In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communic… - Alberto Manguel

reading is at the beginning of the social contract

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality.

Every text assumes a reader.