The Library’s Fire

Picture a library. Not merely a place where books are kept, but a society’s way of remembering itself. Its shelves carry not just texts but the continuity of meaning. Now imagine that library on fire. The flames do not rise all at once; first certain shelves are neglected, certain texts are devalued, and others are discarded on the grounds that they are “no longer needed.” By the time the fire begins, it is already too late — because memory has already fragmented.

One of history’s most striking examples of this scene appears in the narrative of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. What matters as much as the event itself is the symbolic meaning that formed around it: the loss of knowledge is not only the disappearance of the past; it is the future losing its direction too. Because memory is necessary not only to remember, but to judge.

In today’s world, libraries do not burn. On the contrary, they multiply as never before. Access to information is limitless, texts are endless, the flow of data uninterrupted. But it is exactly at this point that a subtler form of destruction takes hold: the acceleration of forgetting.

To understand this paradox, one must turn to Hannah Arendt’s thought. For Arendt, the faculty of judgment rests on the individual’s relationship with the past. A person compares to the extent they can remember; they render judgment to the extent they can compare. But when the continuity of memory is interrupted, judgment collapses too. Evil spreads not because it is radical, but because it goes unquestioned.

What is happening today is exactly this: societies are not being forced to forget; they are being trained to forget.

A constantly shifting agenda, one crisis after another, headlines competing with each other… each creates a momentary concentration of attention, but none is dwelt upon long enough. This can be explained through Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquidity”: in a world where the solid melts and the permanent becomes temporary, memory too becomes liquid. Nothing stays long enough anymore; therefore nothing deepens.

At this point, crisis stops being merely an economic or political category and turns into a temporal problem. Because the continuity of crises fragments time. The link between yesterday and today weakens; experience does not accumulate, it only repeats. In such an environment, the individual notices not what has changed, but only what has come back onto the agenda.

And it is at this precise rupture that the will invisibly retreats.

Because will is not merely the capacity to make a choice; it is also the capacity to decide within continuity. But in a world where continuity has disappeared, decisions too become superficial. Rather than deep deliberation, the individual develops momentary adaptation strategies. This points to the most critical transformation of the political: the citizen ceases to be a historical subject and becomes a temporally fragmented actor instead.

As Michel Foucault pointed out, the operating mechanisms of our era now shape not only space but time as well. How long a given event will be discussed, how quickly a given issue will be forgotten… these are not accidental; they are part of the invisible order we live within. In this way, this structure changes memory’s operating rhythm without directly interfering with memory itself.

This is why the real issue today is not only what is true, but what is remembered.

When a society loses its memory, it loses not only its past but its capacity to object as well. Because objection requires comparison. And comparison is possible only through remembering.

In the end, our era’s fire advances not through flames but through speed. Books do not burn; meanings erode. And the greatest loss is not that knowledge disappears, but that knowledge no longer leaves a trace.

Perhaps this is why the most political act today is not saying something new, but insisting on remembering.

This article was first published on 18 April 2026 in Bursa Hakimiyet.