On the topic of forgetting history

It cannot come as a surprise to people who have read just a bit of what is said in this blog that I am quite excited about books and literature, and appreciate reading in general. But on very rare occasions, something strangely uncomfortable happens - it always starts when I hear about some book, after which I come to the conclusion that I should own that particular book, and that I hope that I will never ever need to read it.
Such a book I became aware of when I read an article about it in a Danish newspaper. It was not because the book itself was new - it actually appeared for the first time in German already in the nineties - but here, I read about a Danish translation. It was the Israeli historian Gideon Greif, who wrote the book "We Wept Without Tears", in which he tells us how he has sought the surviving Jewish members from the so-called Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, where they were tasked with participating in mass extinction of Jews in the camp.
I felt bad by simply reading the newspaper article, and I do not want to read the book at all. But I see it almost as a necessity to have it standing on the shelf - for one reason, if I or anyone around me begin to forget or question the history, it's time to take the book down from the shelf and make the effort to read in it. Not that I will hope it ever comes so far. A little like the fact that you have smoke detectors installed in your home that you hope you will never need - but if it really becomes necessary, you wouldn't want to do without it.
(Translated from Noget om at værne sig mod historieløshed, originally published October 5th, 2010)

Plagiarism and inspiration

There is a thing which has been on my mind for some time - the difference between plagiarism and inspiration: why is it that something will be categorized as plagiarism, while others slip through the eye of the needle and are recognized just to have been "inspired"?
When one subscribes to the opinion that not only have most things been said before; most have also been said in a better and clearer way before, then one must simultaneously accept that most of the things one can acheive, must be acheived through inspiration - very little comes from nothing. So the important thing must be to make sure that one has something to be inspired by.
Somewhere, I have seen the quote that you have to read thousands of books, before you can write one, and most likely, this is true, then you will have been exposed to sufficient amounts of information (and quite probably also information of divergent nature and content) to form and formulate your own opinion.
And when you have formed and formulated your own opinion, then you can always start looking back at the things you were inspired by and use these as references, make sure that quotes appear verbatim et cetera - and then, you have not leaned on any single source, not copied, not plagiarized.
(Translated from Plagiat og inspiration, originally published January 18, 2010)