Burning Libraries

Famous libraries are frequently famous because of their destruction. Consider the burning of Alexandria, the book-burning of Qin Shihuang, and the bonfires of the Spanish conquistadors of the New World. In fiction, too, libraries are frequently burned at the end of the story, cf. The Name of the Rose, The Rule of Four, Auto-da-Fe etc. Aside from the conventional symbolism of wilfully destroyed knowledge or wisdom, I think bibliographical immolations also represent attempts to control, through destruction, things that we cannot possess or understand. Fascists, for instance, are often associated with book-burning, because their political ideology brooks no opposition nor subtlety of expression.

The sheer vastness of the modern library humbles us, and reminds us of the even greater magnitude of human knowledge. The impossibility of digesting and comprehending even a portion of that quantity can be debilitating, especially when confronting the library for the first time. A scholar set loose in a library feels, at best, mild discomfort on contemplating this fact. At worst, psychosis becomes total, all-consuming. The inadequacy he first feels gradually escalates to despair, then turns on its head and becomes into jealousy, hatred, resentment. Resentment that human output could be so prodigious as to make the individual become so very small indeed. Resentment burns yet more when he realises that the great majority of the texts are doggerel, repetitions, corruptions, irrelevances. Fragments rile him, because not only does the library extend in space, it extends in time, and gradually disappears into the irretrievable past. The library is too vast to be understood, it has outgrown its purpose because its purported masters are little more than custodians who dust the shelves and shelve the books. This uselessness from sheer bulk makes the library dangerous, parasitical. To start anew, the library must burn; rid the world of its lies and half-truths, and start again. No matter, the few precious truths which burn with it will be discovered again in due time: if they should be real truths. Only fire can kill this plague.