George Orwell - his craft and his challenge

 My father had a huge set of Encyclopedia Britannica which travelled the world with us.  I remember as a child fondling the huge black volumes of which there seemed to be dozens and later mastering the two books of indexes which helped you to find the information you sought.  I was awestruck that there was so much to learn from these massive bound books.  This was the world before the internet and I felt especially blessed that our home housed such a treasure-trove.  It did not matter what homework was given by teachers, this set of encyclopedias provided the gold standard information on any topic.  

Later, as a teacher, when a student of mine quoted Wikipedia or some Facebook posting in their assignments I would sigh in vain that now the information highway was so full of nonsense it seemed miseducation was the goal, not truth.  Then, years later helping students with their masters and Ph.D. thesis I realised this highest form of education was just endless repetition of the knowledge of others changed slightly to avoid the cry of plagiarism.  Okay, the sources used were peer-reviewed journals and much sounder than a web posting but this puerile packaging and sharing of the knowledge of others seemed to have become the new gold standard.  That feels wrong for so many reasons and I like this quote which gives a different definition and highlights some of the flaws of this particular knowledge system.

“Knowledge is a light which God casteth into the heart of whomsoever He willeth.” It is this kind of knowledge which is and hath ever been praiseworthy, and not the limited knowledge that hath sprung forth from veiled and obscured minds. This limited knowledge they even stealthily borrow one from the other, and vainly pride themselves therein!"

Bahá’u’lláh

When visiting my new baby granddaughter in England I wandered into an old graveyard in a beautiful hamlet outside Oxford and discovered the grave of George Orwell, one of my Dad's favourite authors.  Weeks later I wanted to read more about this writer and turned to the once so reliable online Encyclopedia Britannica as my source.  Expecting a balanced account of this brilliant writer I found myself disturbed by the tone of this particular entry.  Let me quote a few of the offending sections,

"He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar)."

Exactly who cares if his father was a minor official and why does the business success or failings of George Orwell's maternal grandfather reflect on the writer?  Does this not say more about the reviewer and their perspective of what is considered valuable?  If he had come from a long line of wealthy slave transportation businessmen with vast inherited estates would this reflect better on George Orwell?

 "Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” ... lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income."

Oh dear, does anyone else feel that this statement is strangely disturbing? 

 "Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery."

Here one wants to ask the person constructing this piece, is this meant to be the snobbery George Orwell experienced as a result of being poor?  In which case perhaps a different phraseology would be appropriate?

 "After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance." 

I have no problems with the young George Orwell being distinguished by the brilliance of his mind. However, I resent the implications that his being poor made him distinguished in some fashion.  Perhaps it would have been better to say that all the other students around him in the school were exceedingly rich.

"He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953)."

Here is an extract, from George himself, in that very essay, which tells the first few weeks of being sent to a private boarding school for the first time.

“Soon after I arrived ... I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating.”

And beatings were given regularly and harshly in this establishment at first by means of a riding crop, but when this broke during a harsh thrashing, a more sturdy implement took its place.  It was also clear to George at this very young age that those whose families were rich did not receive the same level of brutality.  Even the treatment meted out by older boys was cruel and as George himself sadly pointed out, "Against no matter what degree of bullying you had no redress." Little wonder then in this environment George became sad, uncommunicative, and was regarded as unconventional by others.

George won two scholarships to elite public schools, Wellington and Eton, not due to his birthright or family wealth but as a result of his abilities.  Despite his brilliance, he chose not to go on to university but instead led a full life enriched with experiences he would later use in his writing. My favourite books of George Orwell are Animal Farm, 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London.  He is an insightful and brilliant writer whose perspectives need to be more widely embraced.  Poverty is never viewed the same way after reading the last of these books and 1984’s is a powerful prophetic piece.  Animal Farm is one of the most hard-hitting political storytelling pieces and my admiration of the character Boxer lingered from childhood to adulthood.  

