Borges, perhaps my favourite writer these days, described himself as a young man as Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one. One of his numerous pieces of non fiction speaks of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti who ordered the building of the Great Wall and also demanded all books written before his reign to be destroyed. Borges reflected on this attack on history and geography and wondered was it not merely another (albeit elaborate) means of self preservation, a grab at immortality.
Taking this thought through history, one thinks of Giordano Bruno who believed in the infinity of the universe and the high walls of the Vatican who burned him to death for it, of the courageous Sofie Scholl and the mad barbarian's bloodthirsty third reich, of the Berlin Wall and the egregious crimes of the stasi thought police, of Israel's walls of war and all bloody borders born of and breeding ignorance.
Today China censors rather than burns, the western gutter press rot and bend the hearts of men. Walls are no longer so in vogue as our species instead has set itself to pillaging the planet, but nature is still fenced off from us. Today's flat earthers (science deniers), rather than piling books on the bonfire, usually spit forth their bile in the mass media. Popes and Emperors once burned books and heretics to keep the past in its box and launched uncountable wars to deny space. Things are different now, but only in form. Borges was right, in that the denial of time and space is the root of most barbarism.
