Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times Page 9
As we think about the future of reading, we will want to think about the history of how we have shared reading, the intricate and often troubled ways that individuals have parted, imparted, and parted with ideas. We will want to heed Goethe’s advice that sharing is more difficult than we think.
. . .
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the original act of sharing was not a book, but a bone. In Genesis 2:21–22, God makes Eve from a rib in Adam’s body. This has most often been understood as an affirmation of patriarchal rule (she is of Adam in the way that he is of God). But it can also be read as a repayment for her bringing the gift of life into the world. Take something of him, the story implies, because you will henceforward share something of yourself. Sharing is a chain reaction; it always presupposes more of itself.
What is particularly interesting about this story is the object that is exchanged. At the core of this primal scene of human sharing is a bone, the most durable part of the human body, and also, it should be added, the oldest writing surface. Unlike the rest of our organic matter, bones endure; they far exceed the span of human life. They make possible knowledge between generations at a material level. Bones are an essential component in the shaping of human cultures. In the story of Adam and Eve, the sharing of a thing precedes the sharing of knowledge (in the famous tree from which Eve would soon eat). Things make the sharedness of ideas possible.
The parable of the rib is a reminder that genuine sharing involves some object—I must give something up in order for you to take something in. Sharing is not purely synonymous with giving, but it does belong to the same family.7 Like a gift, there is a sense of sacrifice about sharing, as when a child learns to share a toy by giving it up temporarily. But unlike a gift, when I share something with you I also retain something else, something more ethereal like a bond of friendship or an idea that I hold on to. The rib is important to this story because as a bone there are more like it. In being given, something is also withheld. It is a part of me, but only a part. As a shared object, the rib is both internal and external to me. Only under these conditions can we, as two separate people, paradoxically enter into a common space of what Genesis calls “one flesh.”
We might say that books are like bones. They too preserve ideas across generations. They too belong to a ritual of material and intellectual exchange. And they too consist of this mixture of the essential and the expendable. If we look at one of the most popular scenes involving books, the dedication of a book from an author to a royal or holy patron, I think we can see the logic of Genesis at work (fig. 5.1). As the great Renaissance naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi hands a book to his patron, Pope Clementine the VIII, we can see the deep sense of disavowal enacted in the performance. In order to truly share a book with another, one must submit oneself before the recipient. Giving a book, according to this imagery, is a way of giving a piece of oneself. We lose something of ourselves when we share, but not everything (there are always more copies). Such scenes point to sharing’s etymological origins in the verb “to shear,” as both a carving from and an act of forking.
[FIGURE 5.1] Title page from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologia (1599). Courtesy of the Landesbibliothek Württemberg, Stuttgart, Nat. G. fol. 16-1.
In his dedication to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare writes at the opening of his poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594), “What I have done is yours, what I have to doe is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.”8 One can part with a work because the recipient is already a part of the author. There is a sense of entanglement to the writing and reading of books. When the ninth-century Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus handed over a copy of his renowned poems of the cross to the archbishop of Mainz—a copy we must remember that would have taken him an entire year just to reproduce by hand—he is depicted as being supported by his teacher, Alcuin of York, the leading scholar of the court of Charlemagne (fig. 5.2). When we give something of ourselves—our ideas, our time, our sense of care—we expose ourselves, we become more vulnerable. Behind every book is some support, in this case the support of a teacher.
At the turn of the sixteenth century, Erasmus would publish his famed collection of adages with the opening motto, “Friends hold all things in common.”9 The Adages ushered in a new way of thinking about reading as something held in common among friends (not to mention a new way of privatizing common intellectual property). Alongside the vertical supplication between author, patron, teacher, or divine muse, by the sixteenth century reading was increasingly being thought of within a horizontal framework of equals. One of the most popular book formats of the age were Alba amicorum, or Friendship Albums, in which friends could write brief sentiments in each other’s blank books. They were part of the itinerant nature of university life and are still a common practice today in the form of the “yearbook.” As Walter Scott, Baron of Buccleuch and a distant relative to the famous nineteenth-century novelist by the same name, would write in George Strachan’s album in 1603, “Friendship is to be worshipped above all else because it is so rare on earth.”10
[FIGURE 5.2] Rabanas Maurus (left) is supported by Alcuin of York (middle) as he hands his manuscript to the archbishop of Mainz (right) in the Manuscriptum Fuldense (ca. 831–40). Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, cod. 652, fol. 1v.
By the eighteenth century, friendship would become one of the primary signs under which poetry was written and circulated among circles of sentimental readers. As the most renowned German poet of the age, Friedrich Klopstock, would write in one of his most beautiful poems, “Lake Zurich”:
But sweeter still, more beautiful and beguiling,
Is to be a friend knowingly in the arms of a friend.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge would one day begin a periodical called The Friend, while one of Emerson’s best-known essays, “Friendship,” was written in the spirit of his Renaissance predecessor Michel de Montaigne (“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature,” writes Emerson).11 By the middle of the nineteenth century a new genre of books had emerged that were designed expressly to be given away as gifts among family and friends.12 These so-called Gift Books bore names like Friendship’s Offering, The Token, and Pocket-Book for Love and Friendship. They often contained elaborate presentation leaves to allow givers to inscribe their names within them. Today, “to friend” has become a verb.
