When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  It was a collection that supported scholarship, embedded in a temple to learning. The collections were copied and managed by experts, studied and edited by other experts. The scholars were paid for their intellectual labor, the manuscripts collected and cared for as their tools of production. The legend of Alexandria is populated with great minds affiliated with the Mouseion over centuries, advancing scholarship in a culture that cultivated knowledge for its own sake—among them Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Galen, and Hypatia. For all these reasons, the legendary library glows with the charisma of an academic utopia, a professor’s dream of the Garden of Eden, where all bodily and intellectual needs are provided for—particularly as the scholars, while they may have taken on private students, did not have teaching obligations. The legend must remain a legend, for there is no useful archaeological evidence of the library to shed light on its long and turbulent history.

  Good work requires good order. Before scholars could begin their work, the librarians had to have finished theirs. Their task was twofold: to create and maintain an intellectual organization so it would be possible to find things, and to provide physical stewardship, to keep the scrolls secure and usable over time. There was probably no bright line separating librarian from scholar. (The professional distinction between the two is a very recent development, dating only to the mid-twentieth century.) The collections were spatially arranged to form an intellectual order and hierarchy. Individual rooms were set aside for specific topics and, within that, arranged alphabetically by name of author. It does not matter how comprehensive and well tended a collection may be. If an item cannot be located on demand because it is out of order, misplaced, or incorrectly cataloged, it effectively does not exist.

  Greater efficiencies in the production of scrolls over time meant the proliferation of physical objects that were valuable, fragile, and, once rolled up, identical in appearance. Thus rolled, scrolls can be safely stored and stacked one atop the other. But the problem is that when stored efficiently they all look the same. So scribes started attaching tags to the ends of the rollers for quick identification. So far so good. When you were done with one, you put it back on top of the stack it came from. But what if you wanted to look at the scroll at the bottom of the pile? You would have to carefully adjust everything on top to free the one on the bottom. Manual labor was in abundant supply in the ancient world—slavery ubiquitous and the employment of children routine. The librarians of Alexandria could afford to solve the scroll-management problem by throwing a lot of cheap labor at it. But a better solution was a technically advanced format—the codex. This is the book form we know today, sheets of paper (or papyrus) cut into uniform size and bound between covers. The codex is much easier to search than the scroll, more portable, and because it has a spine, it is much easier to stand up on a shelf and affix the title to the spine for easy identification. This new book technology was more efficient both in keeping good intellectual order, and in maximizing use of space on the shelf.

  Until the present age, managing physical objects was the only way we managed knowledge. The order of knowledge mirrored the order of things. In digital archives, there are no objects, only bits. They are stored randomly and assembled on the fly when they are called up to the screen. There is no deliberate spatial arrangement of bits on a chip. But then again, it is only a machine that searches the archives. Now we throw a lot of machine labor at the problem of storage and retrieval.

  The Library of Alexandria has been lionized in recent history as having had comprehensive or universal ambitions, collecting knowledge on all subjects comprehensively, in multiple languages, and not according simply to one ideology, religion, or other tribal sense of inclusion/exclusion. It was an imperial library in what was probably the most cosmopolitan city of the ancient world—Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Jews, Armenians, Persians, and more all living cheek by jowl. As depositories of human memory, libraries became the symbol of man’s attempts to master the world through the gathering of all knowledge. No library was quite as ambitious as the one in Alexandria. It is the essential model for the library in the digital age.

  THE MORALITY OF MEMORY VS. THE EFFICIENCY OF WRITING

  Greeks embraced the necessity of writing things down so that knowledge may endure for generations, but not without making a philosophical issue out of it. In the fifth century B.C., according to the written testimony of Plato, Socrates warned that the invention of writing would lead to ignorance and, ultimately, the death of memory.

  For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

  Once knowledge is transferred to a piece of paper, then it essentially leaves us and with that, Socrates argues, we no longer feel responsible for remembering it.

  Writing has its uses, of course. Even Socrates may have taken comfort in the fact that Plato wrote down what he said, and so Socrates had a shot at immortality. The works of other Greeks—the missing plays of Aeschylus, the lost verses of Sappho, the unknown writings of Democritus and Epicurus—are gone. Did we lose them because they were written down?

  The key question Socrates poses to us today is about responsibility. Who is responsible for keeping knowledge alive? We keep our contacts, full of other people’s personal data, on our smartphones which we then back up to the cloud, trusting that the information is secure and will be there when we need it. But where does that trust come from? For Socrates, remembering is a moral action, touching the very substance of our being. Remembering lots of phone numbers may not be the best use of our memory, but it is sobering to realize that even something as simple as storing other people’s phone numbers and addresses with commercial services has potential moral implications. How do we know that the data we store in the cloud are safe from hackers, thieves, and surveillance agencies? Understanding the full risks and benefits of relying on a burgeoning array of memory devices is difficult in the digital realm. Change happens so rapidly that we seldom have the time to slow down and learn about the true costs of new services that free up so much time and mental space. Instead, we learn through trial and error.

  When we commit something to memory, we absorb it, metabolize it, incorporate it into our mental model of the world. Memory was the foundation of the feats of rhetorical performance so treasured by the Greeks. But rote memorization and repetition were not what they had in mind. The art of memory was taught as a species of performance, something done in real time according to well-practiced routines. The very foundation of memory itself was understood to be emergent and performative—not fixed and forever, but coming into being under specific circumstances.

  The goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, was daughter of Gaia (the Earth) and Uranus (the sky). Through a union with Zeus, she gave birth to the nine muses—of epic poetry, lyric poetry, song, dance, sacred lyrics, comedy, tragedy, history, and astronomy. These daughter divinities of the arts and sciences were honored at cult sites such as the one at Alexandria that housed the famous library, places where knowledge was created, publicly demonstrated, and thereby kept alive. Making knowledge public was not accomplished only by distributing written copies of a text. Publication was a bit more like the broadcast medium of the web: Things were in constant circulation. If not, they fell out of common discourse. Knowledge came alive through the spirit, the breath, the inspiration that a muse breathed into a person (inspirare being Latin for “breathe into”).

  The scholars and artists who brought knowledge into the light of day relied on deep stores of ideas, words, melodies,
images, and equations committed to memory. The muses were invoked to inspire or prompt the performers. These performers worked from memory but were not slaves to literal memorization. Their versions of a tale or poem would be individual. Like jazz artists, they could move through a script they carried in their heads, fill in blank spots, and riff on stock metaphors or passages, all the time bringing something specific, personal, and unique to the audience. The classical art of memory, practiced well into the age of literacy, was an art of moral development through proximity to and incorporation of inspired minds.

  Today’s arguments that reading on-screen, as opposed to from the pages of a book, will deaden our empathy use the same logic as Socrates did. Both place high value in reliving someone’s thoughts and words, either through recitation or reading, as vital to the development of man’s higher nature. People are worried that without the printed page, we will lack tools to hone our empathy and develop the mental habits necessary for living on a crowded planet that will increasingly place calls on our compassion. But they are conflating medium and message, just as Socrates did. It is ironic that people now lace themselves up in Socrates’s sandals, ruing the loss of print culture as a backward step in our moral development.

  While Socrates warned against the loss of wisdom by outsourcing memory to papyrus (or computer chip), his prediction that external memory systems would hurt us as a species completely missed the mark. If we had not turned mind into matter, our biological memory would have been stuck forever in the present, small of scale and leaving little behind when we die. But once committed to physical objects, knowledge was not only shared among individuals. It was also distributed—collected, copied, and traded, sometimes lent, often stolen. Distributing knowledge over generations and across continents is the closest we will ever come to creating a natural resource that cannot be exhausted and whose value actually increases with use.

  That said, Socrates’s misgivings were not entirely wrong. Expanding the scope of knowledge above and beyond a certain scale makes it impossible to achieve the single thing he thought mattered in life: to know thyself. We can expand the volume and reach of knowledge faster than our ability to know what we know. The real moral hazard of outsourcing is that we outrun our ability to predict the consequences of our actions and refuse to take responsibility for how knowledge is used. It is an old fear that haunts all cultures of knowledge and keeps the tales of Faust and Frankenstein ever alive. It preoccupied the scientists working at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb. And it troubles almost all of us as we read accounts of genetically modified foods, computers that learn, and robots that speak in human voices.

  KNOWLEDGE GOES THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

  Books, scrolls, and cuneiforms are painfully vulnerable. The destruction of knowledge happens with frightening ease. Liquids can damage paper, clay tablets can shatter, damp climates can infect anything with mold. Careless handling of candles and hot wax can set manuscripts alight. Armed conflict puts knowledge at risk too, for libraries are most commonly located in urban centers or attached to seats of power that are the prize sought by invading armies. What survives war can die from inattention and neglect. The library at Alexandria ultimately collapsed not directly from wars. It died because people stopped valuing its contents. The ideological allegiances of both Christian and Muslim populations blinded them to the value of pagan learning. They had no need for the books that held the memory of the classical world in reserve for the benefit of future generations. Even if the Christian and Muslim leaders had not condemned pagan thought for impiety, knowledge for its own sake became unaffordable. Severe economic pressures and raging plagues that swept through lands once united under the Pax Romana meant people battled to live another day. Parochialism and short-term thinking tightened their grip on the public mind.

