if your house was burning down (or caught in a hurricane or other Natural disaster), which book would you take with you?
This is an oft-asked question, and an erroneous one.
For one, reproduction - and reproducibility - culls this inquisitiveness: every single book is replaceable. The contemporary world of the bibliophile is without loss; that is what we come to expect in the age of commodity reproduction. The book as thing.
It is odd that such a duplicitous question does not occur in the pre-history of the modern. No Renaissance writer would thus be provoked. The temerity of modern logic lies in the very posing of this question: despite knowing its omnipresence, its role in disseminating the Thing everywhere and always, it attempts to salvage a trace of tangible immediacy, of feigned authenticity - by asking the question. It is as if the question wishes to convince us of the value of the Thing. But if this is its goal, are we not correct to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves?
Thus the question is dishonest in that it is designed to solicit an answer not to the question “What is your favourite book?” but “What book would you risk you life to save from fire?” Thus posed, the question turns on the meaningfulness of the book in question as opposed to the literary merits of the text itself. The thing-for-us, not the thing-in-itself, so to speak. It becomes purely a manner of dissecting the subject’s personal trajectory as opposed to the literary merits of the book itself or its historical trajectory.
This, however, begs the question: as the meaningfulness of the thing is therefore imbued by the interviewee, so the question’s and answer’s universal applicability is curtailed.
if your house was burning down (or caught in a hurricane or other Natural disaster), which book would you take with you?
My copy of Love’s Work, signed and inscribed by Gillian Rose.
variations on a theme
“So, what would you burn?” That’s the question The New Statesman asked.