When we share a book with a friend, we are declaring our attachment—to an object, an idea, and a person. Sharing is a way of going public. It is what transforms a private reading experience into a public act, however small or large such publics might be. By the eighteenth century this ideal of personal friendship surrounding reading began to assume more institutional shape as a variety of new social practices emerged around the sharing of texts, forms that brought together new groups of people in new ways. The Parisian salon was one of the most famous examples, where learned wit was combined with the circulation of letters, poems, and the day’s newest philosophy, all under the tutelage of a powerful matriarch or salonnière, like Marie Thérèse Geoffrin in Paris or Rahel Varnhagen in Berlin.
The London coffeehouse was another such place. As a French observer remarked, “To improve Society, the English have, besides their usual and friendly Meetings called Clubs, the Conveniency of Coffee-Houses, more common here than anywhere else. In which all Corners intermix together, with mutual freedom; and, at a very easy Rate Men have the Opportunity of meeting together, and getting Acquaintance, with choice of Conversation, besides the Advantage of reading all foreign and domestic News.”13 Unlike the stylishness of the Parisian or Viennese café, the London coffeehouse was imagined to be a place of social and textual commonality.
Common reading spaces were a hallmark of the urbanizing cultures of eighteenth-century Europe, as the rising accessibility of reading helped further disseminate Enlightenment ideals of humanity, equality, and general learning. In Edinburgh in 1720, a group of women came together every week under the heading of the Fair
Intellectual Club to discuss books and promote “Female Excellence.”14 It was the first of many subsequent examples of the way men and women would convene to decide on what to read. “We cannot be too careful in the Choice of Authors and Subjects,” wrote the fair intellectuals in their public manifesto. In the German territories close to fifty reading clubs were founded in the first half of the eighteenth century. Over the next two decades 370 more were established. “Every friend of literature can become a member of the society,” read the first article of the “constitution” of one such society in Bonn.15 Rises in literacy did not initially imply a world of isolated readers devouring material alone in their bedrooms or boudoirs. Instead, it signaled the way individuals increasingly lived in a world where reading was an ever greater part of social life (fig. 5.3).
[FIGURE 5.3] One can see from this popular depiction of the social circle surrounding the Duchess Anna Amalia in Weimar the variety of things people did together while gathered around a table. Reading is only one activity among many. Georg Melchior Kraus, Evening Company with Anna Amalia (1795). Courtesy of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Goethe-Nationalmuseum.
The book’s growing prominence within the eighteenth century and its democratizing impulses were no historical accident. The book was, and continues to be, thought of as an important medium of democratization. But with every new social habit of promoting access to reading came a subsidiary one of keeping other readers out. Coffeehouses and royal societies were for men only, Fair Intellectual Clubs by definition for the fair sex, salons only for the most fashionable, and reading clubs were far more exclusive than their “constitutions” let on, accompanied as they were by membership fees and strict rules of dress. Open circles of sentimental readers in the eighteenth century gradually gave way to cults of nationalistic brotherhood in the nineteenth. The book’s availability transformed into fears of reading madness and maladies like bibliomania. As Emerson himself acknowledged in his essay on friendship, “Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”
When the famed eighteenth-century protagonists of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther begin to passionately discuss the new novels of their day, they only belatedly notice that they have left everyone else out of the conversation. Our attachments to reading, and our desire to share them, can wittingly or unwittingly be the tools through which we push others away, including those with whom we have tried to share. Reading divides as much as it brings us together. No matter how much books have been shared throughout time, at least part of the history of reading is a record of miscomprehension and misjudgment. This is reading’s edge.
There is no more poignant scene of this problem than in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), one of the great novels about reading. One evening, after the children have gone to bed, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are reading together. He is reading Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac, “the English novel and the French novel.” She is reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. Unlike her husband, she does not read genres, but line by line. “‘Nor praise the deep vermilion rose,’” she reads, quoting Shakespeare’s ninety-eighth sonnet to herself. “How satisfying! How restful!” she thinks. “All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet.” For Mrs. Ramsay, the sonnet captured the “essence sucked out of life and held rounded here.” It was a beautiful sentiment about the way certain words can make perfect sense of the otherwise jumbled nature of our daily lives. In the company of another, however, such bliss can be short-lived.
But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her. He was smiling at her, quizzically, as if he were ridiculing her gently for being asleep in broad daylight, but at the same time he was thinking, Go on reading. You don’t look sad now, he thought. And he wondered what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought.
