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An expression of delightcame over his fine, white-skinned face and he raised his finger in the air.
    â€˜People enjoy combustion!’ he exclaimed.
    In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.
    â€˜It may be time itself,’ he exclaimed, ‘that we are burning. For example, take the English writer Jane Austen: I have observed the way in which, over the space of a few years, the novels of this long-dead spinster were used up,’ he said, ‘burned one after another as spin-offs and sequels, films, self-help books, and even, I believe, a reality TV show. Despite the meagre facts of her life, even the author herself has finally been consumed on the pyre of popular biography. Whether or not it looks like preservation,’ he said, ‘it is in fact the desire to use the essence until every last drop of it is gone. Miss Austen made a good fire,’ he said, ‘but in the case of my own successful authors it is the concept of literature itself that is being combusted.’
    There was, he added, a generalised yearning for the ideal of literature, as for the lost world of childhood, whose authority and reality tended to seem so much greater than that of the present moment. Yet to returnto that reality even for a day would for most people be intolerable, as well as impossible: despite our nostalgia for the past and for history, we would quickly find ourselves unable to live there for reasons of discomfort, since the defining motivation of the modern era, he said, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from strictures or hardships of any kind.
    â€˜What is history other than memory without pain?’ he said, smiling pleasantly and folding his small white hands together on the table in front of him. ‘If people want to recapture some of those hardships, these days they go to the gym.’
    Similarly, he went on, to experience the nuances of literature without the hard work involved in reading, say, Robert Musil, was for a number of people very pleasurable. For instance, as an adolescent he had read a great deal of poetry, particularly the poetry of T. S. Eliot, yet if he were to pick up the Four Quartets today he didn’t doubt it would cause him pain, not only because of Eliot’s pessimistic view of life but also because it would force him to re-enter the world in which he had first read those poems in all its unvarnished reality. Not everyone, of course, spends their teenage years reading Eliot, he said, but it would be hard to pass through the education system without at some point having to grapple with one antiquated text or another, and so for most people the act of readingsymbolised intelligence, quite possibly because in that formative time they had not enjoyed or understood the books that they were obliged to read. It even had connotations of moral virtue and superiority, to the extent that parents worried there was something wrong with their children if they didn’t read, yet these parents had quite possibly hated studying literature themselves. Indeed, as he had said, it might even be their forgotten suffering at the hands of literary texts that had left behind this residue of respect for books; if, that is, psychoanalysts are to be believed when they say we are unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences. And so a cultural product that reproduced that ambiguous attraction, while making no demands and inflicting no pain in the service of it, was bound to succeed. The explosion of book clubs and reading groups and websites overflowing with reader reviews showed no sign of dying down, because the flames were constantly being fed anew by a reverse kind of snobbery that his most successful