Greed can do it as easily as Religion — or Time Itself
Items of high value and greed, idolatry and iconoclasm — the cutting up of books from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh including a copy of Newton’s Principia is nend ot in the too different from what ISIS’ Kata’ib Taswiyya batallion did to Palmyra.
Not too different, either, from the activities of Tibetan monks.. or, I suppose, wind, rain, and a thousand years..
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Percy Bysshe Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
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Karlie McWilliams:
July 22nd, 2018 at 10:04 pm
This is my hometown (Pittsburgh – with an h, if you please), and of course I’ve been to that library many times, as well as the bookshop. The fact that many of the books were destroyed in the selling – pages torn out, etc – makes the loss that much worse, as well as the fact that those who bought them will more than likely keep them in their secret collections.
Sally Benzon:
July 24th, 2018 at 11:37 pm
I’d say there is a significant difference involved between the works of the Tibetan monks and the others: the public trust of safekeeping. It is expected that the impermanence of the monks’ works be demonstrated with the destructive act of the performance of the art creation. The other acts are (at the least) demonstrations of power and greed in forced acts from which impermanence counterweights the asserted hierarchies of value.
Charles Cameron:
July 25th, 2018 at 1:40 am
It seems some book thief stole the “h” in “Pittsburgh”, my apologies for that, Karlie.
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And yes, the Tibetans are differently motivated, Sally, but then the link there is religion, which doesn’t apply to the Carnegie Library. They’re there for “compare and contrast” and illuminate the matter by surfacing the inevitability aspect..
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The Venn diagram of this post would be a nice one,