When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  6 Montaigne saw in himself what was universal: “I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.” Montaigne, “Of repentance,” CW, 611.

  7 a new generation of memoirists: In particular, memoirs about addiction, divorce, abuse, incest, and other topics that were seldom publicly discussed in the past proliferate today as a way of creating a contemporary biographical narrative that allows readers to see themselves in a larger social context and make sense of their own journey.

  8 “In the year of Christ 1571”: Montaigne, CW, ix–x.

  9 “The shape of my library is round”: Frame, Montaigne: A Biography, 121; and Montaigne, “Three kinds of association,” CW, 628–29.

  10 he thought he was dying: He describes this incident in his essay, “Of practice,” CW, 268–269.

  11 Montaigne repeatedly witnessed his father: Bakewell, How to Live, 227.

  12 “the thing I fear the most is fear”: Montaigne, “Of fear,” CW, 53.

  13 “nature has lent us pain”: Montaigne, “Of experience,” CW, 837–38.

  14 “my relatives and friends”: Montaigne, “To the Reader,” CW, 2.

  15 overrun by warring factions: Montaigne was forced on one occasion to evacuate his household and seek safety farther afield. But fear of the plague shut many doors tight. “I, who am so hospitable, had a great deal of trouble finding a retreat for my family: a family astray, a source of fear to their friends and themselves, and of horror wherever they sought to settle, having to shift their abode as soon as one of the group began to feel pain in the end of his finger.” Montaigne, “Of physiognomy,” CW, 801–2.

  16 assassination as political tool: Henri III had the Duke of Guise assassinated in December 1588. Then the following August, he was assassinated.

  17 reforming Christian faith: See MacCulloch, The Reformation, for a comprehensive look at current scholarship on late medieval religion as well as the Reformation.

  18 Martin Luther’s “Ninety-Five Theses”: On printing and religious propaganda, see Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 287–319. Especially powerful was the new availability of scripture in local languages. “Between 1466 and 1522 there were twenty-two editions of the Bible in High or Low German; it reached Italian in 1471, Dutch in 1477, Spanish in 1478, Czech around the same time, and Catalan in 1492. In 1473–4 French publishers opened up a market in abridged bibles, concentrating on the exciting stories and leaving out the more knotty doctrinal passages.” (MacCulloch, 73).

  19 “I have known books”: Montaigne, “Of physiognomy,” CW, 808.

  20 “My ignorance will excuse me”: Montaigne, “Of books,” CW, 301.

  21 “I aim [in my essays]”: Montaigne, “Of the education of children,” CW, 109.

  22 “there is no desire more natural”: Montaigne, “Of experience,” CW, 815.

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE DREAM OF THE UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

  1 “fugitive fermentation of an individual brain”: Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813.

  2 “Enlighten the people generally”: Jefferson in a letter to P. S. Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816.

  3 1,256 volumes at Monticello: The Jefferson Bicentennial 1743–1943, 25.

  4 a self-confessed bibliomaniac: “Sensible that I labour grievously under the malady of Bibliomanie, I submit to the rule of buying only at reasonable prices, as to a regimen necessary in the disease.” Jefferson in a letter to Lucy Ludwell Paradise, June 1, 1879. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-15-02-0166.

  5 “While residing in Paris”: Jefferson in a letter to Samuel H. Smith, September 21, 1814.

  6 books burned in Capitol fire: Before the fire, the library had 3,076 volumes as well as maps, charts, newspapers, and congressional records. The 1812 Catalogue.

  7 “Architecture is my delight”: The quote is attributed to Jefferson by Margaret Bayard Smith, who visited him in 1809. Giordano, The Architectural Ideology, 150.

  8 “Those who opposed the bill”: Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 3rd sess., 28: 1105–6.

  9 “I do not know”: Jefferson in a letter to Samuel H. Smith, September 21, 1814. In 1802, while serving as president, Jefferson drew up a list of books the library should have, necessary “to the deliberations of the members as statesmen, and … omitted those desirable books, ancient and modern, which gentlemen generally have in their private libraries, but which cannot properly claim a place in a collection made merely for the purposes of reference.” Like Montaigne, Jefferson was never one to be hobbled by consistency. In any event, despite President Jefferson’s insistence that “books of entertainment” were out of scope, by 1812 there were many books in the categories of “Poetry and the Drama, Works of Fiction, Wit, &c” and “Arts and Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature.” These were usually donated by members for use by their peers, so they ended up with a collection not unlike that of a gentleman’s club in London. The 1812 Catalogue, xiii ff.; and Goodrum and Dalrymple, The Library of Congress, 12.

  10 Ossian admired by Jefferson: Scottish poet James Macpherson published a series of epic poems attributed to Ossian. He claimed they were translations of ancient Scots Gaelic epics that had been transmitted orally over generations. Ossian was thought to be the Gaelic Homer.

  11 “It is the duty of every good citizen”: Jefferson in a letter to Hugh P. Taylor, October 4, 1823.

  12 “I endeavor to collect”: Jefferson in a letter to James Madison, January 12, 1789.

