On book summaries
For as long as I have known how to write and how to read, I've always loved doing both. I remember learning how to write cursive with a calligraphy book that I got for my birthday. I was drawing curves in between lines, pages of As, Bs, Cs, small ones, big ones, Roman ones. Having a very long first name, I wrote it everywhere, with precision, small, big, with every letter as a fancy capital letter that would take way too much space, with way to much spirals at the end of each letter, just because I thought it looked good (which by the way, it absolutely did not, it looked something like an elephant was trying to write on a papyrus with ink while imitating a sparrow.)
With my big cursive clumsy letters, I filled lined notebooks with stories about butterflies and dancers and school and drawings of gingerbread houses. I kept going for as long as I can remember because writing has always felt good, like playing with your thoughts, giving them life and letting them be.
Only much later did I realize that writing was like putting a little piece of your soul on the paper.
The way each sentence is built is a reflection on what comes out of our brain, so it must also reflect what's going on inside of it. For a lot of writers, it is a fabulous way to get out things out that you did not even know were there in the first time.
OK well, maybe you are now wondering, what does this has to do with book summaries. Well, the thing is I stumbled upon an advertising for a book summary shortly after waking up and had to do something about it. It almost made me angry. So here is "something" :
I think if you appreciate reading, you see it as a piece of art, and art is not something that can be summarized, simply because summarizing it makes no sense at all. Do people go around summarizing Mozart's four seasons or Monet's Nympheas? No, and why is that? Because that would be nonsense. A compete heresy. Extravagantly arrogant. Pointless. -Although I am sorry if you are a book summarizer and stumbled on this blog page.-
But who would go around pretending that he or she could summarize anyone's artwork?
That's right, no one. Because it cannot be done. Precisely because it is art. It is a piece of an artist soul, made in one place for one time, and it is for the receiver to experience.
Books, in their particular way, are exactly the same. If you have no time for reading them, maybe you shouldn't bother at all. I think you would get a better idea of a book if you read only the first pages than if you read a three page summary of the whole book.
I think I might have advertantly found a fun definition of art while not intending to. Art is a beautiful way that human beings use to express their emotions, or tell their story, in a way that cannot be explained other than experiencing it. In this way, it finds its purpose. Without experience, art has no soul, no purpose, no existence.
I seem to like the habit on finishing every blog article into a quote, and I think this one will resonates with a very famous one from Antoine de St Exupery, who wrote in his famous Little Prince ; "Since it is beautiful, it is truly useful." In our modern world, we tend to think that depriving something of its soul and beauty to make it more digestible, easier, faster to read, or cheaper, is useful. We have never been more wrong. We are in fact destroying the unique beauty in it, and while doing so, are depriving it of all of its usefulness.
How is it that people think that they can deprive things of all their original beauty, and be proud to turn something beautiful into something ugly, only because it looks more digestible?
Coco-Fraise
Original : *"C'est forcément utile, puisque c'est joli." Le petit Prince, Antoine de St Exupery