The Soul Needs Books

An essay I wrote for LIS 600 (Foundations of Library and Information Science) in the Fall of 2016

Since I wrote this for an assignment in 2016, even prior to the seismic shift that was the November 2016 presidential election, a lot of ideas and references are quite glaringly dated. I edited the following version somewhat with the objective, not so much to bring it in line with current thinking as to give the reader more context and acute perspective. One thing I appreciate is the timelessness of the basic idea, that we need to preserve cultural knowledge, and to do whatever we can to protect intellectual and creative treasures that are under direct assault in war zones: whether it’s Europe in World War II, or Syria in 2016, or Ukraine and the Gaza Strip today.

Photo by Spencer Scott Pugh on Unsplash

There is a movie called The Monuments Men, about a World War II platoon of art scholars, led by George Clooney, trekking across Europe to recoup art treasures that had been stolen by the Nazis. The plot culminates in the emotional discovery of Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, in a salt mine! It is based on a true story, with Clooney playing the leader of the group, Frank Stokes, and Cate Blanchett playing a French Resistance hero whose laborious documentation led to the saving of 60,000 works of art.¹ During World War II, unsurprisingly, there were people who regarded the work of the “monuments men” with cynicism thinking that saving art during a war ought to be low or negative on the priority scale. At the beginning of the film, when Clooney’s character was explaining the problem of stolen and destroyed art to a skeptical President Roosevelt, he said: “You can wipe out an entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground and somehow they'll still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy their achievements and it's as if they never existed.”²

The 21st century began literally with a bang. 9/11 and the neoconservative policies of the Bush II Administration propelled us into what has continued, and what feels likely will continue for the foreseeable future, no matter who is president, as a perpetual state of war. Whether it’s to fight terrorism or send aid to other nations in defense of their borders, we seem to be repeatedly and constantly in what Senator Bernie Sanders called “quagmires.” A 2013 article in Library & Archival Security written by Laila Hussein Moustafa addresses how the “quagmire”³ impacts libraries in the Middle East. Moustafa inserts a brilliantly appropriate quote into her paper, and this quote conveys the same sentiment as the one above from The Monuments Men:

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is, and what it was.”⁴

Think of Malala Yousafzai, the girl who bravely fought for the right to education, who stood courageous in the face of unthinkable horrors. They tried to extinguish her light. She roared back and now her light shines brighter than ever, illuminating not only her native Pakistan but the entire world.

There are other threats to libraries and books besides bombs. In the 1990s, the United States government was intensely focused on crime and incarceration, as well as the so-called “war on drugs,” as evidenced by the omnibus 1994 Crime Bill. That bill was a massive bill, bundling the Violence Against Women Act with a ten-year assault weapons ban and many other measures.⁵ There was funding for prisons and police forces as well as more offenses for the use of the federal death penalty.⁶ Being “tough on crime” was a significant part of the messaging that backed the passage of this bill. Suffice it to say that crime was a big issue on the forefront of the national consciousness in the 1990s. Of course, it is still a huge problem given that, a little more than ten years later, the United States had more people in prison than any other nation,⁷ and today (or sometimes it feels like) we learn of a horrifying police or school shooting almost every week.

At least eight articles in the two issues of Library and Archive Security for the year 1994 focused on the issue of crime in libraries: theft and drugs mostly. The tone of the discourse about drugs was of doom; to paraphrase, ‘beware of drugs because they can be addictive and harmful and lead to irresponsibility….’ The implication was that drug users in your neighborhood can lead to bad behaviors that inevitably impact the neighborhood library. These issues dominated Volume 12 of Library and Archive Security. One very amusing article in this volume warns readers that the average book thief could be your best friend or even you! Book thieves, the writer John Maxwell Hamilton warns, look like everyone else, so beware! Unlike the “inclination to swipe a car,” pilfering books is apparently a “primordial urge”⁸ of the brain! To be fair, some of Maxwell’s arguments make sense. It does seem to be rather common to ‘forget’ to return books. He quotes Anatole France: “Never lend books for no one ever returns them.”⁹ Even the 17th century Pope Innocent X was “supposed to have ripped off a book, though he was a monsignor at the time….”¹⁰ So monsignors are apparently not exempt from the “primordial urge” to avail oneself of the five-finger-discount on books!

