I’ve been reading more reactions to Tom’s book burning and I’m amazed at the range of response. Well, I’m not really amazed. I mean, come on. I’ve been around for a few decades and have seen a lot of responses to a lot of things. People get their tighty whities all up in a bunch at just about anything and everything. So, no, I’m not amazed.
But, really, folks. These are books for God’s sake! Not people. Not animals. Not flags. Not effigies of you-know-who. Books. Some people are outraged that Tom’s burning the books instead of quietly throwing them in a large landfill. Is there really a difference? Whether they are being burned or dumped or left sitting to rot and mildew the end result is the same, right? No one is reading the damn books!
Now, I know there’s all this stigma to “book burning” and some people even have pictures on their blogs of a large bonfire of burning books with people all around doing the “sieg heil.” That’s not happening in ol’ K.C., folks. Just because someone once burned a book as a form of censorship should not forever more taint the burning of books as censorship. That is not Tom’s motive.
And Tom’s even giving every one a chance to save the books from the ashes. Just buy the damn things! Give them a good home. Dust them off once in a while. Open their tender little pages and READ THEM!
So, some people are getting all outraged at someone else burning books and are morally and ethically offended but don’t DO anything to stop it. Send me a check and I’ll go rescue the books. Rent a damn truck and go pick them up. Organize a donation somewhere — I’ll even help you lug them around. But do something instead of pissing and moaning about what someone else is doing when you can remedy the situation.
Do a Google search on “prospero kansas city book burning” and read about our local book burning. The first page contains links to NBC, Fox News, Amazon, and a bunch of blogs. I’m all with Tom on this one. As he says, “not reading a book is as good as burning it.”
I went down to Prospero’s today and picked up 10 books for 10 bucks. There was a lot of crap in the pile and I’m not sorry to see a lot of it go. I definitely do not think that just because a book was written makes it worthy of reading. But I’m not going to be the Book Nazi. If you want to read crap, go ahead and buy that crap and read it.
If a book is just going to sit on a shelf in a storage room or warehouse collecting dust and becoming worm food, then you might as well burn it. At least you can toast some marshmallows and sing a few campfire songs while you’re doing it.
Hey, anyone know where we can get a book of old campfire songs???
I think things. I write things. I take too long to write good 
and put it aside. Then I find that someone else has said what I want to say. And said it more eloquently than I am capable of (hopefully that will change). So, why not let those who have already spoken speak for me?
So, here’s another quote from Thomas Merton’s letter to Amiya Chakravarty in The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns:
It is not easy to try to say what I now I cannot say. I do really have the feeling that you have all understood and shared quite perfectly. That you have seen something that I see to be most precious — and most available too. The reality that is present to us and in us: call it Being, call it Atman, call it Pneuma … or Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen which cannot be learned any more than breathing), we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.
I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happiness, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it …
Aside from Merton’s appreciation for religious and spiritual thought other than his own, what strikes me about this passage is the last sentence. How many of us truly recognize each other? We meet someone and immediately we judge them based on name, appearance, the way they stand, how they talk, what their “affiliations” are. We never are just with them in the “metaphysical space of silence and happiness.” We don’t truly recognize them; we think we see them or know them but all we see are the exterior things. We don’t see how “full of paradise” they are. Hell, we don’t even see how “full of paradise” we are. We just don’t know. And the rate some of us are going — we never will.
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