Books Guide Us Through the Fire

Book burners should know that

Books are made for walking, for walking in the light, to adapt the words of an old gospel song that exclaims, “Ain’t it wonderful how the light shines?” It’s something I could shout about any number of books I hold in my heart.

The sublime light of books and the journeys they offer are central to my life, and I regard the burning and banning of books as attempted amputations of a sort, an effort to handicap wayfaring souls before they set out from the dark.

Book burning is nothing new. It has plagued humankind for thousands of years. Whole libraries have been turned to ash, usually by those in power who have draped themselves in shawls of victimhood before putting the torch to books, the carriers of their imagined torments.

Today, we are once again in the clutches of the shawled.  They imagine books as Hitchcock’s birds, vicious flying things coming for their souls with their opened talons and unholy raptor beaks. Many of the book-burners call themselves Christians and find books the work of devils. Maybe they should read Saint Augustine, one of Christianity’s deepest thinkers. He felt differently.

In his Confessions, Augustine recalled a day that he was sitting alone beneath a fig tree, miserable with doubt, when he “suddenly heard from a nearby house a voice—that of a boy or a girl I could not tell—repeating in a singsong, ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.’” The song, he thought, was a divine command.

PEN America, advocates of free expression rights, said that from August 2021 to April 2022 more than 1,500 books had been banned in U.S. Schools. The American Library Association reported similar numbers. In addition, librarians are increasingly under attack from extremists. They “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials,” the New York Times writes. “Some librarians have quit after being harassed online.”

Recently, there has been at least one actual book burning. Promising “deliverance from demons,” a pastor in Mount Juliet Tennessee recently staged a massive bonfire to destroy the Harry Potter and Twilight books, among others.

The pages of books damaged by fire turn black and the ink white. In his book, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury compared the burned pages to black butterflies. Bradbury’s book burners saw the blackened pages as the welcome destruction of  “all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.”

I once lost a home to fire. After the lightning struck and the fire blossomed, I tried to save as many books as I could. Firefighters made me leave the house when hot sparks showered down my back after the oak-plank ceiling ignited. Later that night with the roof gone, updrafts rose from smoldering ash. With its last merciful breaths, my home lifted black pages with words made white by fire into the air, to safe haven above the destruction.

Maybe the spirits of books are like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and book burners like little Nebuchadnezzars of Babylon in the Book of Daniel. The King, insulted by their independent spirits, condemned the trio to the flames only to discover “that the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men…not even the smell of fire came from them.”

Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film version of Bradbury’s novel beautifully presents the novelist’s vision of life-after-death of books. Guy Montag, the story’s protagonist, joins a community of “Book People” whose members have each memorized a book to save it. They have become the books they love.

The Book People stroll through the snowy woods quietly speaking the words of their books. It’s a captivating scene, one I’ve watched over and over again.

My love affair with books began at an early age. I was four years old when I watched my older brother and mother reading together silently at the kitchen table after dinner. I couldn’t join them because I couldn’t read. It’s a vivid memory. Their faces and the pages of their books were illuminated by a simple overhead lamp that hung from the ceiling by a coppery chain. Rustling pages and the ticking of an old wall clock were the only sounds. I needed right then to share whatever magic was in their books.

I have as many memories of my physical encounters with books as I do of their contents. My parents mail-ordered Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. I was six or seven. When it arrived, a friend happened to be visiting and I made him sit on the living room couch with me while I thumbed through the book over and over.

I read a good bit of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man during high school algebra class. I sat third row, near the middle of the classroom. Surely the teacher saw me. Maybe she was an Ellison fan.

Another memory: a nighttime visit to the local library with my father. I’m sitting on the library floor, searching a lower shelf for Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Special Edition for Young Readers. The book’s first sentence, so simple and clear, reads, “Beginnings are often shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea.” And so it is with the great mothers of imagination, books like Carson’s.

I take extra care with the work of writers I know personally, and books written by friends have a privileged place in my library. I’m enraged at the thought that some fearful fool might one day try to hurt them.

Message to the book burners: Your fires have no power over the spirits of our books because they escape the flames with words white as stars on the wings of black butterflies.

When we enter a book’s world, we leave behind for a bit the world we’re used to before coming back all the better for the wayfaring. Books are made for walking, and they can walk us through fire. When I pick one up, I don’t always know how long I’ll be gone. If you see me reading, put a candle in the window. I’m bound to drift awhile.