It took me a long while to find Geroge Orwell’s grave because he did not use his pen name but his own given name Eric Arthur Blair on the gravestone.  Orwell’s friend, a member of the Astor family, had helped provide George Orwell the privacy he needed to finish his last book 1984 on the remote Scottish island of Jura. This editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency" and insisted that on his own death he would be buried under an equally simple gravestone in a plot just beside his friend.   Somehow as a writer, George Orwell was able to convey a humanity and sensitivity that embeded within it the knowledge he had won from his own life experiences.  These were not stolen from someone else but crafted by a brilliant mind from all that he had observed and magically challenges those that read it.  

A few memories - from the walls and shelves of my parents

Mum in Canada with my brothers.  My favourite photograph of the three of them!

The only thing I ever won in competition (it was a family effort) and we received a lovely bicycle. This telegram was brought from the post office by hand and it was so exciting! Strange to find it after all these years. The winning entry was

"People who pedal past petrol pumps save lives, save health and save money"

Re-reading my Dad's shelves of books and loving Cosmos.  In it Carl Sagan describes Kepler (1571 – 1630), that awesome scientist who discovered so much about the movement of the planets.  At a time when people thought these bodies moved in circles, Kepler came up with the notion of them being elliptical. He used the formula of an ellipse, first codified in the Alexandria library by Apollonius of Perga (262 BC –  190 BC) who had worked out the speed of the moon (one of the craters is named after Apollonius, in honour of his achievements).  You've got to hand it to these guys and strange to think of all that knowledge being lost for so long.  

Kepler worked out so much about the movement of the planets and three fundamental laws of physics remain named after him to this day.  It is impossible to exaggerate his contributions to Astronomy.  In Kepler's hometown of Weil der Stadt three women were tortured and killed as witches every year between 1615 and 1629.  Many scapegoats were elderly women living alone who were blamed for illnesses suffered by others.  It is perverse that Kepler's own cankerous 74 year old mother was carried off in a laundry basket in the middle of the night to face a charge of witchcraft.  Poor Kepler had to leave his contemplation of celestial bodies and return to his home town to argue in his mother's defence.  This, he was eminently capable of and he turned his logical and excellent mind to proving that in no way could his mother be responsible for the minor health complaints of neighbours.  His argument won out and he freed her from the dungeon but she was exiled from the town of Wurttemberg for life and would have been executed had she returned. Kepler lost his benefactors who funded his research due to the Thirty Year War.  During this period he also lost his wife and his son who both died. He was even excommunicated from his Faith due to his uncompromising individualism.   Kepler envisioned 'celestial ships with sails adapted to the winds of heaven' navigating the sky 'who would not fear the vastness of space'.  How sad that this brilliant scientist was reduced to constructing horoscopes for the rich nobility to earn a living.  Today explorers of space use his laws of planetary motion and ride on the shoulders of this unique genius.  

Another book from my Dad's shelves is called Conquistadors by Micheal Wood.

In 1542 Dominican Bartholome de Las Casas wrote a short account of the Destruction of the Indies and dedicated it to the future King Philip II.  Arguments had started about whether the Spanish had a right to make war on the native people of South America to force them to accept Christianity.   As Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos had so eloquently argued a few decades earlier,
'Are these Indians not men?  Do they not have rational souls?  Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?'

Given the extent of slaughter of the native people these were important issues.  A Council of Fourteen was convened to properly discuss the matter and in the meantime King Charles V ordered all Spanish conquests in America be stopped.  Las Casas and the philosopher Sepulveda debated for five months.  Sepulveda argued that native societies were devoid of civilisation and hence virtually devoid of humanity.  Taking their gold, demolishing their political structures, acquiring their land and the widespread genocide was all justified. Las Casas who had, unlike Sepulveda, lived for decades in the Americas spoke eloquently and powerfully.  Las Casa's arguments were,

1. the world is indeed one
2. human beings are the same
3. all have the possibility of self fulfillment and achieving goodness
4. no matter how rude, uncivilised and barbarous, savage or brutal a people could be, all can be persuaded into a good way of life - provided that the method used is proper and natural to men - namely love, gentleness and kindness.

Las Casas won the debate!  This historic victory could have prevented much of the suffering that later happened in so many parts of the world to native people.  This could have been a real milestone for humanity.  However, power and greed became the real drivers and quickly trumped morality and conscience.  Was it ever so?  

