Vos Virtual Network

Google is celebrating World Book Day today with the Google Literacy Project.

Over the course of time I think Google’s library scanning project will prove to be a greater gift to mankind than YouTube.

Reading a book is like having a long conversation with the author. A long conversation is a gift, as my wife has been teaching me. William Cowper said in his poem entitled Conversation; “… and Conversation in its better part, may be esteemed a gift.”

From Poems by William Cowper

A children’s story about a talking dog, Martha Blah Blah, reminds us of the power of literacy in a funny way. “When the current owner of the soup company breaks the founder’s promise to have every letter of the alphabet in every can of soup, Martha, the talking dog, takes action.”

Read a good book to your children today, or let them read The Important Book to you (it’s all about having a conversation) … and in all your reading, don’t forget the most important book … and thank God for the gifts he gives us every day.

Tags: books, literacy

C. S. Lewis was one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. A man with an incredible mind; he was a scholar of medieval literature, who captivated his Oxford and Cambridge students with wonderful lectures, while also creating a fascinating and imaginative series of children’s books, that are currently being made into a series of movies.

I recently finished reading Alan Jacobs’ biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian (which was a gift from my son - Christmas 2005), and decided to sprinkle a few of my observations into the blogosphere.

Let me start at the end, and we’ll talk about the beginning later …

Thirteen year old Roxana Tynan read three sentences from The Weight of Glory (pdf) at the funeral of her father, Kenneth Tynan, in 1980. C. S. Lewis had written these words in 1941 (in the midst of World War II). These are the words Roxana read over her father’s grave :

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.

Tags: beauty, biography, book, books, imagination, music, Narnia