Burning Books

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of late in the states about the issue of books, how to treat them, what to do with them, other than reading them. In far flung places like Florida and Texas, where conservatism extremism presently holds sway, books are being removed from school and public libraries, at the behest of right wing ideologues who not only fail to see their value, but regard them, fatuously, as harmful to the human mind. The term "banning books" has been used, which is perhaps a slight misnomer.The books can be found on the internet and in book stores. But when a fictional work of the highest value, such as "To Kill A Mockingbird", is removed from school shelves because some fear that it might make students feel "unomfortable", the book has effectively been banned. Indeed, the purpose of Harper Lee's classic novel is precisely that: to make folks feel uncomfortable, with racism, a dicsomfort which yields far more value than the avoidance of it. While in high school the book "The Catcher In the Rye" was banned in our school. Every student I know had a clandestine copy in is or her locker. Its always happened, like everything else. In ancient Iraq,Assyrian tablets with controversial content were smasked into fragments. The ancient library of Alexandria was burned to the ground, costing history a treasure trove of information. Troughout the middle ages, the "dark ages",(a not altogether innacurate term) the Catholic church maintained its now infamous "Index of Forbidden Books". If it was not aChristian "Apology" (defense of the one true faith), it had to go in the garbage. In more modern times, places like Sarajevo and NAZI Germany succumbed to the book burning disease. Immigration records have been destroyed in modern times. Poet Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem about "the paper hanger" Hitler and hhis book burning frenzy. Brecht screamed at Hitler, not becuase his books were being banned and burned, but because they were not. His reasoning was that since only good books were being burned, his should be included."Burn me!", he furiously exhorted. A more comprehensive description of this nightmarish nonsense was published in twenty twenty by a librarian-historian at Oxford University, Richard Ovenden: "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge". On this topic Ovenden is clearly a polemicist; he attacks the book burners with nothing short of manic fervor. Everyone seems to like his scholarship and agrees that the expostion is well written and insightful. There are, however, "outliers", as we say today. Some scholars think the title is misleading, that is it more concerned with the history of libraries than the selective destruction of their contents. More properly, Ovenden seems to be dealing less with the actual torching of books, or with their physical destruction by all other means, including shredding and burying, and more concerned with the general suppression of knowledge. Ultimately, it amounts to the same thing. Although, as Goethe said, books are at best only designed to give names to human mistakes, the mistakes are enumerated most convincingly and frequently in books themselves. Ovenden reminds us that the suppression of knowledge, while indefensible, is never permanent. Reality adheres,the truth will win out. Light illiminates the night.