BORROWING FOR KNOWLEGE

  BORROWING FOR KNOWLEGE 

                     By Dr. Dimitri Karalis.

If we carefully observe the parasitic insects and other microscopic beetles in nature, we realise that all borrow food from bigger creatures for their nourishment and growth. Fleas, lice, mosquitoes, ticks, leeches and many others, suck blood where and whenever it is given occasion. The same phenomenon continues also in the vegetable kingdom; Convolvulus, Ivy, beans, tomato and lots of other creepers, need external support for their growth and survival.

In bookshops and libraries we observe humans doing similar things. All search patiently among old and new pages to abstract new ideas for their intellectual growth.  Every free intellectual thinker becomes a torchbearer in the stride for spiritual freedom. We all borrow something from somewhere to re-synthesize it afterwards to our likeness. Like the honey bee that sucks only flower water and synthesises it into sweetest nectar in their hive later.

“This is our supreme aim, said the writer Nikos Kazantzakis, to shoulder our ancestor’s heritage renewable and better forwards forever”. It is not enough to reproduce our race forward like in lower animals, but also to progress it intellectually and spiritually forwards.

“He who borrows from a similar thinker, said Burke, he doubles his own and he who borrows from his superior, rise intellectually to level with his lender”. Knowledge is free for everyone, only it requires an awakened perception and a ceaseless yearning to be harvested.  Nothing is completely new, but they are rekindled coals from the forgotten past. Every new idea is a renewable old copy of continuation. Like the primitive wooden plough that developed slowly into mechanical tractor today.  All of us carry some ancestral idea and it is our sacred duty to pass it, updated to future generations.

 

When we read Plato, we discover the thoughts of previous philosophers, Heraclitos, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras and Socrates, much riper for better digestion.  When we read the Christian bible, we see the platonic theory reformatted into religious dogma. When we read thinkers like Rabelais and Montainge, we discover the charming thoughts of the biographer Plutarch. The strong borrow bravely and dress it with their personal colour for future consumption. Progress, means, to re-synthesize the past with the present and to forward it bettered for the future generations that follow. Every   judicious thinker carries with him a private library, and when we read their chiselled thoughts, we ask ourselves with admiration, “I wonder which worthy books ripened their mental cells so profoundly?” Like when we look at the temple Parthenon and wish to meet its architects, Kallikratis, Ictinos and Phidias.

 

“Libra thesaurus anima” said the Romans, “books are treasures of the soul”. Without books today, mankind would be undeveloped almost in a primitive state. Books are the mental archives for every human to learn and add something new of his own. If Heaven has no books at all, not every thinker wishes happily to inhabit there.  What business has the bee in the deadly dessert?  When the sterile sand doesn’t offer a drop of flower-water to convert into delicious honey?

 

Reading offers mental wealth, writing, literal precision and speech expressive readiness.

We read to learn, we write to precise and we talk to express.

We are valuated how we think; we appreciated what good we have written and loved how eloquently we speak.  When we open our mouth we reveal at the same time our intellectual level.

Once a senseless flatterer talking to Aristotle, stopped suddenly when he observed the apathy into philosopher’s face, sorry; master, he said, it seems that my longish speech has tired you a little, by no means, answered Aristotle, I wasn’t listening to your speech.    

 

Isn’t our mental ripeness a dignified virtue and best intellectual nourishment to better humanity?

-      Hermanus-South Africa