Excellent 10/10 | Books Are Cultural DNA, The Code For Who We, As A Society Are.

Great companion piece to Doubles Vies (2018) with Juliette Binoche (and other excellent French actors), directed by Olivier Assayas
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7250056/

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books. Destroying those books is a way of saying that the culture itself no longer exists; its history has disappeared; the continuity between its past and its future is ruptured. Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.
- Susan Orleans