That is as it may be, but why has the knowledge of these books kept company with such sorrow? I ask only because I do not understand, not in hope that a more favorable answer will be freed on the small hinge of rephrasing. I am, as many of us are, familiar to the point of sickness with a world where one is exiled within the very walls of one’s home, one’s city. The stories these ones tell are left to settle in the listeners’ minds, like small feathers dropped from a balcony on a windless day. The places and people, the colors and struggles, however lightly fleshed with words, reveal, when pursed and scattered, stitched together or dissected, the reversed and transparent and negative images which make up the tissue of the other, hidden, stories. The ones which everyone wishes to hear but which no one has the courage or foolishness to speak. A song about nothing becomes a chant of revolution, a tale of manners and platitudinous arithmetic becomes a geographer’s chart of downfall. No one loves the mythologies. Those who know them are haunted by them, and the ignorant are the truly happy ones. So burn, and burn on, books piling like bagged pheasants, to curl, blacken, and evaporate, cleansed by the only light we need.