When we got the first task I was very discouraged because my book “Hieronymi Pradi et Joannis Baptistae Villalpandi societate Jesu in Ezechielem explanations” is written in latin and has two or three pages more than most of the other books.
The second task was my favorite, even though I had some problems doing it. The collaboration with the e-rara library wasn’t the easiest. I understand that they were annoyed that all architect students came without informing them before but I think considering the information we were given concerning e-rara, which was non at all, I’m not surprised that nobody registered in advance. Even worse when it takes you two attempts to realize that you are in the wrong library to meet your new friend. But when I made it to the right library I was quite impressed. The cover of the book was beautiful and it was quite interesting to go through such an old book. It’s kind of sad that nowadays book are not as decorated as they used to be. Of course I know that it must have been a huge effort making this book and that it would be expensive to do something like this nowadays.
The language was a little bit of a barrier for me and my not so good friend. The few illustrations didn’t really help understanding Villalpandi societate Jesu in Ezechielem explanations. But luckily with the task 5 I was able to guess the content of my book because of the group I was in, even though it took quite some time to see the coherence between the other books and mine. It might be possible that it was even more difficult getting to know my book because task 4 didn’t really work out with my latin friend.
To be honest I would have preferred to dive into the content of my book instead of just the formal tasks that we had. I saw with the task we had to do that it wouldn’t really be possible doing somethings with the content of the book with mine for example but still I think we could have benefited even more by knowing what our friends really are about. Even though I think it’s a good addition to the lecture.
As always I went through the words of my fellow students and I think that Bo Yang wrote an awesome sentence explaining why we had to do these task and what we can learn from this experience. So I want to end my one year task trying to become friends with an old book by honoring these old books with the following sentence from Bo’s task 5: “ Man can’t hold all the knowledges or languages, man should find a way to learn and try to draw up a step-by-step plan to closer and closer approach the aim.”