the temperature at which books burn

Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.  - Ray Bradbury, read the interview here.

 
There seems to be a trend in the bibliotheques, noted in a previous post about music collections, to "go digital" with as much as possible at the expense of tomes already on the shelf and anything from previous decades that may be dogeared but is just as good if not better than what fills up the shelf now and is definitely preferable to the hundreds of copies of Danielle Steels and James Pattersons ordered to satisfy the masses and jettisoned within the next to years.

As many of the Powers That Be in this field seem to really want to be "cool" and also "with it" and not the stodgy chignoned shushers of yore and guardians of dusty crumbling tomes, the trend seems to be more towards becoming like the now-deceased Borders with a cafe atmosphere and tablets and apps and only works put out or repackaged with swankier graphics in the last ten years.

As if "digital" and "edgy" weren't tired ten years ago, but whatever. For those who peruse the bestseller lists, who consolidate collections to one department rather than tailored to the needs of specific communities, cutting corners every which way. Because really, they read industry journals and beach books, they're not quite as interested in learning and being a source of knowledge and inspiration and the expanding of horizons. Yes, there's lots of cool stuff I can find on the Internet, to indulge my geeky love of Elizabethan pamphlets and medieval alchemical texts, but there's something very satisfying about the tactile printed page, of books that have lasted for a couple hundred years or so.


Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Not that I always swing towards the apocalyptic, but if the gatekeepers shut down, if the Internet blacks out, what are we left with? Formats involving electricity go obsolete quickly, there are disks with information on them that I try to process only to find that my computer no longer has a drive for them or that they sat near a magnetic desensitizer and have been wiped clean, that the Almighty Cloud doesn't work in more censorious countries (and who's to say we're not heading there as it is), texts can evaporate off of one's Kindle, and as we toss things that are old only because of that, I wonder if we in the industrialized world are at risk of losing our collective cultural memory if the shit ever gets real. I couldn't imagine the Library of Alexandria doing this.

Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too. By the time I was six years old, I had learned how to read and write.

We should forget about teaching children mathematics. They’re not going to use it ever in their lives. Give them simple arithmetic—one plus one is two, and how to divide, and how to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly. But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives, unless they are going to be scientists, and then they can simply learn it later. My brother, for example, didn’t do well in school, but when he was in his twenties, he needed a job with the Bureau of Power and Light. He got a book about mathematics and electricity and he read it and educated himself and got the job. If you are bright, you will learn how to educate yourself with mathematics if you need it. But the average child never will. So it must be reading and writing. Those are the important things. And by the time children are six, they are completely educated and then they can educate themselves. The library will be the place where they grow up.

One of my acquaintance is an education major and she tells me that The Kids are not being taught fiction anymore because it's deemed somewhat pointless by the current wave of academics. I read literature in part because it taps into the universal desires and struggles of humanity, it tells incredibly powerful stories and provides metaphor for the daily experience, has taught me empathy and helped me understand the inner life of people halfway around the globe or who lived long before I walked this earth. It's strangely comforting to know that people haven't changed that much fundamentally even if their culture and way of living was vastly different from my own. And it fuels one's own imagination. What other thing does that so well besides maybe music or art? But those are getting cut from schools too.

Will it come to a point where we don't need the Fahrenheit 451 firefighters to burn the books because they're already gone. People come to the bibliotheque where I work because we still have tomes on the shelves, and we don't even have that many. The Powers That Be are a little perturbed at this because they'd rather play with apps and order online subscriptions, and we don't get much new stuff, but there's at least three copies of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  It's easier to read disposable substanceless trash on one's Nook on the bus without shame because it has no bodice-ripping cover, and like a survivalist stocking ammo, I find myself snagging copies of books I loved as a kid so that I have something to share with the next generation of nieces and nephews because I know that the books I loved won't be at the library in another ten years.

As a society we've already lost a sense of history, lost interest in the outside world except on the most cursory level and are all too ready to sacrifice freedom, especially the freedom of other people to not have a sucky life, to preserve our compulsive need to be entertained. "Aberrant behavior" such as not engaging in front of the screen and just taking a walk and observing the world is increasingly  looked at as something strange. I hope I'm just a premature kook and not a Cassandra, but this is where my thoughts have gone.  It's hard to not read the literary tea leaves of Bradbury, Huxley, and Orwell to see the tides continue to shift.

paper and ink

 I was at a bookstore last night flipping through the anthologies of folklore, overhearing a conversation between a clerk who looked like an extra from a Creation Records britpop band and a woman who said the last two books she read were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Da Vinci Code. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I know there's countless others, and maybe that's what does it for some people, the way I devoured Nancy Drews even though they all ran together. Not everyone thinks that Welsh mythology is awesome, and that's ok I guess, as someone else tells their significant other that they can just download that book instead of buying it and that DVD is streaming on Netflix now.

I came out with a pile of CDs and movies and books, filling gaps in the collection, realizing that despite my love of Nirvana, I've never actually owned a copy of Nevermind and that my sister has all the Tolkien that wasn't worn out from much love and reading when we were kids, and The Master and Margarita is just fantastic.

I've been reading bits and pieces of Pamuk's Istanbul, and his Nobel Prize speech keeps coming back to me as I look around my apartment, at the pile on my desk at work, consider the correspondence and conversations I overhear, knowing that everything says people are reading more but that books in themselves are being devalued. My mom took us to the library when we were kids, and I fell in love with the atmosphere so much that half of my life has been spent working at one or another, in part for the access to the wide wealth of text and tunes voraciously indulged. It was a comfort in my introverted childhood, and a source of pleasure in adulthood, when I come home in the winter to wrap up in a blanket with tea and read, and stretch out on the balcony in the summer.


But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. 

One of the losses when things are withdrawn, thrown away, packed off to a depository is that this wealth of knowledge is inaccessible and lost to most. There has been so much good stuff in old bindings that can tell us about the past, to understand the future. I guess the population wants to be happy, and ignorance is bliss, and learning about other places or how other people are might destroy our sense of smugness and superiority.


I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. 

It's not so much that books are burned, but devalued in an age of everything being downloadable, instant gratificational, and disposable. I went to library school post-English lit because I loved books, and realized quickly that this wasn't true of most of my colleagues, which was profoundly disillusioning, when they debated the minutiae of terminology that no one outside of middle management cares about or what was "relevant" to people who wouldn't be interested in learning anyway or tried to out-liberal each other.

But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.


A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous


What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me.


Books aren't burned anymore, but they're disappearing from shelves when they get old and "irrelevant" and most of the libraries seem to look more like Borders with the newest and the brightest and the most easiest to digest as opposed to the repository of knowledge that I remember these places once being. People keep saying that this is the way of the future and that I fetishize the bindings, the paper, and ink and illustrations, that I need to get with the times. It kind of freaks me out that books can vanish from one's Kindle at the behest of a publisher or other entity. Who needs burning when text can just disappear into a digital void?

What happens when there's a blackout, or a power grid goes down, or one doesn't have an Internet connection. There are people who don't, believe it or not. Sure, you can share on a Kindle, but I've loved sharing physical copies of my favorite tomes with others, trading dogeared underlined paperbacks in the mail. Maybe I'm a hopeless romantic in my own weird way, maybe it's some kind of consumerism that feels good to me the way other women buy shoes.

I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

I write because it's the only way to get these thoughts out, hoping that maybe someday there will be something good and enduring.