NO TIME FOR BAD BOOKS
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Novelist Umberto Eco was raised a Catholic and abandoned the faith a long time ago, but he has not abandoned common sense.
Recently he wrote that "We are supposed to live in a skeptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity. The 'death of God,' or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church--from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of 'The Da Vinci Code.'"
Eco said that "It is amazing how many people take that book literally and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: He married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the center of Dan Brown's book."
I was in Barnes & Noble over the weekend. Near the entrance was a large table filled with things related to "The Da Vinci Code": the book itself, of course, and several offshoots from it, plus a dozen books taking advantage of this publishing phenomenon and pushing Gnostic "secrets" of their own.
There even were games and puzzles related to Brown's book. And, yes, there were three or four anti-"Da Vinci Code" books, but they occupied less than a tenth of the acreage. The "sub-Christian superstitions" predominated.
I have not read "The Da Vinci Code" and don't expect to, partly because I go by a rule of thumb that says anything that makes the "New York Times" bestseller list probably is a waste of time, partly because I have little interest in the book, and partly (and most importantly) because at home I have a long shelf of truly interesting and informative books that I'm trying to get through in the next few months.
A couple of nights ago I paused in my study and surveyed my book cases. I have given away hundreds of books in the last few years, but so many more remain--and so many remain unread! Some I have had for decades, from as long ago as high school. Many others have been sitting patiently for ten or twenty years. I look at them and regret having wasted so much time on useless pursuits.
Once it was television. I can remember, during my university and law school years, repeatedly staying up to watch late-night talk shows and movies. How many thousands of hours disappeared into the maw of that tube!
I gave up television entirely at least sixteen years ago. I know it has been that long because I remember quipping that I was the only person I knew who never had seen an episode of "Seinfeld," and that sitcom debuted in 1990. So maybe it has been closer to twenty years since I was a regular viewer.
I wish I could say that, having given up television, I spent the saved time wisely. Not the case. A good chunk of it was consumed in other frivolities. I console myself, though, in noting that those frivolities usually were harmless, whereas television programs are almost always injurious to the mind and often to the soul.
This is true even of television news programs, which filter out most real news and fill the hour with manufactured stories. (No one relying on television news can end up with a true understanding of the forces at play in the world or in the human heart.)
This month I am making what is, for me, particularly good progress with my books: I expect to finish reading about fifteen of them. I have kept a log of every book I have read since 1982: author, title, date completed. Some years have been much better than others, and this will be a better-than-average year.
Still, I wish I were more disciplined. Even if I were able to keep up this month's rate indefinitely (an impossibility, since some of these fifteen books were started in prior months and some of them are thin), it would take me more than a decade to read the unread books I now have. In the meantime, of course, I will be buying new titles. If I just had another fifty years left!
But I don't. If fortunate, I may be granted half that. While there is no way to compensate completely for time squandered, I hope to make partial amends. I hope to learn things I could have learned a long time ago.
I just don't want to die ignorant.
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