A broiling sadness: burnt libraries

Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light (or, maybe, Making Light of Teresa Nielsen Hayden?) writes movingly of the profound loss that was the burning of the Iraqi National Library. My great-uncle would be weeping in his beer, I think, were he still alive. He devoted his life to the exploration and preservation of those ancient documents which were most likely housed in that library.

I don’t even have words for the kind of grief that is. I am not even able, quite, to fathom it myself. Let alone put it into words. It’s the kind of thing that I have been waking up in the night thinking about. (And my dreams are full of books…) It troubles me that this news has affected me far more than anything else coming out of Iraq…

2 thoughts on “A broiling sadness: burnt libraries”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *