O’Hara was one of the first to articulate the difference between the seriousness of the scientists’ loss and that of the arts: “You could destroy every specific reference to calculus,” she said in a report, “and still write a calculus text, by getting together a committee of people who had studied it recently or used it in their work. Well written or not, the text would still have all the information. But the only way we could get back Crime and Punishment, for instance, is to find somebody who had memorized it word for word, preferably in Russian. Nobody had.

“That’s a good case in point. Anybody who’s interested in fiction knows what Crime and Punishment is about, whether they’ve read it or not. But now it exists only as part of a new oral tradition—descriptions of the iost’ works—and it’s one of literally millions.”

O’Hara was part of a six-person ad hoc committee to retrieve as much literature as was possible. She was glad not to be in charge of it—Carlos Cruz had tentatively volunteered, and everybody else took one step backward—because the organizational details were maddening. More than half of ’Home’s ten thousand people had something to offer, either a physical document like O’Hara’s The Art of War or a memorized bit of prose or verse or song. The documents had to be scanned into computer page by page (in New New there would have been a machine to do it automatically) and all of the people had to be recorded and then interviewed for reliability and information about the social context of the thing they had memorized, which was often obscure or trivial. Of course their rule was to refuse nothing as insignificant, and press every informant for another line or two from something. They got a lot of limericks.

There were some heartening bits of luck. New New’s Shakespeare Society had put on a production of Hamlet two years before; the people who played Hamlet and Ophelia were on board and, between them, could still reel off most of the play. A sanitation engineer with an uncanny trick memory spent a month reciting all of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and most of Kipling’s verse.