Literature is by far the single greatest achievement of human intuition. In the past, before it’s construction all ideas, stories and beliefs were passed down by word of mouth. Either by person to person or down through the generations. There was a problem with this of course, as anyone who’s ever played the childhood game Telephone knows. Each time something even as simple as a sentence is passed down from person to person it is vulnerable to change and manipulation- either intentional or unintentional. Thus the original meaning and message is forever lost. But with the invention of literature came something which does away with this entirely. For the first time the thoughts of a human being can be directly recorded- in paper or stone indefinitely. In this way your mind can directly mirror the exact thoughts of the person who wrote the text. In this way time knows no bounds. For people who lived and existed thousands of years apart can in essence collaborate through the reader to construct a truly amazing thing. Books and other methods of recording thoughts take them and trap them in the pages, to last far beyond the natural lifespan of the person who first wrote them. In this way, the most cherished thoughts and ideas of those long departed still echo off the bookshelf. As Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen farther than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.