A digital library

The plausibility of the Churchillian phrase, the persuasive use of language are captured in a million bits and bytes in my iPad, ready to enjoy and be entertained at a touch.
I have just downloaded Churchill's  "The World Crisis" in three volumes, following the excellent book on Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead.  I needed to explore the wider landscape surrounding the disaster. The 'World Crisis' now sits like an undigested meal in my electronic Library alongside my Dickens, Dostoevsky,Richard Hoggert and JB Priestly, to name but a few. What a compendium what a treasure.
It is at times like this that I wish I had more than a score of years left to read.

Reading "good" books by famous authors is not simply escapism but rather a learning process about events, or characters who resemble people and issues which you have an interest in. When written in a style they bring the events to life. 

What is the point of Churchillian history or Priestly's observation on the plight of working class Britain in the 30s you might ask.  Dostoevsky gloomy illumination of people living in the Russian under the stress of an authoritarian society. Tolstoy's magnificent portrayal of that other segment of Russian society, the Russian aristocracy with its men going off to fight the Germans and the women queuing up to marry who ever survived.

Good writing shines a spotlight, it illuminates and informs and in our armchair we learn and ponder the lifestyles of others. It is not escapism into a phantasy land but an introduction into the wider society, a society we have no hope of meeting but in Churchill's case, we meet by proxy the movers and shakers of his time. Remarkable insights into what were household names if you were around at the close of Victoria's reign, names who were on everyone's lips as we and the rest of Europe trudged slowly, inevitably towards conflict.

If for no other reason one is able to view that landscape from the viewpoint of a contemporary, be it in Russia, Middle Class England or the Aristocracy. In no other way can we grasp at how things happened, things which effect us today.

Britain for instance was reduced by both world wars to virtual penury. The working class at last began to have people who described their lot like George Orwell and who in their writing instilled in the populous at large the hope that something had to be done. The scope of the Russian story, it's impossible to imagine size and geographical variation. The hardships made worse by class and politics brought out in the writing such deprivation, such pathos. Solzhenitsyn's books describing the Gulag are heavy with the weight of authority, his Cancer Ward is a difficult read but he brings out the character of the Russian under extreme stress and an almost detached dehumanisation which working in the cancer ward brought to the doctors and staff.

Yes we all need to get out more and reading is the cheapest way I know !!