Posted by araucaria
(here)
I hear you, dear Ulli. All these thoughts have passed through my mind, except perhaps for the astrological thing. But put that rolling pin away as well and let me share with you the thoughts that follow on from here. In general terms, I would say I have a rather different reading of Ray Bradbury
First the astrology. A) it is not just a Libran matter, and B) Libra to me means more than that (not being perfectionist btw, I’d be a very strange (oxymoronic) form of perfectionist
).
A) My daughter, who has the same problem, is not a Libran, she’s a historian. She has to trawl through archives and read ancient publications in such short supply and with such a limited readership that digitization will always be totally out of the question. In French a
librairie is a book shop. A library is a
bibliothèque, from
biblos simply meaning book, and a
bibliophile is not a fetishist but a book lover, someone with a reverence for the written word, and not just bibles.
B) Libra in French is
balance (scales), so I suppose an accountant is another form of bookkeeper (balancing the books). Also we are talking about the scales of justice, in other words accountability. History is about calling people to account, reputations suffer or are enhanced. To that extent, one might say that an auto-da-fe in accounting terms is a radical way of “cooking the books”, and in legal terms amounts to destroying the evidence.
The books lying quietly on my shelves are inactive, and doing me no harm. It is not until I get them down to work with them that I feel ill. In any case, the ones I have been talking about are not from my library at all, they only just arrived in the post! Why do I feel ill? Because until about ten years ago, there was no acid-free paper. Acid “burns” books at Fahrenheit 45 period! This is what attracts micro-organisms. So burning is not the solution, it is the cause of the problem in the first place. Just as digital versions of acid-free hard copy are simply unnecessary.
My library is not dead and disposable. It is not even just ballast (although ballast is important as well), it is a storehouse or back office without which my front office would be pretty useless. I come back to Bradbury to explain what I mean by this. Fortunately I wrote about burning books a few years ago, so I don’t need to make myself sick by digging out an old copy.
There are two kinds of book burners in the no vel. First, the officials from the fire brigade, the idea being to replace subversive literature with a living-room endlessly playing a “family” soap in 3D. The others are the rebels, who only burn books because they are doomed in that form, and only after they have committed them to memory. The book becomes a person. Montag is introduced to a man called “Plato’s
Republic” etc. The choice is then between the virtual “family” and a real family of human books – between ghosts or clones or robots and humanity (a word I emphasized in a previous post). I am not Plato’s
Republic, I am an entire, constantly growing library that refuses destruction – not memorizing verbatim of course, but writing my own book from it all. This is how books come to be written and it is what makes them a living entity and even gives them personhood. That is how I blow the whistle on the destroyers, who prefer to give personhood to corporations. Does it damage my health? Well of course it does – the whole place is on fire after all
Interesting sidenote: Dolores Cannon attaches great importance to her recollection of having been a librarian at Alexandria at the time of the fire. She has even met the scholar she used to feed with documents (see
The Convoluted Universe IV)…
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