we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

Yes! This is exactly what I was trying to put into words here:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2008/05/05/inter-changeable-people/

Excellent!

I have the book handy, and was going to quote the whole ending here, but it goes on for pages and pages, from the perspective of the narrator as he wakes up, sees a glowing fire in the distance, and realize people are not burning, but warming by it. The book people live in small towns, along riverbanks and hidden amidst the trees.

“How many of you are there?”

“Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn’t planned, at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, traveling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise. Some of us live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau’s Walden in Green River, Chapter Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb’ll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person. And when the war’s over, someday, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth doing.”