A Manual for Myself

The books of all the world will burn in a fire today, baby.

You can save one. What will you choose? Choose the one to burn. You have always known which one. But that way, all of us together in the end will burn every book away. One book or another. But choices being choices and for what they are, faced with an act of piety for civilization you will snatch your book up from the red and black tinder at the edge of the fiery monstrosity.

The flames will be reaching skywards and licking sideways towards every book, edging closer lovingly like the forked black tongues of a thousand serpents, like every time we have thrown books and witches into fire.

You will snatch it up from the dust.

I shall save the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes, I haven't read it. Every odd year I try just like you do. Mark my words, it is not even a page that I finish and yet this book holds for me the sense of a guide to everything that was, and will be. A manual to go into my strange, survival backpack in a spaceship that has no need for an escape pod.

I could save one from amongst all those I have read.

Mostly written by the dead. I shall save The Razor's Edge to salt away sullen lust and earthly love. I shall save The Guns of Navarone to let men step out of tents in deathly white wildernesses to never return, so that another man can live.

I shall save The Gulag Archipelago to immortalize all the ways I, just like all of them and all of us, could kill a man without skipping a heartbeat. No, let me save Man's Search for Meaning instead to let those who come after me know how to hold a heartbeat in a sunset, while humanity will come crashing down, taking us with it on a path of perdition on which we always fancy we can return.

Let it be One Hundred Years of Solitude. Let those who come afterwards know they can step on magic carpets to fly over sultry lands where dusty grandmothers pimp and enslave nubile granddaughters destined for star crossed love stories, whose tresses do not stop growing even after they die.

Let it be The Old Man and the Sea and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and all of what Asimov wrote. Let me save the hope that humanity has of moving between words, worlds and time. I remember, I finished reading them once a long time ago. I do not remember much about what happened between the pages, just like what happens between sheets and the days in our life, of paper and otherwise. Just like how I remember what happened on March 30 last year, or on the Ides of March in some strange book about Rome.

Perhaps they could all burn, for the idea of leaving their rescue to someone else appeals more to me. Reading a book is like putting it back on a shelf. But I shall still rescue the Hitchhiker's Guide for all its promise of answers to questions I never asked.

I shall not save the textbooks and the comic books. They were all ephemeral like the learning and the fun I obtained from them. Yes, douse the fire over the comics for wonderful movies they make. Douse the fire with water and dioxide in a red extinguisher.

But the textbooks, let them burn in hell.

I could save the The City of Joy, for I have read it twice. The first time to gloat over pain with the fake tears that only a kind voyeur can shed. The second time, by accident and by design, to understand love that can light a lamp in the dark.

Should I wait for the day to pass by while I ponder over what to save from the fire?

Let me save 1984 to help preserve a language spoken by us all.

Let me save Down and Out in Paris and London or Poor Folk to save a writer my soul takes after, by rescuing their first born from the fire. They were condemned to burn at the stake too. Death mostly by consumption, a certain rarity of abstinence or sometimes by a bullet to the head, but seldom a hero's fate.

But isn't it just one book that I can save?

Perhaps, I will save Lust for Life to salvage the story of a painter instead, who hardly wrote anything other than letters. Who knows, if they are burning books today, they could be burning drawings next. That, my brother will turn the clock one generation back for us and we will need to start all over again to understand how starry nights could be in our backyards.

All the other magnificent books recommended now and then. What about them?

Recommended no more by friends (for who does that anymore) but by acquaintances who have thumbed a page or snooked the end, and by hundreds of lists which will help you figure out if it is okay to die today. You, having read most or a bit less of the hundred books to read, that read you must before you die.

Let them all burn.

As the fire swirls like the mist over a lake, reaching out to touch, singe and embrace, the ink will burn. The ink always burns first. The words will go away to where they came from. The pages will follow like lovers and they will crackle, twist and turn to the next. And between the smell of all that was written, I will find a page, a scrap of a page that the fire couldn't burn for it was too close to the binder. I will snatch that leftover of a book, devoid of ink. For I could write on it, a manual for myself.

And maybe, someone else will have use for it too.

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Hi. My name is Sanjukt.

I am an engineer, mostly on Paper. I am also the founder of a tiny Not for Profit, wallobooks.org. We make magical storybooks for children in conflict zones. You can also find me writing on Medium and on Twitter.

A Manual for Myself is an experimental project. You can look at it as a combinatorial journey of reflection, or even a course without duration until I figure a few things out. Perhaps, end up writing one for yourself too.

Yes, do tell your friends and do not forget to subscribe. They are burning books this year, and you need to save one.