The Grim Mendery

"Tonight’s the night…and it’s going to happen again, and again…has to happen…"

I enter the basement floor. An operating table waits for me. Boxes and barrels at my side overflowing with mangled spines and entrails; the refuse of our disposable world. Behind me my coworkers chat idly about the weekend weather. Another wheels in a hand truck every so often and takes a barrel with her. I take out my rusty utility knife and look into the face of an orphan. A woman returns from the bathroom and tells us how spooky they are. Can the same not be said for this godforsaken place? I plunge my knife into the undesirable just to the left of the spine and pull down the length of the back in one clean movement. There is no pain; it is instantaneous and I get faster every time. I repeat the movement on the other side and rip the spine clean out. I place the spine in a cardboard box, stacked neatly with others. I dispose of the rest in the emptiest barrel next to me. From the side room I take the next unwanted orphan and begin again.

It occurs to me that I have not yet decided on the moral status of what I am doing, but given the circumstances, what can I really do about it? Refusal will lead to another taking my place; the work must go on. They allow me to claim them for my own and I have in the past, but my home is filled to capacity now. Others could have claimed them, but did not. $1 could have saved this one; a token fee! We offered them to anyone to do with them what they will. Even advertised…on TV, radio, the papers. Some came…claimed many but not most. Not enough…not nearly enough. The worst thing is that few were completely undesirable. Most just happened to be in the wrong place…wrong time…looked wrong…wrong language…whatever. Given enough money and manpower it would be feasible for us to find a home for every single one. But it is precisely because we lack these resources that we find ourselves here, running this operation out of sight of our customers like a midnight abortion in the back alley of some slum doctor’s clinic.

This is part of the natural cycle, I tell myself, and there is nothing I can do about it. I console myself by starting with the least desirable of the undesirables. But no, this is not why I do it. Why I do it is because I was told to do it, because it is my job to do it. This is probably why the Nazis did what they did, at least those who were not psychopaths. Just following orders. Not my fault; couldn’t be my fault. It’s gas or be gassed. What can I do about it? I’m only one man. I wonder if they brought their work home with them, hid some Jewish children in their attics and stole extra rations for them. How did they choose, how did they decide who was going to live and die?

Not that what we’re doing is murder…No, really, it’s not even close. Even those crazy fundies who parade their signs in Red Square equating first-trimester abortion with Darfur have more of a claim to use this word than we do.

No, I have been intentionally misleading with my choice of words so that you might feel some of the horror I felt and consider the moral dilemma that has been consuming my thoughts for the last couple days. I volunteer at the Western Library, you see, and we have been disposing of the books that did not sell at the book sale that was held last month. The library is unable to simply give away books that have been in its collection or donated for whatever reason; I am told that it has something to do with the library, like the rest of Western, being funded by the state. We get so many books, however, that we must sell some of the collection (generally the most damaged, least used, or duplicate books) for a token amount at least once every year. The sale at least provides funding to our chronically under-funded library, but anything that is not sold must be destroyed: it is illegal to give away. We recycle the paper itself and throw away the covers. This is an essential part of the natural life cycle of information, but for us bibliophiles it is the hardest one to stomach. One imagines the paper and covers being carefully and gently separated in the mendery and reused for new books, not in the way I described above. I have experimented quite a bit with the cut-up technique, but it has always been with copied pages. And although I never write notes in my course books I would not be opposed to doing so. But this…I feel as though I am doing violence to the books and to the information itself. It is brutish, something to be reserved for willfully ignorant mobs: those who burn books because they fear that they contain some secret body of knowledge that conspires against them and that mastery over this information confers power and control over their lives. Not the caretakers and guardians of this information.

What bothers me even more, though, is that this information that is to be destroyed is not always useless. As I scanned the aisles of books on death row, looking for obsolete government documents and old reference books that no one would miss, I found a wonderful leather bound set of Shakespeare’s works that hadn’t sold simply because they were in German, and many more books were ones I would someday want to read, given enough time, but I simply had no space for in my house. Surely there must be someone out there for even our most obscure books. Surely some charity out there could keep them until they all found a home. Let it even be a child whose family is so poor that this dreary, boring old book is his or her only reading material; at least then it can be valued against the absence of anything else.

I am not confident that the paper will even be recycled. Too often the load of a recycling truck will be full of contaminants from people improperly disposing of their garbage and it will have to be thrown away. We have to wonder what this means for us on a larger scale. As Terry Pratchett illustrates with his idea of “L-space” in the Discworld series, all books affect all other books. This is not only true of those works that influence a writer to write their book in a certain way, which then influences another writer and so on and so forth. It is also true of those books that are not written, could have been written, will be written later, and even of those books that are written but not read. The fact that a writer did not read some particular book means that his or her own work will not be influenced in that way. Not being affected is being affected counterfactually. Imagine James Joyce writing Ulysses if we had lost all of our Greek and Roman literature when Rome fell. Imagine how much more advanced our sciences would be had the Library of Alexandria not burned, or the Archimedes Palimpsest not been written over and discovered many centuries after calculus was independently discovered. The readers do not necessarily need to become famous writers or scholars for these lost books to affect them. Reading is not a passive activity; even those who “read for pleasure” form the interpretive lens that they approach the book from through their experiences, which includes every book they have already read. In fact, “casual” readers may do this even more as they are unlikely to shift interpretive lenses or seriously analyze what they read, and thus are more likely to accept whatever their first feelings or opinions (I hesitate to give them the prominent status of “thought” or “idea”) are as being “what this book is about” or "what this book means to me." Imagine a reader trying to work his or her way through Aquinas’ Summa Theologica without being familiar with Aristotle’s works; what would they really get out of it? And of course, even the most uninspired reader is bound to contribute something to the body of human experience, even if it is through unimaginably complex and chaotic causal chains. Someone says something to a friend offhandedly at lunch, they repeat but also distort and expand this idea to another friend, etc. and eventually it manifests some influence however insubstantial in the way things turn out.

This is a concern that will not, of course, be magically solved through not destroying any books or information because there is an infinite number of ways a piece of information can not affect someone without being destroyed, and furthermore it may not be desirable for every possible piece of information to affect someone. Nevertheless, I cannot see how this needless destruction of books (a product of the industrial age when even information can be made overly abundant) can be anything other than a waste.