Interesting thoughts about the importance of writing

I'm working my way through History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon via DailyLit. If you've been meaning to read an old classic, but haven't been able to find time, give DailyLit a chance. I like getting snippets in my email. I will always make time to read another page.

The Wikipedia entry on the book has:

---------
It stands as a major literary achievement of the 18th century because it was adopted as a model for the methodologies of modern historians. This led to Gibbon being called the first modern historian of Ancient Rome.
---------

The 117 installment (of 264) had these thoughts about the important of writing:

---------
The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; ^16 and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant.
The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-laborer, the ox, in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater, difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce, that without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.
---------

Most times we take for granted the way life is right now, it is nice to be able to step back and recognize just what a blessing sometime as basic as writing is in our life.


----------
Technorati tags: writing