Genius minds discovering the intricacies of the movement of the planets, great intellects urging respect of others, all so ahead of their day.  With the passing centuries we see more clearly the truths they were urging others to accept.  We also see the suffering that stupidity, greed and a lack of moral conscience brings to this world.  

My grandfather fought in World War I.  He was sixteen and the recruitment officer told him to walk around the table and come back and say he was seventeen.  In order to enlist he needed to be a year older.  He found himself in the Somme, was shot and awarded a commendation for bravery.  He never spoke of his experiences much.  He was the most fearless person I ever encountered.

My grandmother on the other side of the family painted this.  She became a teacher and had five children.  She never had time to touch a paint brush again.  I reckon she had talent.  But what do I know?  Perhaps her five children were her real creative output.

What gives me joy!

I have ever filled notebooks with my scribbles.  A dear cousin in N. Ireland, foolishly volunteered to store my diaries and notebooks when I left for Malta.  When I turned up with five huge plastic containers filled to the brim with writings, she coped really well and kept her promise to look after them all.  I did feel guilty leaving her dining room a quarter filled!  My favourites are the moleskin books and for some reason they need to be with squared paper not lined.  They have an envelope at the back for bits and bobs, they can cope with photos stuck in, flowers, cards etc and are pretty indestructible.  

When, I was at school and university there was a family tradition that my Dad would present us with a parker pen before an important exam.  My parents never asked any of us if we had done our homework.  They never pushed school work or studying as of vital importance at all.  Strange in a sense because they were both teachers.  So this purchase of a pen was the sole encouragement to excel.  It was all that was needed.  To this day I get excited by a new pen.  Full of hope for the future and armed to cope with it all.

My mother uses Oil of Olay and every baby I ever handed her was pressed lovingly to her cheek while she sang songs to them.  When they were handed back at the end of the day they all smelt of this cream.  They later brought out a new version with suncream and I tried it, but realised that it was the familiar smell that I associated with my Mum that made the difference.  So I am back to using  the original cream and each time I use it I remember all the love and closeness we have shared.  Why is smell such a powerful trigger to memories?

I discovered Bach rescue cream decades ago.  When any of my children fell and hurt themselves this was the stuff that was slapped on.  We called it a miracle cream and I was never sure if its ability to cure was psychosomatic or genuine.  All I can say is that to this day when I find an ache, rash or pain this is the stuff I rub on and invariably feel much better. 

Look to this day,

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course lie all the

Verities and realities of your existence.

The bliss of growth,

The glory of action,

The splendor of beauty;

For yesterday is but a dream,

And tomorrow is only a vision;

But today well lived makes

Every yesterday a dream of happiness,

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.

Such is the salutation of the dawn!

(A beautiful old Sanskrit poem) 

Libraries - the oldest and the most beautiful

I have always loved libraries.  There is something wonderful about them.  Our house was always filled with books and I can remember picking up books and pretending to read them from a young age.  So today I explored the National Library of Malta in Valletta.  It was built to house the books and valuables of the Order of St John including items belonging to  knights who had died in 1766.  A decree in 1555 had decreed that the property of the knights should be preserved.  You can visit this by handing in a passport or ID at the desk, in exchange you will be given a visitors badge.  It is worth doing as the library has an atmosphere like a scene out of Indiana Jones.  This is an old image of the library.

Here is how it looks more recently.  Unfortunately, since this recent photo was taken they have removed the lovely trees which used to be in front of the building and which were filled with hundreds of birds.

Inside the building used to look like this.

Here is how it looks today.

It does have a lovely atmosphere and is well worth a visit.  I have several libraries that I love and have included them below.  Starting one of the oldest, the National Library of Czech Republic, built in 1366.

The National Library of Austria comes a close second dating from 1368.

Another favourite is the Marciana National Library of Italy which was built in 1468.

The National Library of France is exceptional, built in 1480.

Another library I personally love, though not so old as those above, is Trinity Library in Dublin.

