You’re enamored of books, ideas and the life of the mind? Then you should’ve attended the weeklong PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature, bringing together 125 writers from 43 countries that ended last Friday.

Why are writers, who are convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that their pen is indeed mightier than the militarists’ sword, celebrating this year? Well, it’s a bumper crop of anniversaries memorializing tomes that, unlike their authors, remain very much alive today.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of “Don Quixote,” perhaps the greatest novel ever written in any language (sorry James Joyce). Its greatness, among other things, lies in its transnational, transcultural and transhistorical focus, a saga written by a Spaniard, narrated by an Arab and set, well, wherever you want it to be set, somewhere where the ash and grit of human conduct can be discerned.

Is it any wonder that Cervantes, the author, bequeathed us the adjective “quixotic,” connoting an individual imbued with lofty ideas and extravagantly chivalrous action?

This year also marks the bicentennial of the birth of the French Alexis de Tocqueville, a keen interpreter of political life whose travels deep into the heartland of the United States resulted in “Democracy in America,” a seminal work that remains in print today and continues to be read by the public and on campus.

Then we have the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” that most American of American poetry collections. From Whitman, who cultivated a persona as a ruffian, propelled by that very American bent known as self-promotion (after all, his most famous poem is “Song to Myself”), artists like Woody Guthrie, Jack Kereuak, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan took on their trademark stance as outsiders, rebels and defiant common men. (We all recall that scene in “The Wild Ones” when, asked by a small-town girl what he is rebelling against, Marlon Brando responds with pensive insolence: “Whatchu got?”)

In New York, at the PEN festival, there were countless readings, panel discussions, lectures and cultural exchanges — and a lot of boozing. Salman Rushdie, president of PEN American Center, said that the idea behind the event was to “bring attention to America’s cultural insularity at a time when there has never been a greater need for the exchange of ideas.”

And, yes, participants exchanged political ideas as well — or hurled them at each other. There was that heated debate between Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley who had filed repeatedly from Baghdad and authored the book “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror,” and the Iraq-born commentator, Kanaan Makiya. Danner opposed the invasion of Iraq, but Makiya supported it, claiming improbably “this is a country that now has a hope it never had before.”

The Iraqi, however, was outmatched intellectually by Danner, who had all the pertinent facts and figures at his fingertips, facts and figures that he proceeded to throw at Makiya like a boxer in the ring — a right to the midsection followed by an upper cut here and a left hook there. There was nothing that our pro-war Iraqi activist could do, as the blows rained down on him, than cover up. It was a classic case of an overmatched fighter trapped in the corner of the ring waiting for it to be over.

I recall a similar encounter at an almost identical writers’ conference in Toronto many, many years ago, also sponsored by PEN, titled “In Aid of Amnesty International,” where my fellow-panelists, Suzan Sontag, Jacvobo Timmerman, Allan Sillitoe and Allen Ginzberg (no, I was not the mere token Palestinian among four Jewish literary giants) hammered me in equal measure. Serves me right for having stubbornly — but let’s face, innocently at the time — supported not only the PLO but its chairman as well.

Yet the most interesting discussion at the New York festival addressed itself to the issue of the power of the written word to affect our lives: “Does Writing Change Anything?”

Most writers in attendance, from Wole Soyinka to Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen to E.L. Doctorow, answered affirmatively with an emphatic yes. Salman Rushdie said in a speech: “’Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ changed attitudes toward slavery, and Charles Dickens’ portraits of child poverty inspired legal reforms, and J.K. Rowland changed the culture of childhood, making millions of boys and girls look forward to 800-page novels.”

I find this throwaway observation on such a profound issue thin and absurdly unconvincing. Literature is more than just a vehicle for the transformation of “attitudes” in society, for we leave that to its poor cousin, journalism. Literature is, in and by itself, a humanizing force that, by defining the syntax of our experience, deals with the image of man, with the shape and motive of his conduct.

And yet. I wonder, as a person who strings words together for a living, if literate man, where he is heir to great works of culture, does not nevertheless remain vulnerable to bestiality.

In Europe, men read Goethe in the morning, listened to Bach in the evening and went on to their next day’s work at Auschwitz. In Iraq, a country with an enviable civilizational heritage, Iraqis buried their fellow-Iraqis in mass graves in outlying fields and dropped poison gas on them in impoverished Hallabja. In the Holy Land, Israelis, to whom liberal ideas are a building block of their sensibility and traditions as Jews, often rose to welcome that bestiality, when directed against Palestinians, and gave it justification and apologia.

“What are the links, as yet scarcely understood, between the mental, psychological habits of high literacy and the temptations of the inhuman?” George Steiner, the literary critic, asks. “Does some great boredom and surfeit of abstraction grow up inside literate civilization preparing it for the release of barbarism?”

If the answer is yes, as I suspect it is, then what has been the point — say, for this author, already in his sixties, with several published books and countless papers to his credit — of a lifetime of writing? Why do we have to write, to contend for literacy, to impart ideas, if our work not once has acted as an impediment to oppression and to the degradation of our national soul?

Yes, the participants at the New York Festival of International literature all had a great time pontificating, and massaged each other’s intellects, but I wonder if, in the end, it was not all of marginal value. Some kind of frivolous pursuit.