Some of you are reading Romeo and Juliet with Mr. Burghauser.  Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems over 400 years ago.  Others of you are reading Pinocchio with Mrs. Spaulding—it was written by Carlo Collodi almost 150 years ago. 

Have you ever wondered, “why do we bother with all these old books?”  “If we have to read something, can’t it be more up-to-date?”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with new books.  Some may turn out to be classics in a hundred years.  But we read old books for a number of reasons: they’ve withstood the test of time, their characters and stories are part of our everyday life (has anyone ever told you your nose is growing when you tell a lie?  You wouldn’t know what they’re talking about unless you’ve read Pinocchio).  But C.S. Lewis provides us another reason why we should read old books.  He says:

“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. * * * Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

Old books tell us what is true for all time, while also showing us the errors of both the past and of our own time.  After all, did you know that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet borrows from Dante’s Purgatorio more than 200 years earlier, and from the Latin poem Metamorphoses written by Ovid during the time of Jesus, over 2,000 years ago?  Shakespeare read old books – so should we.

Have a wonderful day.