Nothing exists except an endless present

 

 

More than 1,500 book bans have been instituted in US school districts in the last nine months, a study has found, part of a rightwing censorship effort described as “unparalleled in its intensity”.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”**

 “Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.”

 Fire is bright and fire is clean.”****
 

* The Guardian

**  1984, George Orwell

*** Franklin D. Roosevelt

 ****Ray Bradbury

image: Holland House Library September, 1940: 

The photograph provides an image of the fetishization of the text, or document, of the ways in which history attaches itself, not to the social disturbances and crises surrounding it on all sides, but to the ruins of the past, and even more so, to the orderly archive of the narratives of those ruins. In that austere repository of the bound volumes of fabula and historia -- the library -- the scholar seeks the world of lived human experience but encounters instead one of its chief symptoms -- writing. link

see also, Eduardo Cadava, The Lapsus Imaginis':The Image in Ruin

Paper Graveyeards