Neil Gaiman recalls having been one of those children who were never found without books scattered about, knowing them to be an escape from pointlessness at family parties. He loved genres from spy thrillers to detective novels, and his father would often go into spying missions to try to find out if he wasn't hiding some books. However, in his avid reading, he never thought that books could be dangerous. Once at school, a stern headmaster had snatched a book from him with a cover photo that offended; but he did not punish him for it. That incident suggested the dangers that books entailed, yet Gaiman did not treat it with the seriousness it deserved then. His true encounter with the danger imbibed in a book took place when he conducted a book's experiments. First, he experimented with vegetable dyes and accidentally turned his laundary pink. Next, he attempted toffee and made something he liked. In his math lesson the toffee, having taken the shape of a lump of molten toffee, eased out of his pocket and exploded into shards on the floor. The headmaster judged that to be pure malice and he caned him with a tartan slipper.
If people use them improperly, the safest things in the world can suddenly become extremely dangerous. For example, Play-Doh is pretty safe. However, if someone decides to eat it for some reason, someone should call a doctor, and probably a psychologist. This is the same for Gaiman’s books. 1001 Jolly Interesting Things a Boy Can Do is probably meant for kids to do the activities listed for fun, but not to be too crazy about it. However, Gaiman actually took it seriously, which got him punished as the headmaster thought it was intentional. Misusing something happens a lot. Toddlers play with food instead of eating it. I tried to use scissors to open a stuck doorknob once. And skydivers get punished very seriously when they neglect to prepare their parachute properly.
Accidents happen a lot, but they may not always be taken as accidents. Gaiman accidentally made all the clothes in the washer pink. That is pretty bad, and likely got him in trouble. He then made some toffee, and accidentally dropped it on the floor and that got him in trouble because the teacher and headmaster thought he did it as a joke. And people are not always tolerable of accidents. One of those in construction. It’s pretty obvious that, when 20 or 30 people are working on a skyscraper (like many skyscraper construction projects are), when someone accidentally cuts a rope in half while trying to drill a hole a 5-metric-ton block of concrete falls to the ground below, causing the skyscraper to topple and destroy everything.
It was this experience that made Gaiman fully realize the possible undesired consequences of following the instructions in books, and how perilous they were. There are a lot of examples. And that’s why we should be careful around materials that could pose a hazard, and consider everything a sane man would do. That’s how we avoid accidents — by not messing with dangerous stuff, and not making danger out of safe stuff. And people fall while running. Occasionally they break a bone, like my friend Alan did, or hit their knee so hard it bleeds pretty bad and looks hideous, like I did. Mistakes are not always light, and a lot of the time, they matter, although always your teacher or parent says that “mistakes don’t matter, you learn from them”.
In conclusion, Why Books are Dangerous shows that things can be under something that can be even more dangerous. When you don’t use safe materials properly, they become very dangerous. When you ingest potassium cyanide thinking it’s salt, you grab your bike and ride like the dickens to the nearest hospital while screaming at full volume. And when you found that your cat ate the poison dart frog, you faint and your mom sends you and your cat to the hospital. There are a lot of ways something can just go wrong when you are doing something “jolly interesting”.
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