  13 “the worthiest minds, who lived in the best ages”: Montaigne, “Of the education of children,” CW, 115.

  14 “universal toryism”: Jefferson in a letter to John Norvell, June 11, 1807, cited in Sowerby, I: 157.

  15 Benjamin Franklin’s marginalia: American Treasures in the Library of Congress, 68–69.

  16 “The earth belongs to the living”: Jefferson in a letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789.

  17 “I cannot live without books”: Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, June 10, 1816.

  18 “I feel a much greater interest”: Jefferson in a letter to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819.

  19 Daniel Kahneman has pointed out: Kahneman, Thinking, 417–18.

  20 collect and curate artifacts: The words “curiosity” and “curation” share the same etymological root, cura, or care. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the eighteenth century curiosity meant carefulness, scrupulousness, accuracy as well as inquisitiveness and the desire to know.

  21 Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation: www.loc.gov/avconservation/packard/.

  CHAPTER SIX: MATERIALISM: THE WORLD IS VERY OLD AND KNOWS EVERYTHING

  1 “the tranquil pursuits of science”: “Within a few days I retire to my family, my books and farms … Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.” Jefferson in a letter to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, March 2, 1809.

  2 “The word ‘science’”: Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 5–6, n3.

  3 species ever go extinct: See Martin, Thomas Jefferson, 96–114; and Thomson, Jefferson’s Shadow, 86–97.

  4 “reason in action”: “In an age in which reason was venerated, science was esteemed as the intellectual manifestation of human reason in action.” Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, 60.

  5 “Freedom [is] the first-born daughter”: Jefferson in a letter to François D’Ivernois, February 6, 1795.

  6 American Philosophical Society: For the early years of the American Philosophical Society, see Lyons, The Society for Useful Knowledge.

  7 “have spent the prime of our lives”: Italics in original. Jefferson in a letter to Harvard president Joseph Willard, March 24, 1789, written from Paris just months before the storming of the Bastille.

  8 “Science is important to the preservation of our republican government”: Quoted
in Martin, Thomas Jefferson, 56.

  9 exotic live specimens: Ibid., 14; and Thomson, Jefferson’s Shadow, 224ff.

  10 Jefferson’s admiration for Francis Bacon: Jefferson in a letter to John Trumbull, February 15, 1789. He considered Francis Bacon to be one of the three greatest men ever to have lived (the other demigods being Isaac Newton and John Locke). Bacon’s scheme, widely known by subsequent generations, was adopted by Diderot for his Encyclopédie méthodique. A diagram of this system of human knowledge appeared as a frontispiece in the first volume of the encyclopedia, a book well thumbed by Thomas Jefferson.

  11 “Lord Bacon founded his first great division”: Jefferson in a letter to A. B. Woodward, March 24, 1824.

  12 “In classing a small library”: Jefferson’s annotation to his catalog of March 1783 can be viewed at: http://www.masshist.org/thomasjeffersonpapers/.

  13 letter to A. B. Woodward: Jefferson in a letter to A. B. Woodward, March 24, 1824.

  14 Jesus was a materialist: “Indeed Jesus himself, the founder of our religion, was unquestionably a materialist as to man. In all his doctrines of the resurrection he teaches expressly that the body is to rise in substance. In the Apostles’ Creed we all declare that we believe in the ‘resurrection of the body.’”

  15 “Metaphysics have been incorporated with Ethics”: Composed sometime between 1820 and 1825 as a preface to “A Catalogue of Books Forming the Body of a Library for the University Of Virginia” and published in the University of Virginia Alumni Bulletin, November 8, 1895, 79. Thanks to Heather Riser of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia for this reference.

  16 historical eras could be dated relative to each other: There was nothing here that contradicted the divine creation. The argument was about when and how God had created the world.

  17 “the God whom science recognizes”: James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 536.

  18 roots of materialism in Christianity: Christianity absorbed a good deal of Greek and Roman pagan thought in its formative years. But it is not clear that Christianity felt the influence of pre-Socratic thinkers, such as Empedocles, nor that of the Epicureans. The poem that propounds materialism, for example, On the Nature of Things by the Epicurean poet of the first century B.C., Lucretius, was lost to Western thought until 1417. See Greenblatt, The Swerve.

  19 “Evidence of the antiquity of man”: From J. W. Burrow; and note David Friedrich Strauss published his book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined in 1835 to 1836, which was translated into English by George Eliot in 1846.

  20 natural philosophy and natural history collapse into science: In French, German, and Russian, the general term for science (la science, Wissenschaft, and nauka respectively) covers all disciplines, including what in English are called the humanities and social sciences.

  21 British Association for the Advancement of Science: This was in stark contrast to the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in London, chartered by King Charles II in 1662. It had lost considerable scientific luster since the days when it counted Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Edmond Halley as members. See Danielson, “Scientist’s birthright,” 1031. See also OED, 1834; Ross, “Scientist: the story of a word”; and Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club, 2–3.

