"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."
---Old Chinese Proverb
There are few things on this earth more beautiful than a garden --- especially a secret garden with high stone walls; a hidden, wooden door covered with English and grape ivy, and a wrought-iron gate hung with climbing roses; riotous flowerbeds in which a profusion of lush, multicolored blooms grow throughout the seasons, permeating the air with their rich and fragrant scents; and a lone, soaring old yew tree beneath whose spreading, gnarled branches one may recline upon cool, shaded grasses --- treasured book in hand.
For books do indeed go hand-in-hand with gardens. Like flowers, books, too, spring from seeds and bulbs...the seeds of dreams and the bulbs of imagination that grow in the fertile minds of writers the world over. The first words on every first page are like new green shoots in spring, holding the promise of something magical and wondrous; and if they are carefully and lovingly nurtured, they may indeed blossom into something that will remain with you, the reader, for the rest of your life --- a memory cherished long after the book itself, just like that flower pressed between its yellowing pages, has faded and crumbled with age and is no more.
We, as human beings, once had a vast store of knowledge painstakingly recorded for all posterity, on ancient clay and stone tablets, papyrus, and parchment, and which manuscripts were the first books of our ancestors, the roots and first green shoots, as it were, of Humankind and our history. But tragically, we did not tend our treasure troves of books, just as, today, we do not tend the gardens --- the atmosphere, the rainforests, and the rivers and oceans --- of our earth. Instead, the huge Egyptian library at Alexandria was burned to the ground by first the Romans and then, later, the Arabians, many of its ancient scrolls and books used as fuel to heat bathhouses. The immense Celtic library at the far-from-legendary Grail Castle of King Arthur was sacked and destroyed by ignorant, barbaric Vikings. Spanish missionaries, in their religious zeal, consigned countless Meso-American works to bonfires. And sadly, the list goes on.
We will never know just what was lost, what priceless knowledge may have been contained on those tablets and scrolls now gone forever. Both the Celts and the Greeks, among others, performed successful brain surgery. Where might our own neurosurgery be today if we knew how they had done it? The Babylonians and the Egyptians charted the courses of our stars in the night sky (it took twentieth-century technology to prove their theories, by the way). The Mayans created the most accurate calendar our world has ever known, and they also understood the mathematical concepts of both zero and infinity. The Minoans utilized the world's first-known flush toilets. And again, the list goes on --- for far from being uncivilized savages, many of our ancestors were actually highly educated, cultured, advanced peoples.
The knowledge and history, the philosophy and theology, the stories and dreams of Humankind can live on in books. This is the "big secret" every single writer who has ever lived has always known. Today, we know the words of individuals like Aesop, Aristotle, Chuang-tzu, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Hippocrates, Homer, Lao-tzu, Machiavelli, Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, Nostradamus, Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Virgil, and so many others because the works of their lifetimes somehow survived. Their manuscripts and the texts of their followers who cited them were not forever banned and burned by those who, in their prejudice or ignorance or fervor, would tell us what we can and cannot read --- which is a very dangerous thing indeed. For if we are told what to read, then it will soon be only a matter of time before we are told also what to think and dream. And no one must ever tell us that.
Alone, we are born into this world, and alone, we die. But between the beginning and the end is an extraordinary gift --- a precious journey that is ours to make of whatever we can and will. Writers will tell you all kinds of reasons why they write: for love, for fame, for fortune, for the thrill of it, for lack of anything better to do, or perhaps because they are compelled by some intangible muse to put derrière to chair and pen to paper. But the real truth hidden deep in all writers' hearts and minds and souls is that they write because they want and hope to be heard across the aeons, to leave something lasting behind.
For it is in the poet's word and the bard's song that the archives of Humankind are preserved for all posterity, so we may learn from our mistakes of the past, rather than being doomed to repeat them endlessly in the future.
If, in Rebecca's lifetime, she is lucky enough to write any book --- even just one --- that endures over the ages, then her voice, too, will still speak long after she is only dust in the wind....
You stand now before the Gardens gate, ready to continue down the road you have chosen in this life to travel.
Rebecca wishes you a good journey --- and pax vobiscum (peace be with you).
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