The German playwright Heinrich Heine wrote in his 1821 play, Almansor: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.) In less than a decade, in towns such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the Nazis burnt people by the millions.

The link of creativity between the written word on a printed page, the thought that goes behind it, the imagination of a mind that gives it shape, is what makes us human, and it is what expression and humanity are all about. Destroy the work, and you destroy the thought behind it—and the thinker.

In early 1989, British Muslims (many of Pakistani origin) in Bradford had not given much thought to such philosophical impulses, but they were driven by the same angry passion which was to ultimately turn the Nazis into beasts, when they held aloft copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, burning them to ashes. Rushdie was stunned. Books were holy in his childhood home; in an early essay, he writes about his grandfather kissing a book that accidentally falls on the ground.

This does not mean every written word is sacrosanct. Telephone directories get pulped; junk mail gets thrown away; why, if unread, I hope this column will at least hold the bhelpuri someone might eat
some day. But the responsibility of destroying the original rests with the creator. If you forget to destroy it, too bad. Do it yourself; don’t pass the burden onto others. Sometimes destroying things yourself might even be good: Ernest Hemingway’s Dangerous Summer, The Garden of Eden and True at First Light did not enhance his reputation. But the posthumously published A Moveable Feast ranks as one of the finest evocations of Paris of the 1920s, even if some dispute the events and characterization, particularly of the Fitzgeralds, and whether James Joyce drank Swiss white wine.

The novel I had always wanted to read was the one the adult Apu casts away in a valley, the pages disappearing, flying away randomly, carried by the wind, towards the end of Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar. He loses the novel but regains his son. The sight of Apu carrying his estranged son on his shoulders at the en of the film is one of the most beautiful endings of all time.

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Dmitri Nabokov’s dilemma inspires Salil Tripathi to produce this meditation on the ways in which books mediate loss and recovery.