The Arsonist

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1870”

One strides before me with a flaming brand.
I call him back. He turns and faces me. I ask,
“Are you the one who just burned down
     the library of the Louvre?”
He wipes his brow, puts down the torch,
extends a fraternal hand toward me.
“Yes, sir,” he says. “That fire you see,
was nearly all my work.” My hand
does all it can to not become a fist.

“But that’s a crime!” I shout. “Incredible!
A crime against yourself, an infamy.
In that black smoke, the ray of your soul
has been extinguished. The very torch
you held so proudly up is canceled
by the horror of what you have done.
What have you burned in this mad rage?
Your property! Your honor! Your dowry!
The whole of your inheritance!”

He would race on; I stop him.
Hands on his shoulders, man-to-man,
I must, I must, I must
     get through to him somehow.

He waits me out, he knows enough
to understand respect
for a distraught old poet, at least.
So I do my best to explain.

“Some of those books
were your masters’ worst enemies.
They worked to your advantage.
The book has always taken up your cause.
What is a library but an act of faith
that darker times invest against the coming sun?
By telling the truth, they bear witness for us.

“What seems to you a tomb to desecrate,
is a living repertory, a mass of truths,
out down in masterpieces so fine
that lightning and clarity spark out from them.
Out of the centuries the speak; they tell
of ancient men, in histories that spell
a warning to the future. And in the poets,
thoughts that first came and never ceased
to echo, live on and on. Bibles die here,
lost in the abyss with a thousand authors,
Homers and Aeschyluses, Shakespeares and Jobs,
far off the upper-shelf horizon; they led the way
to Molière, Voltaire and Kant.
Into Reason itself you cast your wretched,
flaming torch, the human spirit up in smoke!

“Books liberate men. Have you forgotten this?
One book can stand above the human fray.
It glows with its own light. Because it shines
its pure white beam of reason, the scaffolds
fall, wars stop, and famine is averted.
A book well-read ends slavery, calls home
the outcasts whom ignorance banished.

“Just open a book. Plato, Milton, Beccaria.
Prophetic texts! Dante, or Shakespeare, or Corneille;
the great soul that dwells within them
awakens in you. Dazzled, you feel transformed.
You tread their steps and think their thoughts,
as though you had been, all along, one person.
Reading makes you serious, thoughtful, and kind.

“You are quite young. Perhaps you doubt ideas
can leap from a page into your own being.
The great men past await your company,
the same way dawn gold-lights a cloister.
Ideas plunge deep into your understanding.
Their warm rays soothe and quicken you.
Your hesitating soul gains confidence.

“At last you recognize yourself as good,
and capable of better — old prides and furies,
evils and prejudices, even the obeisance
you once gave to kings and emperors
melt off like snow at the start of spring,
all because knowing pushes fear aside.

“Then freedom comes.
     Yours were this light and glory,
yours between those walls of stone,
and it’s you who have blacked them out!
All that you dreamt of ever being —
some book in there could show the way.
Books read and thought about
     sever the Gordian knots
that error and truth were tangled in.
Doctor, guide, and guardian, a book!
One would have healed your hatred,
     another your madness —
Not yours! Not now! And it is all your fault!

The book is your wealth. Where but from here
do knowledge, law, truth, virtue, and duty,
progress, and reason, dispel delirium?
How could you have done this? Answer me!”

This is, in so many words,
     what I try to tell him.
The Arsonist regards me. He looks
half-mad, half-god. My words
have stunned him. As eye to eye
he keeps my gaze, he answers:

“No one ever taught me
     how to read.”