Mind you, if we really wanted to look at the oldest existing library we'd probably have to put St Catherine's Monastery in Egypt up there ahead of all of them.  Built in 565 AD this has been a running library since its establishment.  Only open to monks and invited scholars this gem of a library was constructed, it is claimed, on the site where Moses saw the burning bush.  The monastery library preserves the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library. It contains Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Hebrew, Georgian, and Aramaic texts.  It also contains the oldest icons in the world.  Much of its treasures avoided destruction due to the monastery’s remote position in the Sinai desert.  However, it was also protected throughout the centuries by popes, sultans, queens and kings. Napoleon and even Muhammad provided documents of protection for St Catherine's which are themselves still in existence in this unique library.  Which only goes to show, that while it can take only one fool to burn down a priceless library, it takes over a millennium of careful, constant, protection to preserve such a gem.

Shit House Rats - asking questions

Went to the local charity shop to buy a book.  They have a huge selection.  Mostly holiday reads.  Visitors to Malta bring their reading matter with them.  It’s part of what a holiday is about.  Time to chill in the sun, swim, enjoy the local cuisine and sights.  The novels represent the luxury of free time that is rare commodity today.  Many enjoy their kindle, light compact but a portable library in many ways.  But what do they read?  Well, I’m no expert but having lived quite a few years abroad I’ve noticed some things.  First, I have to confess as far as books go I’m omnivorous.  I’ll consume just about anything.  In my search for input I’ll devour fact or fiction.  I’m not even fussy about it being contemporary.  I’ve read my way through out of date versions of The New Scientist, The Economist and enjoyed it all.  While working at Daresbury synchrotron I read all the material available in the coffee room.  Mostly catalogue on vacuum pumps and machinery but also a complete collection of Asterix cartoons.  While on Rhodes, knowing my hunger for reading materials good friends would deliver black bin liners full of novels left behind by tourists at hotels during summer holidays.  I’d devour all but then be instantly hungry for more.  So here on Malta I noticed a shelf of brand new novels (well new to the charity shop) and I pounced eagerly.  Only to find novels on murder, betrayal, mass killers, drug cartels, military assassination, child killers, child abuse, child abduction, spousal abuse, incest, graphic tales of autopsies, violent cop incidents etc  for the first time in my life I could not find anything to my taste.  I've discovered what people now read on holiday and it’s shit.  We read it and I fear we have become it.  Don’t think for one moment that our TV shows escape this modern slant.  The popular ones all peddle the same violent content with an undercurrent message that everyone is a killer/amoral.  There are no heroes, just villains in various shades of grey.  Speaking of ‘Shades of Grey’ I've never read this particular book but I fear it may trigger my shit alert meter as well.  I actually had a moment of crystal clarity as I stood before shelf upon shelf of novels longing to pick one, anyone.  I took a step back and thought.

“Why do people read all this shit?”

“Why do people watch all this shit?”

Are our lives so smeared with the stuff we are infinitely more comfortable surrounded by it.  My grandfather’s pig shed smelt astonishingly bad.  The odour was like a facial smack when you entered. You couldn't help raising a hand to your nose and face to protect them from the assault.  After 15 minutes in the shed admiring the new piglets you hardly noticed it at all.  That’s how adaptable our senses are.  Most people cannot smell their own B.O.  We have grown accustomed to our own stink.  We cannot really register it.  Like the pig shed our senses have gone into overload and switched off to protect us.  Only something much more foul smelling than we're used to is picked up.  So, I fear our books, newspapers, TV shows, Internet content have noticed our jaded tastes and slowly adapted to grab our attention.  In a world full of shit, it seems only the even more shitty gets our attention.  I could be wrong but I fear I’m not.  There are those who benefit massively from our abundance of shit.  My grandfather called them ‘shit house rats’.  Huge foot-long brutes that thrived on the pig shit that was produced in abundance.  They grew sleek and huge on this diet, a breed apart.  His cats and dogs were nervous of this tougher crew.  My grandfather fought a losing battle with the rats over many years.

Do we become what we devour?

Or are we like the ‘shit house rats’ designed to eat the stuff?

Was it always so?

Have our tastes got worse?

What does it do to our communities?

I don't know the answer to any of the above.  I’m just really concerned that no one is even asking these questions. Perhaps we've all been in the pig shed far too long.