People want books. Desperately. They are willing to die for the freedom to read. Today, [in 2016] in a suburb of Damascus, Anas Ahmad hunkers down in his secret library. He proudly tells a BBC reporter, via Skype, of his incredible accomplishment, but he cannot reveal his exact location because outside there is a civil war in his country. He tore threw his war-ravaged hometown, grabbing every book in sight, desperate to save the precious volumes of knowledge. He collected more than 14,000 books and put them in his secret library. Why would he do this? He could leave Syria, run for his life and find refuge in a strange land. No! Anas Ahmad will not abandon his town and his people. His actions show a determination to preserve for his people whatever he can of their culture. One of the users of his library told the BBC reporter: “In a sense the library gave me back my life... just like the body needs food, the soul needs books.”¹¹

The soul needs books. This truth underpins the history and the future of libraries. We must protect the freedom to read. We must protect the books. Whether we are talking about a secret underground library, or a neat community of suburban America, or even a digital database, the issue of security is real. We will always need to protect knowledge--from bombs, from fire, from theft, from hacking. Perhaps John Maxwell Hamilton was right when he said that the pilfering of books is a primordial urge. I think he was actually partially right. It is not the pilfering that is primordial. What is primeval is the hunger of the soul for learning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hamilton, John Maxwell. 1994. "Is There a Klepto in the Stacks?"  Library & Archival Security. 12 (1): 47-54. http://uncg.worldcat.org/oclc/4803571466.

Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).

Quoted in Moustafa, Laila Hussein. 2013. "Disaster Management Plans in Middle East Libraries and Archives in Time of War: Case Studies of Iraq and Egypt". Library & Archival Security. 26 (1/2). http://uncg.worldcat.org/oclc/5816723667.

Liptak, Adam. “U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations.” The New York Times. April 23, 2008. Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html.

Morrison, Jim. “The True Story of the Monuments Men.” Smithsonian.com. February 7, 2014. Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story- monuments-men-180949569/?no-ist.

“Not Another Quagmire.” Senator Bernie Sanders. Accessed October 13, 2016. http:// www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/not-another-quagmire.

Pear, Robert. “The 1992 Campaign: Platform; In a Final Draft, Democrats Reject a Part of Their Past.” The New York Times. June 26, 1992. Accessed October 13, 2016. http:// www.nytimes.com/1992/06/26/us/1992-campaign-platform-final-draft-democrats- reject-part-their-past.html.

The Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com, Inc,  n.d. Web. “The Monuments Men (2014).” Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2177771/quotes?i tem=qt2108108.

Thomson, Mike. “Syria’s secret library.” BBC News. July 28, 2016. Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36893303.

Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, H.R. 3355, 103rd Cong. Accessed October 13, 2016. https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house- b ill/3355.

REFERENCES

1. Morrison, Jim. “The True Story of the Monuments Men.” Smithsonian.com. February 7, 2014. Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-monuments-men-180949569/?no-ist.

2. The Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com, Inc,  n.d. Web. “The Monuments Men (2014).” Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2177771/quotes?item=qt2108108.

3. “Not Another Quagmire.” Senator Bernie Sanders. Accessed October 13, 2016. http:// www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/not-another-quagmire.

4. Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), quoted in Laila Hussein Moustafa. 2013. "Disaster Management Plans in Middle East Libraries and Archives in Time of War: Case Studies of Iraq and Egypt". Library & Archival Security. 26 (1/2).

5. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, H.R. 3355, 103rd Cong. Accessed October 13, 2016. https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355.

6. IBID

7. Liptak, Adam. “U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations.” The New York Times. April 23, 2008. Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?_r=0.

8. Hamilton, John Maxwell. 1994. "Is There a Klepto in the Stacks?" Library & Archival Security. 12 (1): 47-54. http://uncg.worldcat.org/oclc/4803571466.

9. IBID

10. IBID

11. Thomson, Mike. “Syria’s secret library.” BBC News. July 28, 2016. Accessed October 13, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36893303.