Books are not a mere luxury or a superfluity of civilization; they do what men of action cannot do. They are a complelling force to make humanity feel its oneness. Folk-tale, folk-love, folk-songs have done as much for man king as the great religious or the great leaders of humanity. A book is the life blood of a man, preserved for a life beyond life, as Milton says.
To say that only noisily trumpeted men in history make civilization is an unpardonable blunder. Civilization is very largely made of anonymous forces.
A book like the Gitanjali is not a political treatise. The Ramanayan, and the Mahabharata are not political treaties. Poetry, great fiction, painting, music and dance, architecture and the little nameless unremembered acts are the best portions of a man’s life and not the noisier parts of life. They do not celebrate such names as Gandhi and Lenin. Yet they are the breath of civilization. The world can do without great men but it cannot do without great books. The great German thinker Geothe said that a word was a dead.
The Sanskrit word mantra means a world changing force. Bankim Chandra Chaerjee’s poem entitled Bande Matram has made history. The Bible and the Holy Koran are nothing but books but they have made history. Books are not merely sheets of printed paper. The novels of Dickens, the books entitled ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, Marx’s ‘Capital’ and a hundred other books revolutionized human history.
For more valuable and important are the other services rendered by books. The value and the joy of understanding, the richness of thought, the joy of knowledge, a heightened awareness, of nature and life which books give cannot be give by any political leader. Books are not mere fashionable respectability, they are a force in life.
Books are as great a force in civilization as political leadership, political creeds, scientific and technological forces or any other noise of the moment. They are the persistent and the all conquering forces of history. This is true even of those books which are apparently aimless and purposeless. Life is no’ all Marxism and Leninism or Maoism. Humanism is greater than communism No single school of thought can give us the whole of humanism. Let thousand flowers blossom and let there be a countless variety of books. Mar and Lenin could give us much, and gave us much; they simply could not give us all the value of life.