  22 “scientist” came only slowly into common parlance: Google Ngram search for “scientist” (case insensitive) shows the word essentially not in use at all until the 1860s; Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club, 297–98. People resisted the term as a barbarism. It caught on in the United States faster; as Snyder (361) says, Americans are “always more open to new things. Indeed, the term became closely associated with American scientists, and by 1874 its English roots were forgotten, the president of the Philological Society in England referring to ‘scientist’ as ‘an American barbarous trisyllable.’” The Ngram Viewer, incidentally, is in early stages of development. Its Google Books database comprises titles held chiefly in U.S. academic libraries, one particular slice of the digital universe. The corpus is text from roughly 7.5 million books, about 6 percent of all books ever published; it includes no journals, newspapers, or unpublished materials such as manuscripts, letters, and so forth. The Ngram is fun to use and quite suggestive, but like all searches of large databases, can only tell us what the selected data know. In this case at least what it tells us accords with what historians have deduced from research using other methods and sources. See Natasha Singer, “In a Scoreboard of Words, a Cultural Guide,” New York Times, December 7, 2013.

  23 invention of image capture: The French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is believed to have created the first image using a photographic process in 1826. On the 1860s “phonautogram,” see www.firstsounds.org/sounds/. By 1878, Edison filed for a patent on a phonograph, a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil that could be encoded for audio waves. See www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/recording.technology.history/notes.html. Thanks to Sam Brylawski for this and other references about sound recording.

  24 giddy pace of the Red Queen and Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” the Red Queen explains in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

  25 “You say that we go round the sun”: Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet,” chap. 2, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

  26 “the objects of natural knowledge”: Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 162.

  27 “The most powerful storehouse of value”: Ibid., 164.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE SCIENCE OF MEMORY AND THE ART OF FORGETTING

  1 biology is neither personal nor cultural destiny: Much of what we know about human memory is based on knowledge gleaned from two sources: humans who have memory disorders and experiments conducted on other species. Animal studies usually involve genetic tinkering and other means of creating memory disorders in lab animals, procedures not permissible to perform on humans. Such studies rely on the vital, if qualified, identification of humans with other forms of life. One of the pressing challenges in life sciences is to develop a keener understanding of when models based on rats, mice, or sea slugs work in humans and when they do not. The biologist Richard Lewontin cautioned strenuously against using biological models of evolution to explain cultural practices and how they change. “We would be much more likely to reach a correct theory of cultural change if the attempt to understand the history of human institutions on the cheap, by making analogies with organic evolution, are abandoned. What we need instead is that much more difficult effort to construct a theory of historical causation that flows directly from the phenomena to be explained.” Lewontin, “The Wars over Evolution,” 54. He was addressing primarily his fellow natural scientists and social scientists who use evolutionary psychology to “explain” human behaviors and cultural practices. Several disciplinary perspectives on uses of biology in history and history in biology are published in the American Historical Review, “AHR Roundtable: History and Biology,” 119: 1492–629.

  2 prepares a miniature map of its environs: Gazzaniga, The Mind’s Past, 74–75. “We have predictive perception … what we see is not what is on the retina at a given instant, but is a prediction of what will be there. Some system in the brain takes old facts and makes predictions as if our perceptual system were really a virtual and continuous movie in our mind.”

  3 we spatialize that information: Research suggests that place is measured by time in the brain. “Essential to spatiotemporal encoding are ‘place cells’ [in the hippocampus] that fire when an animal passes through a precise position in its environment and theta oscillations, brain impulses that act as an internal 4–10 Hz clock … Thus time in the hippocampus is organized topographically, resembling a series of local time zones. The findings imply that, at any given time, the hippocampus encodes an extended segment of the environment—not just a point in space.” “The map in your head,” Nature 459: 477.

  4 “By virtue of the unconscious status”: Kandel and Squire,
“Neuroscience.”

  5 modern biology as a science of information: “Modern biology is a science of information,” editorial, David Baltimore, New York Times, June 25, 2000. By the 1940s, fundamental advances in biochemistry had already transformed the life sciences “from a discipline concerned with enzymes and the transformation of energy (that is, with how energy is produced and utilized in the cell) to a discipline concerned with the transformation of information (how information is copied, transmitted, and modified within the cell).” Kandel, In Search of Memory, 242.

  6 “The new genome”: Pollack, The Missing Moment, 14.

  7 crucial processing steps: See Yang et al., “Sleep promotes.”

  8 poems are “like dreams”: “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence. Selected Prose 1966–1978. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

  9 “Biological value lies only in learning”: Quoted in Jonathan Weiner, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 138.

  10 “The retrieval of the consolidated memory”: Kandel and Squire, “Neuroscience.” “Reactivated memory undergoes a rebuilding process that depends on de novo protein synthesis. This suggests that retrieval is dynamic and serves to incorporate new information into pre-existing memories. However, little is known about whether or not protein degradation is involved in the reorganization of retrieved memory … It also provides strong evidence for the existence of reorganization processes whereby pre-existing memory is disrupted by protein degradation and updated memory as reconsolidated by protein synthesis.” Lee et al., “Synaptic Protein Degradation,” 1253.