I have an anecdote from my first summer working at the library.
It was a sunny day, midsummer. A woman walked in, someone I recognized by face as a member of my church. I had no books to shelve, and so struck up a short conversation with her as I checked her books out. I don't remember if I got her name. I don't remember it in any case, as I am notoriously awful with names. If my memory serves, she asked something like what books I had read recently. I told her I had read
The Stand, by Stephen King, in all its one-thousand-page-plus glory.
She said, and I will never forget the offhand way in which she said this, as if it were completely normal and non-heinous, "Oh yes, I remember burning that book once."
I flinched as if physically struck. I remember my mouth working for a couple seconds, like a nutcracker with no nuts in it. But, I asked, but why would you
burn it?
She gave me a look as if I had asked a childish question. "Well, because it was
evil," she said. She took her books, her apparently fine, non-evil books, and left, not in a mood or anything. As if that was a perfectly normal conversation to have.
I felt disquieted and jacked-up for the rest of the day.
When I told a friend about it after my shift was over, explaining it almost in a blank daze, I remember saying, over and over, that it wasn't even that she was a member of my church that disturbed me so much. Nor was it even that it was a book by my then-favorite author. Or the fact that she was denouncing a book in which light triumphs over the forces of ignorance and darkness as "evil."
No, what disturbed me the most was the fact that she seemed so okay with the
concept itself. Of burning a book. Any book. She had told me it was at a large book-burning. Like a party. I didn't know they existed in a civilized world.
The only sentence I remember saying word-for-word was a simple one. One I kept repeating to myself, once I had triangulated the purest, most naked form of my disquiet and horror.
"Books are not for burning."Keeping those five words in mind, my thoughts on the Dove Church's movement for this September 11th should be crystal clear.
But just in case they aren't, have this video:
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