  What we see clearly in the wake of classical literature’s Great Vanishing is that the collective memory of humanity is dependent on two things: a durable medium on which to record an image, text, map, or musical score; and an institution, some organization that takes responsibility for the care and handling of the collection for generations into the future. The temple to the daughters of Mnemosyne in Alexandria was dedicated to the making and sharing of knowledge. When the knowledge trade itself atrophied, the museum and library no longer returned value to its legatees. They stopped investing in it.

  Fundamental to today’s anxiety about the future of memory is the lurking awareness that our recording medium of choice, the silicon chip, is vulnerable to decay, accidental deletion, and overwriting. And we know there are few institutions—if any—that have the scale and capacity to keep our analog legacy of knowledge intact at the same time they scale up to acquire the digital. This is a reasonable anxiety. Without preservation, there is no access.

  Like preservation and access, the fate of media and the fate of institutions are so closely intertwined that the story of one can only be told as the story of the other. With every innovation in information technology that produces greater efficiency by further compressing data, librarians and archivists begin a frantic race against time to save the new media, inevitably more ephemeral. The next inflection point in the history of memory, the Renaissance and the invention of printing, comes one thousand years after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. It is quite wrong to refer to the period after that collapse as the Dark Ages. While Western Europe fell victim to a radical case of cultural amnesia, in both Constantinople and centers of power and enlightenment in the Islamic world, much of the legacy of classical Greece and Rome was kept intact.

  Therefore, when the self-styled humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries went in search of the classical legacy, their excavations of ancient sites and texts bore remarkable fruit. The revived and downright rambunctious spirit of curiosity that marked the humanists spawned its own information inflation as they uncovered text after text and created a voluminous body of critical writings to argue about what they found. The invention of movable type by a goldsmith in a town north of the Alps in the 1450s allowed multiple printings of a text to replace the one-offs of the scriptorium. Johannes Gutenberg and his shop inadvertently created in the printing press an accelerant that turned the modest flames of scholarly passion into the great intellectual conflagration of the Renaissance that grew quickly and spread the spirit of rebirth and reformation.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHERE DEAD PEOPLE TALK

  I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.

  —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, “OF BOOKS”

  Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) grew up with books, and his attachment to the pleasures of reading began early in life. The landscape of memory had only decades before been altered beyond recognition by two tectonic forces. The first was the excavation of long-buried literature and art from the ancient world, begun by an avant-garde of clerics and literary types in the fourteenth century. The Renaissance was midwife to the rebirth of a civilization that survived in complicated fragments and bereft of a broader context that would make it comprehensible. The second force for change was the technology of movable type. It was created in Mainz, in present-day Germany, on the periphery of the ancient world. But the Germans more than made up for their provincial status by the mighty force of their artisans’ brilliant craftsmanship and dedication to technical perfection.

  Printing presses arose to meet an insatiable demand for reading material. They in turn inflamed the curiosity of a new literati who wanted more books, produced faster and cheaper. Book production soon reached a scale that was unprecedented. By 1500, a mere four decades after printing presses began operations, between 150 and 200 million books flooded the circulation system of European culture. Both the quantity and the quality of what was available to read had taken a dramatic and surprising turn.

  The result was that in the 1530s, Montaigne learned to read as a “print na
tive,” a creature thriving in the new ecology of memory and learning. He grew up in the midst of the first well-documented information inflation (it was literally self-documenting) and, through a series of bestselling books of essays published over the course of his life, he was both a mirror of his times and helped to shape them. The great inflation of information, carried far and wide in books and broadsides (the precursor of today’s newspapers), created what seemed to many contemporaries, Montaigne among them, a promiscuous intercourse of ideas that was both empowering and bewildering.

  Although the bookmakers were still learning to take advantage of the new technology’s navigation tools (including such novelties as title pages, tables of contents, and consistent pagination), books were no longer designed as knockoffs of handwritten manuscripts. The first printed volumes had been skilled imitations of the handwritten codex. Today, in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, two Bibles face each other in imposing exhibit cases the size of small cars, each produced within years of each other, and both masterpieces of their form. The Giant Bible of Mainz was produced the old-fashioned way by hand in 1452 to 1453. Across from it is a rare vellum copy of Gutenberg’s first printed work, the Bible, probably produced in the same town about the same time and executed in a perfect imitation of the Gothic script used in scriptoria. With one glance you can see how perfectly Gutenberg’s shop was able to create by machine a work that could pass for the unique product of a first-class scribal hand.