More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
he knew about the maladies caused by books—in fact, he had started to display some of the symptoms: metaphors cropping up in his head; persistent ache in his upper back; stealing books involuntarily; compulsive late-night reading by candlelight even when the power went out.
Books could hear, bite, multiply, have sex. They had sinister protocols to take over the world, to colonize and conquer—word by word, line by line, poisoning the world with meaning.
experts said about rumors: they were the vestige of a biological instinct to invent stories, a primitive instinct from the Old World, in the process of being wiped out.
what about the dangers a censor had to face alone? What if a book swallowed him? What about his ongoing exposure to poisonous thoughts? What if he were to become entrapped by a novel and left unfit to live in the real world?
language should be an impenetrable surface. It should be smooth and flat with no bottom where meaning could settle. It was a censor’s job to curb imagination.
the forbidden trinity of God, government, and sex. All prohibitions revolved around this trinity.
Interpretation is a censor’s undoing. It’s the last thing you should ever do.”
Perhaps one must deserve a book before they have the right to read it.
the last thing a book censor should do is admit his enemy’s virtues. They were probably just tricks, which the enemy used to tempt him. But why did bread suddenly taste as though he’d never had bread before? And why was the air so sweet and pure? Like butterflies shedding cocoons, the extraordinary emerged from hiding. The surface of his humble world was pulled back, exposing tenderness beneath.
Everything he’d been warned of about books had come true: he’d become someone else.
People who don’t eat don’t get hungry. His job was to fill the bookstores with drivel. He had to make sure no one craved books. He’d come to understand that they weren’t waging a war against books so much as a war against reading. Reading was a bad habit, but you couldn’t keep people from doing it, just as you couldn’t keep them from smoking or having sex. All you could do was limit their options, give them the illusion of choice. Then, all on their own, they would turn away. In the future, he and the other censors wouldn’t need to ban any books—no one would read them anyway. It was as if he
...more
spit on those books of yours. Not everything that exists can be found in your books. How could he ban one book that spit on the rest? Those rectangular beasts that had kicked him out of his familiar world and into a place where a thing was no longer itself.
was rumored that each new baby was born with certain vestiges of the Old World: things cemented in human memory for thousands of years, tracing back to bygone civilizations, such as fables and fairy tales. The Guidance and Counseling Authority allocated a huge budget each year for awareness-raising campaigns: DOES YOUR CHILD SUFFER FROM IMAGINATION? DON’T HESITATE TO ASK FOR HELP! DON’T LET THEM SUFFER! YOU’RE NOT ALONE!
HUMAN EXISTENCE IS SUFFERING. THE ROOT OF SUFFERING IS DESIRE. THE ROOT OF DESIRE IS IMAGINATION.
The Founding Fathers had discovered—after the fall of democracies, the rationing of technology, the revolution against the information revolution, and an in-depth study of their history—that the only way to create a happy city was to empty its inhabitants of their desires, except those desires that are essential for the survival of the species.
He had never heard of the crime of “interpretation” until he became a book censor. Even then, he hadn’t understood what it involved. When he’d asked the First Censor, his answer was that interpretation was an Old-World practice from the time when readers thought they could engage with texts to create meaning. “But,” the First Censor had continued, “we don’t have to deal with such issues. The only meaning in our lives comes to us from the government. Our duty as book censors is to block all avenues of interpretation.”
“Interpretation is the responsibility of the authorities.”
All the news about the exceptional success that government labs had achieved in the field of developmental studies. Imagination had truly begun to shrivel and fade away, proving that if you control a human being’s circumstances, you can drive their development in a certain direction. You can encourage the existence of New Humans with no imagination and extremely limited desires, and without any pesky existential musings.
the digital revolution. In that age, foolishness was exported far and wide. Everyone had knowledge, so everyone had power.
reality was something that couldn’t be pushed aside, even by a million books. His wife believed that. He wasn’t sure anymore.
when the government decided that religion must be based in reality, that there would be no more heaven or hell. They deconstructed all the symbols: Heaven was happiness and hell was misery. After the Revolution, the Party formed a committee of forward-thinking religious men and gave them the task of religious reform. Their aim was to relieve the texts of their inner meanings. In the end, you could read a Holy Book the same way you’d read the phone book.
With a bit of grit and determination, he would transform himself from a reader into a book censor, from softhearted to stone-hearted, from a butterfly into a caterpillar. It could be done. A person could behave as if he hadn’t been reborn,
The Secretary had told him he couldn’t become a Guardian of the Library until he’d read that book. “It’s just one book,” he said, “but it’s like nothing you’ve read before. This is the mother of all banned books. Listen carefully. They might catch you reading a banned book and make you pledge never to do it again. But not this one. If you get caught with this book, you’ll disappear. You won’t exist anymore. It’ll be as if you were never there in the first place.”
The voice was the color of khaki and it had a mustache.
The only way he could make sense of the world anymore was through metaphor.
there were three basic, legitimate desires: to belong, to procreate, and to work—everything else was toxic and superfluous. But had it succeeded? The early founders had focused their efforts on getting rid of unnecessary choices, arriving at the extremely simple (and truly ingenious) conclusion that human suffering and the worst of all human instincts were intimately connected to the ability to imagine. There was a time when robots were modeled after humans, but now it was the other way around.
He had made up his mind about hell: it was where the difference between what was real and what was imagined ceased to exist.
every story was a retelling of older ones and a harbinger of tales still to come. It’s been the same story since the beginning of time, and it will live on forever, giving birth to a new version of itself every day. He had never felt so close to understanding the Divine as he did at that moment.
The unborn human being was more important than the living one; a fetus was closer to the ideal.
Perhaps he could help her adapt to an imagination-free reality by using imagination! Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
Thinking wasn’t good for anyone, he reminded himself; it was best left to the authorities. For the last few months, he’d been trying to teach himself this new skill, the skill of not thinking. To make it less tiresome, he decided to look at it as a form of delegating authority.
wasn’t it the government who called them Cancers? Why were they proud of being compared to deadly cells in a healthy body? Although if you really thought about it, weren’t cancer cells the only ones that thrived in a dying body?
“We all have our bad habits,” he muttered. “Some of us smoke, some drink, and others read.”
“The most ridiculous war you can ever wage is the war of one metaphor against another.”
