This doesn't address Lewis's point that all those books written in the last 125 years share more of our perspective and our biases than something written a thousand years ago. Furthermore it's not just that they are old, but that they are old and have survived that recommends old books to us.

I thought I addressed perspective in my post. In addition often all you have to do to change your perspective is go to another continent.

There's also an element of survivorship bias. The Antikythera Mechanism, while not a book, is amazing, yet it and devices like it and its instruction manual didn't survive through the ages. Many books on the minutiae of the regiments and classification of angels did.

Re: C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books

#60

Post by eadmund » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

slededit wrote: post #32

enriquto wrote: post #29

"The UNIX programming environment" by Kernighan and Pike will be cherished by computer scientists in 200 years, just like mathematicians today cherish Gauss' disquisitions on curves and surfaces. PHP, javascript, python will be long forgotten.

I'm more with Dave Cutler and think Unix's win was a sad historical accident. It worked great in a world with teletypes but is a horrible model for our world of multimedia. Ioctls are a sad blemish on the face of computing and fork() while again beautiful in the simple world of single threaded programs forces far too many constraints on modern OS services. Modern OSs get around it by barely supporting it except for e…

OTOH, I go completely in the other direction and think that the failure of Plan 9 to take over the world is the real historical accident, because everything on a computer is, ultimately, a byte.