RACHEL EYTAN
593
say, Creature, the minute you have a book bigger than you are, you
have become human.
Book burners burn more than books. They burn bridges to the
past, to the "years of many generations," to the understanding and
the collective subconscious of what we call civilization . Yet it seems
as though burning may soon be superfluous.
Will
we voluntarily
abandon our experience in favor of ready-to-wear imagery, of fabri–
cated mythologies, of a shallow, one-dimensional existence that has
no layers of culture, no subtleties, no miracle of poetry? There are
those who truly hope that, just as tuberculosis and syphilis have been
eliminated through antibiotics, so television and video may soon
relegate reading fever to the dustbin of history.
Are we the last generation of scribblers? Not yet, fellow pa–
tient, not yet: Here and there we still meet the odd few who suffer
from the craving, who perk up when they walk into a bookstore,
their nostrils quivering at the smell of their timeless aphrodisiac.
Translated from the Hebrew by Jonathan J. Goldberg
Coming in
Partisan Review
• An Inteview with Czeslaw Milosz
• William Phillips on Allan Bloom
• Vassily Aksyonov on
Glasnost
• Raymond Aron:
A Memoir
• Pearl K. Bell on Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne Jewett
• An Inteview with Stephen Spender
• Edith Kurzweil on Everyday Life Under Hitler
• Fiction by Jose Donoso
• George Watson on Orwell and Waugh
• Nathan Glazer on Life in the Bronx
• Eugene Goodheart on Desire and Its Discontents
• Steven Marcus on Ernest Hemingway
