“Books are friends, oracles, household gods, characters in the ongoing drama of our minds.”
Understandably, Lance Marrow gets a little sentimental about books and their needless destruction. We resist soft-headed fetishism but for some of us, discarding or destroying books, even lousy ones, amounts to barbarism – “sacrilege and profanation,” in Morrow’s words. In this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal, his “Requiem for a Dumpster Full of Books” made for squeamish reading. Several years ago by the curb outside the church on the corner, I saw knee-high stacks of Bibles, hymnals and religious tracts virtually dissolving in the rain. In his account of a book-filled trash dumpster behind an arts center in upstate New York, Morrow writes:
“There’s
theology in this. Libricide is Satan’s work: We think of the Nazis’ ritual
burning of ‘un-German’ books in cities all over the Reich in May 1933. It is
true that certain books may also be Satan’s work. Think of ‘Mein Kampf’ or ‘The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ When the discussion degenerates into cultural
politics, you get people claiming that ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘The Catcher in
the Rye’ are evil.”
There are
evil book-burners, usually motivated by politics or religion, of course.
But there’s another species of book
destroyer -- those who reduce books to empty objects, like tin cans ready for the recycling bin or
landfill. The words they contain, the stories and ideas, stand for nothing,
which makes it easy to discard or destroy them. Perhaps the sole purpose of a
volume in the attic or on the bottom shelf in a library (or the dumpster) is
that it be read by a single reader who unknowingly opens it and changes his
life. Think of Eric Hoffer discovering Montaigne's Essays.
H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle) is not a poet who has ever much interested me (the poor thing was
briefly engaged to Ezra Pound). But while living in London during the Blitz,
she wrote some memorable lines in The Walls Do Not Fall
(1944). You can add it to the list of books written by civilians -- Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry
Green – during the German raids. Here is the ninth section of that poem:
“Thoth,
Hermes, the stylus,
the palette,
the pen, the quill endure,
“though our
books are a floor
of
smouldering ash under our feet;
“the burning
of the books remains
the most
perverse gesture
“and the
meanest
of men’s
mean nature,
“yet give
us, they still cry,
give us
books,
“folio,
manuscript, old parchment
will do for
cartridges cases;
“irony is
bitter truth
wrapped up
in a little joke,
“and
Hatshepsut’s name is still circled
with what
they call the cartouche.”
"and Hatshepsut’s name is still circled
ReplyDeletewith what they call the cartouche.”
Edward Dolnick's excellent "The Writing of the gods: the race to decode the Rosetta stone" (2021) explains that the discovery of Hatshepsut, the "lost pharaoh", was due to Egyptologist Champollion’s chance observation of a letter T where it did not belong.
Napoleon's savants called ovals “cartouches”, French for cartridge, which they resembled. They were the key to decoding hieroglyphs.