I grew up with books.
All my life, I filled my lungs with air thick with the scent of yellowed paper, the sharp perfume of aged leather bindings, ink, and dried glue.
Stacks of novels, classics…These dead leaves turned pages prolonging autumn! Cursed authors, fallen thinkers, broken dreamer-poets
Masters, lovers, drugs
Shattered heroes, characters haunted by fate, women smothered or rebellious… Sentences written with fire, signed in tears or blood, carved like epitaphs! They were my friends, my family, my guides, my escape, my wings!
For so long, I believed I was flying.
But at nearly forty, I heard the clanking of chains.
So I burned my library.
Not a metaphor.
Real flames.
Paper, at first indifferent, twisted and resisted the fire, then shrank consumed by fever
Edges blackening and curling into charred lace…
The letters swallowed by flames, like a secret!
All that remained was a black heap, the shadow of vanished words, gray smoke, and the pyromaniac I’d become!
Shadow had always been literature’s raw material. Writers were meant to plunge into the depths of the human condition; they wrote from their wounds. To these architects of melancholy, solitude was an eternal truth, and love was a trap and an open wound.
They had probed the soul’s abysses, and their genius was born of ruthless lucidity that refused all consolation. Their words were mirrors held up to a fractured humanity, and a funeral march of dreams.
The great authors offered no solutions. They offered mirrors. They sought not to comfort, but to awaken, sometimes brutally.
Thus…
Kafka’s work is a labyrinth of absurdity, and a literature of suffocation where crushed characters are lost in logical nightmares metamorphosing under an opaque fate. They endure inhuman trials paralyzed and laced with tragic irony. For Franz, despair is life.
Camus’ work is a razor-sharp, lucid cry against the absurd. He offers no redemption, only naked awareness and confrontation with the void: to live without illusion with fierce lucidity.
Kundera’s work paints existence as a fragile theater where nothing holds weight. He glorifies erotic and philosophical idleness in an era that mistakes motion for life, exposing the illusion of sentiment and the absurdity of romantic pretensions! His characters are disillusioned, rootless, and trapped by past or freedom. They roam a weightless world, where the quest for identity becomes a ghost hunt: to be oneself, one must vanish.
Hugo’s work is sublime chaos. His lyrical grandeur and baroque genius draw from social shadows, injustice, and human pain to elevate his characters. He hymns the flesh and the spirit, the believer and the atheist, the oceans infinity and the narrowness of sewers…
Hemingway’s work could never be a life manual. It’s a stripped-down battlefield, an aesthetic of the virile melancholy, and a mirror of his own demons. His famous iceberg style: spare words, drowned emotions, sentences pared to the bone, a rifle, a giant fish, and a woman always leaving too soon. He perpetuates the myth of the cursed artist, the archetype of the hard-shelled man shattered within.
His obsession with death, normalization of excess as escape, and fetishization of alcohol and aggression all romanticize self-destruction and the choice of a “dignified death” over living with one’s wounds.
Bukowski, Miller, Kerouac are the heralds of inner chaos, endless nights, and jaded bodies. Their style fascinates, but their world is brutal, often nihilistic.
Bukowski idealizes life on the margins, the beautiful loser, solitude, and decay. For him, relationships shrink to domination or exploitation; raw prose, total cynicism toward love and friendship, and a romanticization of misery and self-annihilation.
He denounces society but offers no way out; only painful clarity.
Henry Miller plays the cursed artist, scorning the world and smashing taboos, but his work is no more than a refusal to adapt. A teenage revolt confusing selfishness with authenticity and glorifying poverty, emotionless sex, and freedom without responsibility.
His work is narcissism wrapped in the honorable cloak of philosophy and rebellion.
And let’s not forget:
Sartre’s anguished existentialism and glorification of toxic relationships, Balzac’s cynical materialism, Dostoevsky’s metaphysical despair and obsessive guilt, Baudelaire cultivating darkness as a badge of depth…
and the others…
I Did not forget the Women!
But I forgive their concrete darkness because it called for change and sought real solutions to real problems.
They were censored, denied education, and forced to publish under false names.
The writers who draw from their trauma often describe depression, anxiety, and identity crises as permanent states with no way out.
They repair nothing: they only expose.
And that creates a myth:
That suffering is inevitable, even noble.
That to be deep is to be tortured.
That to create is to suffer.
That to live fully is to burn yourself down to ash.
I burned my library when i realized that for a whole lifetime of consuming well-written, well-packaged, well-sold despair, that i was imprisoned in their toxic stories, their chaos, their neuroses, and their sterile genius.
I really burned it.
All that remained was a black heap, the shadow of vanished words, gray smoke, and the pyromaniac I’d become!
But I didn’t set fire to knowledge.
Not to the characters, not to literature.
I set fire to the hold.
To the sacred lies.
To the printed idols.
WAIT..
One shelf in my library refused to burn like the others.
It was the shame section.
Like a cornered beast, it blazed! The flames were dancing wilder and louder, and each page was fighting back, screaming as it burned.
Books detonated in bursts of glossy paper, gilded letters shriveling and melting masks.
The shame shelf would not surrender, it fought to convince, right to the end. Every cover, every line clawed for survival, refusing to die like an illusion denying its own death.
The self-help books wouldn’t go quietly!
The positive mantras sang out their unreachable ideals.
The ready-made answers, the “Ready to Use” keys, leapt into the air, and the promises of instant transformation burned black without leaving an echo. Meanwhile… Next to them, the classics had already vanished.
Stoic. Tired. Resigned! Like the human condition they described, their fall was swift, ambiguous, naked, raw, and uncomfortable.
One exposed chaos, the others sold control and lies.
And that’s how I burned my library!
A fire of fury, of clarity, of rebirth.
I burned what I no longer wanted to be, and what I’d once believed I should be. I burned the poetized pain, the locked doors of hope and the hollow promises of universal love and happiness in 20 easy steps.
Today, I Still Read…
But not to identify.
I read to awaken.
And sometimes, I even revisit the authors I grew up with.
But now they are the ones locked in the cage. Not me!
If you loved this glimpse into the tension between literature that subtly destroys and literature that gently disarms SHARE IT!
Share it with those who adore the scent of yellowed paper, with the word-lovers, the story-devourers, and the hardened bibliophiles.
Not to convince them to burn their libraries.
but to open a breach. And to raise a question:
What if some books we hold most dear are binding us more than freeing us?
I’m not calling for book burnings. I want us to burn the bridges that keep us under spellbound control, even when that control is made of ink and poetry.
READ, QUESTION AND SHARE.
But above all TAKE BACK POWER over what you read and what you allow to read you.
And if, in your library, you come across one of my old friends
Pass them my regards
Tell them I loved them
That I read them to the point of dizziness.
But now, I live without their voices in my head
Because it’s time to write my own novel