PS  I don't know if it is significant but rats eat faeces, because their digestive system is poor at absorbing nutrients and a second go through the system helps digestion.

PPS pigs will also happily eat the faeces of other animals, this desire to eat faeces is called Coprophagia

PPS Cows are vegetarian by choice but we like to feed them chicken faeces, because it is cheap, this is how (bovine spongiform encephalopathy)- Mad Cow Disease arose.  In US and other places outside UK they will not accept our blood donations because of the prevalence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), from eating the mad cows.

Life without Facebook

Life without Facebook, well this is almost the first week over and the feeling is actually not one of lose but of huge relief.  The sheer freedom not to have that constant checking of postings is like giving up an onerous job.  

Have made little progress otherwise.  Watched films instead of watching Facebook/internet, so not a great break through and then yesterday I began reading a book.  It is an old favourite, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and am struck by the delight of being able to put the book down and have a break and come back to it.  Novels don’t have that gripping attention that the film/internet demands.  It is like an old friend that you can meet, not see for a few days and then carry on as if nothing has been disturbed.  I am walking more, talking to family instead of being plugged in.  It is early days yet but so far being without Facebook has been a really positive experience.  

I am delighted that close friends are sending more personal emails to me, making the real effort to keep in touch.  Facebook allows that sense of being connected to those we know but it is a fairly insincere contact.  You get all the information without actually talking or phoning.  No real effort is required other than a constant updating on what everyone is doing.  That effort is not balanced by what is received.  Monitoring the postings of friends is not participating in their lives it is more voyeuristic than I like.  It is early days but so far life without Facebook feels like a step forward for me.  Strange to read that others have also made that choice and come to similar conclusions.  Here is one such account that struck a chord with me.

“I quit Facebook because I wanted to live deliberately.

Seventeen months ago, I deleted my Facebook account — not just deactivated it, but fully deleted it — and the relief was tremendous.

No longer did I have to check for updates, deal with friend requests (is this someone whose updates I want in my life? do I want them to see mine?), post whatever was happening in my life, be grossed out by inappropriate sharing, listen to those who wanted to promote their latest business or interests, care about what Farmville game someone else was playing, look at what other people are having for lunch or what parties they’re going to, see “funny” photos, worry about whether people “liked” my update or photo … and so on and so on.

This is not to belittle what others do, but to reflect on the noise that builds up when we participate neck-deep in a social network.”

From http://zenhabits.net/fb/

My father was upset about the library being burned

My father was upset about the library being burned.  He tried to be stoic but I could tell he loathed the destruction of knowledge it represented.  I was at primary school and fancied myself as an amateur detective.  My main suspect was William McCartney, a boy in my class.  The evidence was circumstantial but clear.  I had discovered him defacing a library book at school.  He had drawn two huge breasts on the cover of a book on Cookery.  Instead of a prim, apron clad April Summers displaying cakes in each hand, William had constructed huge breasts incorporating the cherries on top of the cakes as nipples.  I was convinced such vandalism spoke of his disrespect for the written word.  

In our household books were everything and everywhere.  We devoured them like bread and water and whether it was by Henry Miller, the collected plays of Shaw, or Steinbeck we consumed them and then hunted for new fodder.  No folding down corners or scuffing the cover and no underlining of texts or notes in the margins.  Books had to be respected like people.  Even the crappy ones.  So Ms Summers added breasts offended my sensibilities.  William’s violent tendencies were shown clearly when he brought to school a black bin liner full of dead birds he had shot with his own air rifle.  When the American Constitution stipulates the right to carry arms, they must never have had classmates like mine.  I could honestly say I wouldn’t have trusted any of them with a firearm.  So there you have it.  William was violent (bag of birds – exhibit one) and he took pleasure from the defacement of literature (cookery book – exhibit two).  That made him in my mind a strong candidate for the burning of the library.  For a whole year I seethed with resentment towards William and blamed him for the book, the birds, the library and for bringing sadness to my father’s heart.

It came as something of a shock to discover later that my father was referring to the burning of the Great Library in Alexandria which happened around two thousand years ago.  A crime William, however vile, could not have committed.  Through the following years my father continued to mourn the loss of this great library and filled in the details of this catastrophe. 

