Q: Where is the best place in the world? - Sidonei

 

There's a public library in Sarajevo that got shelled in 1992. The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They burned it. Incendiary rounds. Two million books, hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts, gone in three days while librarians formed human chains to carry out what they could and snipers — snipers! — shot at them for it.

They rebuilt it. Took twenty years. It's beautiful now, all striped arches and colored glass, and you can walk in and sit down and read a book in a building that someone decided needed to be murdered.

That's the best place on earth.

Not because it's pretty, though it is. Not because of what it represents, though every journalist who visits writes that paragraph and I'm not going to. It's the best place on earth because it's the clearest evidence I've ever found that institutions can be built back by the same species that burned them, and that this changes absolutely nothing about whether they'll be burned again.

The men who shelled it were following orders from men who were following a logic that made sense inside the system that produced it. And the librarians who ran into sniper fire were also, in their way, following institutional logic — the library matters, the collection matters, the mission. Two institutions aimed at each other across the river and the books were the casualties and the heroes were the casualties and the snipers were somebody's kids from a town twenty miles away.

EVERY BEAUTIFUL THING THAT EXISTS IS A REBUILT VERSION OF SOMETHING SOMEONE DELIBERATELY DESTROYED. The glass lets in light now. That's all. That's the whole story.

Go sit in that library. Read something. Don't think about what it means. The meaning is a trap — it makes you feel like understanding is enough, like comprehension is a form of action. It isn't. But the chair is comfortable and the light is good and someone died to keep the book in your hands.

That'll have to do.