is a word I’ve just invented to describe the devastation one can feel upon discovering that one’s view of reality is also largely shaped by one’s own lack of experience. For instance, although I was aware that American author Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 (coincidentally, the year in which my own father, also a World War 2 veteran, passed away from mesothelioma), I was never particularly taken by his work, which seemed too darkly comic for my taste, though as a teenager I tried to read his 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, widely popular at the time. World War 2 (and what led up to it) was clearly topical during the era of Vietnam War protests, and perhaps even more so today.
But now his first novel, the 1952 Player Piano, which I’d never read, and which satirizes a world run by engineers through the use of machines, also seems alarmingly prescient. And his final collection of essays, A Man Without A Country, published in 2005, darkly comic as it is, seems horrifyingly relevant, with this quote on page 103 discussing Ray Bradbury’s famous Fahrenheit 451:
“Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, coincidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of person who have checked out those titles.
So the America I love still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desk of our public libraries.”
20 years on, this seems even more true, with the alarming addition of pseudo-engineers who have become the tech oligarchs who now control the machines that have siphoned off the products of human knowledge in order to create the algorithms intended to control us, and the slow, fatal turn from “fair use” of physical books to “price-per-use” metering of electronic books in libraries. And the public libraries themselves (and all my former students and colleagues in the profession) are under constant assault by those who are enabling the process. The Serenity Prayer (usually attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr), which plays a role in Slaughterhouse-Five, is applicable here as well, though librarians try to focus on the “courage to change” part.
Perhaps if I’d been less complacent about the world (and read more Vonnegut), I wouldn’t be quite so Vonnegutted now.
Keywords In and Out of Context 