books Archives - Ned Hardy

18 Awesome Places Where We Would Love To Sit Down And Enjoy A Good Book

April 5, 2013 | No Comments » | Topics: Books, Design |

reading spots

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What’s The Use Of Literature?

February 27, 2013 | 1 Comment » | Topics: Books |

literature

by OnlyFoolin

The universe is huge. Time is impossibly vast. Trillions of creatures crawl and swim and fly through our planet. Billions of people live, billions came before us, and billions will come after. We cannot count, cannot even properly imagine, the number of perspectives and variety of experiences offered by existence.

We sip all of this richness through the very narrowest of straws: one lifetime, one consciousness, one perspective, one set of experiences. Of all the universe has, has had, and will have to offer, we can know only the tiniest fraction. We are alone and minuscule and our lives are over in a blink.

All of this strikes me as terribly sad, and if I believed Someone were in charge, I could muster an argument that our awareness of vastness makes our tininess unfair.

But here’s the thing. Literature lets us experience life through a second consciousness. For a time we share the perspective and experience of the author and his imagination. Our experience of the universe is broadened, multiplied.

Without literature, we are all limited to our own lives. With it, we can know something of what it is to be other people, to walk in their shoes, to see the world their way.

Literature needs no further defense than this, I would say. It is our species’s most advanced and successful technology for cheating dismal fate out of the abstract aloneness it would otherwise impose on us.

1 Comment »

JD Salinger Explaining Why “Catcher in the Rye” Wouldn’t Work As A Movie

February 25, 2013 | 6 Comments » | Topics: Uncategorized |

jd salinger catcher in the rye

If we’re lucky, Catcher in the Rye will never be made into a movie. It’s managed to avoid that fate for over sixty years, and hopefully it will continue to do so. Not everything needs to be a movie, and I say that as someone who loves movies. We live in an age where something always had to be translated into other things, and whoever owns the rights happily takes the money that translation provides. J.D. Salinger was not one of those people and he never sold the rights for Catcher in the Rye. Producers will continue to hunger for the opportunity to turn one of the greatest novels of all-time into something that can be viewed in under two hours, but Salinger wasn’t just being stodgy when he refused to give up the rights. In a letter he wrote in 1957, he listed his reasons for why he couldn’t see Catcher in the Rye as a play or a motion picture.

jd salinger catcher in the rye