the existential blues

Science Can't Keep Up

An Essay on the Writings of Paul Crume

If people can somehow bring themselves to "think outside the box," the Internet will ultimately change the way we capture and hold our tiny individual servings of human creation. And it will increase the size of our serving, that is the amount of human creation we can see, touch and ultimately understand. But none of us can ever hope to see or hear even a tiny, tiny percent of all that exists.

I don't believe we understand the size of all human creation. Let's set aside, for the purpose of this discussion, all of man's creations throughout time in every single area except writing. No paintings, no architecture, no pictures, movies or music. No "wonders of the world," no living art, no science, politics or government. Just writing. Books, letters, magazines, essays, newspapers.

What chance have we got? I never even finished Hamlet.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with nearly 119 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include some 18 million books.

For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume each of those 18 million books has 250 pages.

Now my wife is a voracious reader. She can read 100 pages in a book in one evening. But even reading at this torrid pace, she could only read 11,680 books in her lifetime. And that's if she read for 100 pages a day for 80 years. Not a likely scenario.

But if she did, that's only 6/10ths of 1% of the books only in just the Library of Congress. And The Library of Congress itself only contains a small portion of the writings world wide.

In other words, we don't have a prayer of ever scratching the surface of human knowledge and creativity.

And of course a substantial portion of human creativity has already been lost. Books go out of print and fade into the dustbin of history. Which brings me to the point of this essay.

Paul Crume was one of the most talented and insightful writers ands essayists of our time. His column appeared on the front page of The Dallas Morning News from 1948 until his death in 1975. And selected essays have been collected into two books, now both long out of print.

My wife and I have been rereading The World of Paul Crume, because we are lucky enough to actually own a copy. As of this writing one copy of the book was available in Zshops on Amazon but I can't promise you it will still be there when you click the link.

Sometime in the mid 90's Marion Crume (Paul's wife) or another relative set up a Paul Crume Website. It seems to have fallen into a little bit of disrepair. Links are broken and we have been unable to locate or contact a webmaster. We're still working on it.

Small snatches of a very few of Paul's essays are available at this site. My guess is that even for Paul's wife there were copyright or other legal hassles that prevented a larger portion of the books to be reprinted.

And here is where our society and government must allow and even force change. Every essay Paul ever wrote should be archived on-line. It would be easy and very inexpensive to do this. For a small fee (or perhaps advertising support) Every person in the world would be able to read his writings, be warmed by his wit, be touched by his love.

Millions and millions of similar, perhaps even greater works are held back from humanity out of greed, ignorance or simple stupidity. Today lawyers and "creative rights managers" in this country will withhold creative works from the Internet and let them disappear rather than allow one person to read the work for "free."

Every day this week Paul Crume has made my world a better place in which to live. We need for it to be possible for you to have the same experience. At the click of a button.

Here's hoping that science (or maybe the lawyers) will soon discover the Internet is a good way to both store and distribute the knowledge, wit and wisdom of mankind to all of mankind.

People have been knowing this for years, as Paul Crume might have said.

Keep this bottle in front of you.