As part of the preparation for a holiday travelling around Spain, I’m reading Cervantes’s Don Quixote (and also because I have some horrible lurgy which has given me sleeping sickness).

The first part of which was written in 1604; that’s over 400 years ago. Which begs the first question of how much of what is captured on electronic media will be still available in 40 years, let alone a possible 400 years. And what would be the point of most of it?

At least Cervantes wrote great literature which is definitely worth preserving. And it is uplifting to realise that despite the constant stupidity of great swathes of humanity, usually organised into ruling classes and governments and coalesced around ideologies such as ‘capitalism’ and ‘neo-liberalism’ that works of art do survive.  Unlike Quixote’s own library…

“That same night the housekeeper set light to all the books in the yard and all those in the whole house as well, and burnt them. Some that were burned deserved to be treasured up among the eternal archives, but fate and the laziness of the inquisitor forbade it. And so in them was fulfilled the saying that the saint sometimes pays for the sinner”.