In his poem, "In Memory of W.B.Yeats" (from his book, Another Time, 1940), W.H. Auden noted--rather lugubriously, but with a sad and undeniable honesty--that "The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living." I have always admired these two lines for their unflinching truthfulness and feared them--for the same reason.
In the photograph, the pages at the left, the derelict pages (leaves, are they? Leaves of grass?), are printed with the words of the dead, now utterly and mindlessly changed by ungenerous time.
The volumes at the right are neat and archival and, with any luck, will never be read and distorted by vagrant readers of the future. They will, in fact, never be read at all.
