The immortal part of man

I am reading Farnham’s Freehold, a somewhat dated Robert A. Heinlein novel about a family thrown 1,000 years into the future by a thermonuclear bomb. I was attracted to the book by this quote a friend posted on Facebook:

“The last books in the world, so it seemed. He felt sudden grief that the abstract knowledge of the deaths of millions had not given him. Somehow the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it was their single ...