Original Title: Torching Books, Saving Books
© 2009 G.N. Jacobs
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Part 1 of a rumination on the value of art and historical preservation.
Ray Bradbury recently asked readers of the comic book adaptation of his Fahrenheit 451 to think about the one book in their life that they would memorize as a member of The Book People to preserve against the next Dark Age. Instantly, several books popped into my head, the list starting with Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers and including Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit, The Bible, Koran, Bullfinch’s Mythology and a long list of splashy thrillers and science fiction potboilers. Suddenly, I realized that my list was too long for Bradbury’s question and I would be paralyzed into indecision. And then I had a contrary thought do we really need to preserve everything?
Don’t get me wrong, if the Louvre burns down and the Mona Lisa gets zapped I will cry for society that has invested so much mystery into a simple painting of a woman. I would personally cry more for the Titian presently displayed along the right wall of the Mona Lisa room halfway between the giant Wedding at Cana and the Mona Lisa. Great art should be preserved as much as possible, because it reminds us of our collected history and prevents us from excessively reinventing the wheel.
But, I will trade the last copy of The Three Musketeers to save a human being from a burning building. I might even do this for that great dog that only seems to exist in the movies, or at least my dog that under the rose-colored glasses of unconditional love seems like that perfect dog. Now we know what my priorities are, in order: life, health and freedom.
Why am I less stringent than other writers and artists about preserving the works of the past? I think it is because sometimes people really do need to reinvent the wheel as a way of making the human condition seem fresh and new again. Isaac Asimov built a blasé attitude into the Galactic Empire before the Foundations replaced them when the collapse came. People thought they knew all there was to know about everything, because there was a book in the Imperial Library on Earth. So they stopped doing archeological digs and the other types of fieldwork upon which much of our knowledge is based.
I describe an oxymoronic situation where we need to preserve our past, but not do it so stringently that we strangle the need to go, see and do for ourselves. Perhaps, the best society is the one that takes preservation seriously, but accepts leakage. Using my example of the Mona Lisa, we could survive if we only lost that smile, but kept everything else in the Louvre. We could not survive if we burned every book or painting on the planet at the same time.
However, I write fifty years after Bradbury wrote to exorcise his fears of censorship and resulting Dark Ages. I live in a world with more technology that can be hidden so that books may surface once more when people need them again. I didn’t see a single flash drive in either the book or movie for Fahrenheit 451. There is nothing stopping me from storing the books I care about in a geo-cache with an encrypted GPS location that only the initiated with passwords can access.
BREAK FOR PART 2
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