“Well?” she said, echoing his smile dreamily, looking up from her book.16
“Probably not” is one of the most piercing lines I have ever read. He cannot know how deeply, how “well” she has understood Shakespeare, how meaningful that moment of reading has been for her. It has made her well, and yet she cannot share it with him (“Well?” she says). How could they ever have this experience in common? A chasm exists between husband and wife and reading only deepens it. Reading is a sign of what cannot be shared between two people. His words reveal a profound truth in their condescension.
In the letters of the twentieth-century poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann we find a moving, real-world equivalent of Woolf’s predicament. Celan and Bachmann, who had a brief love affair after the Second World War, were two of the most important postwar writers to work in the German language, she an Austrian woman contending with what it meant to write for a male-dominated literary market, he a Romanian Jew contending with what it meant to write after the Holocaust. Few writers have had a more intense relationship with the nature of language. In their letters we can see how they are like opposing poles of a magnet, so similar, and yet so irreconcilable.
Celan was living in Paris, while Bachmann was in Vienna. Their correspondence, irregular from the start (like their affair), is supported by moments of sharing their writing with one another. After their second affair in 1957, she sends him her radio play The Good God of Manhattan, and he replies by sending her some of Rimbaud’s poetry. A few months later he will send his new collection of poems Speech-Grille. Their letters are delicate balancing acts, with requests to see each other and replies of deferral. They are concerned with what cannot be said and what will inevitably not be understood. “You know, Ingeborg, yes you know,” writes Celan. “And us,” she writes, “oh Paul, you know.” “You know,” they write repeatedly, because, as Bachmann later suggests, “I don’t know the word that could completely capture what sustains us.”17
A break happens in 1959 when Celan receives a scathing and overtly anti-Semitic review of his new poetry collection. Bachmann writes to console him, but he is deeply hurt by what he sees as her misunderstanding of the stakes of his writing. This isn’t about style, he says, it’s about the memory of my mother’s death in a concentration camp. He asks her never to write to him again. For Bachmann, years of frustration at the one-sidedness of their conversation well up as she replies, “I will hear you, but you must help me by hearing me too.” A few months later she writes, “For us there can be nothing further.” Nevertheless, they continue to exchange letters—and books. He sends her poems by Paul Valéry, she sends Gertrude Stein in return. He sends more of his own poems, she sends her collection of stories The Thirtieth Year (1961). Finally, though, the letters break off. Nine years later in April 1970, Celan will throw himself in the Seine. Three years later Bachmann will die from burns after passing out in her bed with a lit cigarette.
Two of the greatest writers of the twentieth century sustained a friendship through sharing reading. And yet sharing persistently drew attention to the way they were always writing, and reading, past one another. If you look closely at their letters, a book is most often shared at those moments when something has been misunderstood. The closer we are, whether physically or intellectually, the less we need to share. Sharing is a sign of shearing, a fork in the road to which we cannot return.
. . .
On October 15, 1973, six months after I was born, Ken Thompson of Bell Labs delivered a talk on what was then the third version of the Unix operating system. He spoke before a small audience at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Annual Symposium on Operating Systems Principles that was taking place at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The publication of the talk a year later marked a decisive turning point in the fortunes of Unix and the development of operating systems. Requests flooded in for copies of the software, which were then shared on RK05 disks or nine-track tapes. In a virtual feedback loop, the more people that had access to Unix, the more people we
re trained on it, the more they contributed to its further development. Unix would subsequently become the single most important operating system in the development of computing, forming the backbone of the emerging Arpanet and every major corporate operating system from Windows to Sun to Apple.
Unix’s success, and eventual eclipse, was critically related to the problem of sharing. In a very basic sense, sharing is what an operating system does: it makes decisions about sharing the processing resources of a machine (Unix was formally known as “The Unix Time Sharing System”). Prior to operating systems, scientists used sign-up sheets to share large mainframe computers that could only run one program at a time.18 The early computer lab was akin to the medieval monastery with its scarcity of copies. The operating system took the idea of shared access to a scarce resource and implemented it at the internal level of the machine.
But sharing was integral to the development of Unix in another way as well. One of the keys to Unix’s success was not just its simplicity and elegance (something programmers repeatedly highlighted). It was also the weak licensing culture to which it belonged. Because Bell Labs was partially owned by AT&T, and because AT&T at the time was a state-regulated monopoly, it was forbidden from entering subsidiary markets. It therefore took a rather aloof role in licensing the operating system, allowing its source code to be shared for a nominal price (something unimaginable today). It was this historical accident that resulted in Unix’s initial availability among the computer science community and that in turn led to its development. As Peter Salus writes, “The decision on the part of the AT&T lawyers to allow educational institutions to receive Unix, but to deny support or bug fixes had an immediate effect: it forced the users to share with one another. They shared ideas, information, programs, bug fixes, and hardware fixes.”19 That sharedness resulted in the spread, adoption, and adaptation of Unix into hundreds of different forms (fig. 5.4).