When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC his kingdom was divided up into three pieces: Antigonids ruled Greece, Seleucids ruled Asia Minor, Syria and Mesoptamia while Ptolemis ruled Egypt.  Wanting to gain supremacy and legitimacy Ptolemy stole Alexander’s body and took it first to Memphis and then to Alexandria.  This was a blatant attempt to create a political and dynastic link with Alexander the Great.  Creating a museum “Temple of the Muses” was also a part of this goal.  After all, Aristotle who had taught Alexander, had a wonderful library and so Ptolemy and his line created the greatest library of the ancient world.  It was their intention to collect all the books in the world and works from India, Persia, Babylonia, Georgia, Armenia and far a field were gathered.  The works of poets, philosophers, historians etc were carefully obtained and kept in the library.  

There was a copy of Epidemics belonging to the physician Mnemon of Side, ancient scrolls and books from all over found their way to the library at Alexandria.  Even when a ship entered the port it was searched and if books or scrolls were found these were seized and copied.  The copies were returned but the originals were stored in the library.  The greatest fruits of human endeavour flowed to Alexandria and were collected and collated.   The arts and sciences were represented and so many were not only original but unique and priceless.  The fame of the Great Library of Alexandria spread far and wide.  It was an incredible search for knowledge all carefully gathered from the four corner of the earth. 

So what happened?  Well, as one has probably suspected by now, some idiot burned the library down.  After centuries of careful collection and cataloguing the works of great minds it took small minds a few days to dispose of the Great Library.  The disaster was of epic proportions.  We don’t know, even now, the scale of the loss.  But there are hints.  Callimachus, a poet and scholar, had created a catalogue/biography of the contents of the library called Pinakes.  We only have a tiny portion of this Pinakes (table of contents) left but there is enough to make you howl in despair at what went up in flames.  

Now, I understood why my father took the burning of the Great Library in Alexandria so personally.  So should we all!  But on further reflection I didn’t feel so bad about blaming William McCartney for the crime.  It turns out blaming those we dislike for despicable crimes they have not done is a theme common in history. For example,  Caliph Umar was blamed for the burning of the library and there is even a nice little tale told to explain why. , "If these writing of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed". It was, the story continues, thereupon, decided that the books were contrary to the Quran and the whole library was burned down without even opening the books.  Totally rubbish of course, the Great Library was lost much earlier probably in 47/48 AD perhaps by Julius Caesar who was burning ships around that time in the harbour.  Mohammad and the Quran did not appear for another five centuries and so Caliph Umar is in the clear.  There was another library in Alexandria called the Serapeum (daughter library) but this was burned down in 391 AD under the decree of Archbishop Theophilus.  Edward Gibbon (writer of the  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) described Archbishop Theophilus as "...the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood." Not a great way to be remembered in the history books.  

But some people really do say and do such stupid things that they need to be remembered for posterity.  Like Pope Gregory’s famous line "Ignorance is the mother of piety." Following this principle to the letter, Gregory burned the precious Palestine Library founded by Emperor Augustus, destroyed the greater part of the writings of Livy and forbade the study of the classics. The Crusaders destroyed the splendid library of Tripoli and reduced to ashes many of the glorious centres of Saracenic art and culture. Ferdinand and Isabella put to flames all the Muslim and Jewish works they could find in Spain. 

Library burning has not gone out of fashion.  The library of Leuven, Belgium was burned in 1914 and then after being rebuilt was burned to the ground once more in May in 1940 by the Nazis.  In case you think this fetish for library burning has run out of steam one need only look at the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the National Library of Baghdad was burned and priceless ancient antiquities and manuscripts were lost. 

Knowledge is like a light that illuminates humanity and ignorance is the opposite, darkness.  The burning of libraries serves to show the bigoted, the fanatic and the stupid at work.  Such a shame to destroy what is really the birthright of the human race.  We should all sorrow over the loss of the Great Library at Alexandria.  It reminds us that ignorance is too dangerous to be permitted and the search for knowledge and truth is the only way ahead.