Laura Brooks > Recent Status Updates

“This symbol” — she gestured at the fylfots on the bishop’s statue — “is thousands of years old. It will long outlive a party of fascists…..I am reclaiming it for its true meaning….i have used it as and act of subversion. A single thread can make quite a difference.”

They’re fylfots….An old Anglo-Saxon word. It is an ancient symbol that has been used for thousands of years, in many cultures and religions, from India to Scandinavia, and particularly used in Hinduism and Buddhism. A symbol of light and life and good fortune….
The direction the symbol runs is neither here nor there. It has been used both ways for centuries.

Despite refrigeration and shops where you could buy food year-round, she sometimes felt in January that she was subsisting like her ancestors, waiting for sunlight and its warmth to unclench her and and first shoots of spring to reassure her that life was continuing.

They themselves were memorials to the ideals that were being celebrated, simply by the way they’d lived their lives.

At the end of the day, Otto has chosen what was easy over what was right. And Hannah had watched her entire country make the same voice time and again.

It wasn’t always that strength of character was inherent at birth. Sometimes it came through stride and struggle and failure. Sometimes it came through growth.

And I promise you, if I’ve learnt anything from my time in Berlin. It’s this: an attack on books. On rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.

I was naive, you see. I thought politics were all civil, I thought world leaders were constrained by norms, that while there could be and had been war, that war would be waged by rational men.

In fact, long before Hitler has the power to incite countrywide book burnings, he wrote in Mein Kampf that a smart reader should take away from books only the ideas that support their own beliefs and discard the rest as useless ballast…
I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used sf a way to erase a people, a belief system, a culture.

The rare nights I lie awake wondering what the moment was that we list the Germany I knew. Some might point to the invasion of Poland…the Anschluss….There are a million such moments….But sometimes I think it was the moment right before the gasoline was poured on the books. The moment the most educated country in the world willingly, joyously, wholeheartedly turned away from knowledge.

…many are shocked to hear that it was students who led the charge, who lit the pyres and brought books to the flames….
Those students cherished books….But they loved their own beliefs more. And that kind of love? It can rot a person from the inside. Can rot a country from the inside.

I grew up in a democracy, fledgling thought it might have been, that allowed space for radical ideas and uncomfortable discussions, that encouraged critical thought and free speech.

It can deepen with every disdainful remark about science and art and literature in a pub. A Friday night. It comes cloaked in patriotism and love of country, and uses that as an armor against any criticism….
I grew up in a place that prized intellectualism, reason, and civil discourse, in a country that held a reverence for books.

Few people have to watch their country die…I have had that dubious privilege, and I can tell you that it comes not as a rebel shout but as a sly whisper. The cracks creep in, insidious as anything I’ve ever seen. It can start with rumblings about an unreliable press and rumors about political enemies that will threaten your family, your children.

She did catch sight of one of the covers of the books waiting to go into the pyre, let out a little wounded sound, and saved it without thought. She held it close as she would a child…

Thus was the gleeful destruction of knowledge, of science , of poetry, of love. The students who should have cherished such things were giddy as they watched all of it burn.

If Althea had a church, it was within the covers of books; if she had religion , it was in the words written there.

When they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.

So much of this is because of fear,isn’t it? All Hitler had to do was make people afraid. There is a monster out there who will attack you if you don’t let me protect you.
And if that requires sacrificing a few freedoms. Then that’s the price for law and order, isn’t it?

It was the rare book that offered her no safety, just an ugly, terrible reality.

She just preferred the safety of books to reality. For better or worse, the fictional stories allowed her to wear blinders, allowed her to grow close to people, made-up though they might be, without the vulnerability that came with actually being known.

Maxis are portrayed in propaganda as ignorant anti-intellectuals. But the leaders know just how powerful knowledge is. That’s why they want to control it so strictly.

The way to judge people wasn’t to look at how they acted toward people they wanted to impress; it was to look at the way they treated those who could do nothing for them.

Books are the way we leave a mark on the world, aren’t they? They say we were here, we loved and we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed. They can be burned halfway around the world, but the words cannot be unread, the stories cannot be untold. They do live on in the library, but more importantly they are immortalized in anyone who has read them.

The Church of England, I knew, is divided between those who hold to the old traditions and elaborate rituals—bells and smells—and the more modern, seeker-friendly service with contemporary music and audience participation—the happy-clappies.

I was forty-six, not exactly young but far from getting a giant pill organizer and joining the Red Hat Society.

Late forties, wealthy, socially prominent—what people these days call the Upper Middleton class.

Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation.
And this—love—gives me the courage I need for today.

Love is what remains when everything else is gone.