Malleus Maleficarum
It’s not as cool as it sounds.
The Malleus Maleficarum is a 15th century text on the danger presented by witches, how to figure out if a woman (as witches are more generally women, per the text), and what to do about them. As you might suppose from the time frame, the instructions did not include, “Give them a hug,” or even, “Ask them how their day is.” The name of the book is generally translated as, ‘The Hammer of Witches’, and its treats the subject with according gentility.
Obviously, I don’t bring this up to advocate you go strip and shave your English teacher on account of thinking she be a witch, a fair precaution according to the Malleus. Instead, and please, for Pete’s sake don’t anyone go assaulting a teacher, I bring it up to show the power of writing, namely the power in its longevity. Because this treatise was written down, published, and preserved an entire phase of history is lifted from obscurity to easy scrutiny. We need not look back at the events and wonder what they were thinking. They have told us, and the text stands where they cannot, being physically dead, to testify of their rationale and methods.
In this way, the authors live forever. In the same vein, Shakespeare breathes and spouts verse to this day, in literature courses, theater stages, and outdoor festivals. Are we not all intimately familiar with Steinbeck, Whitman, and Thoreau? Bless his heart, Solzhenitsyn trudges on. Things are still, and likely always will be, falling apart for Achebe. Into the infinite void, Asimov and Adams plumb the depths of space. And we all know Anne, Stephen, and Clive haunt the shadows of our dreams to this day.
Do we not as authors hope for this same thing? We toil and slave over our creations in the hopes that they will be read, appreciated, disseminated, and preserved. Our work is intended to go on, to remain after we have gone. Authors, let your writing be up to this weighty task! Write! Expand! Live for today! Live forever!
Hmph, look at us, chasing after immortality. We must be witches.
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