I love books that give a broad, sweeping overview of everything there is to know about a subject, an encyclopaedic vision through history and the boundaries of our knowledge. This is such a book, and even more interesting, it's a book about books, about writing, about the importance of the physical aspects of human writing: clay tablets, parchment, paper, but even more so about what they achieved in terms of sharing stories, ideas and values. Irene Vallejo is a Spanish classical philologist with degrees from the universities of Zaragoza in Spain and Florence in Italy.
Her passion is clear from the very start. She writes with incredible erudition, but with equal personal joy and personal experience of her relationship with texts and writing.
"After all the agonies of doubt, after exhausting every possible delay and excuse, one hot July afternoon, I face the void of the blank page. I've decided to open with the image of some enigmatic hunters stalking their prey. I identify with them. I appreciate their patience, their stoicism, the time they have taken, their steadiness, the adrenaline of the search. For years I have worked as an academic, consulting sources, keeping records, trying to get to know the historical material. But when it comes down to it, I'm so amazed by the true and recorded history I discover that it seeps into my dreams and acquires, without my volition, the shape of a story. I'm tempted to step into the skin of those who traveled the roads of an ancient, violent, tumultuous Europe in pursuit of books. What if I start by telling the story of their journey? It might work, but how can I keep the skeleton of facts distinct beneath the muscle and blood of imagination?
The initial idea seems to me as fantastical as the journey in search of King Solomon's mines or the Lost Ark, but historical documents show that in the megalomaniacal minds of the kings of Egypt, it was truly possible. It might have been the last and only time - there, in the third century BC - that the dream of gathering all the books in the world, without exception, in a universal library, could become a reality. Today it seems like the plot of a fascinating, abstract story by Borges - or perhaps his great erotic fantasy." (p. XV)
She starts in ancient times, with the endeavour of Alexander The Great to conquer the known world, to create his own city of Alexandria in Egypt, with the largest collection of written material from all the places in his realm. He opened up the world to create a kind of proto-globalism where all cultures could meet and mingle, if not in person, then at least in their written forms. She draws a fantastic picture of how scrolls were written, how they were traded and collected, how they were catalogued and copied. It's a fascinating journey, one that we are of course by and large aware of, but she adds so many snippets of concrete examples and information that it make for fascinating reading. As in this example of the last Egyptian scribes, "who witnessed the shipwreck of their civilization". In 380 CE, Christianity became the compulsory state religion, and pagan cults were prohibited in the Roman Empire.
"(In the) Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, to the south of the first cataract of the Nile, (...) a group of priests took refuge, men who were repositories of the secrets of their sophisticated writing system and who had been forbidden from sharing their knowledge. One of them, Esmet-Akhom, engraved on the walls of the temple the last hieroglyphic inscription ever written, which ends with the words "for all time and eternity." Some years later, the emperor Justinian I resorted to military force to close the temple where the priests of Isis were holding out, taking the rebels as prisoners. Egypt buried its old gods, with whom it had lived for thousands of years. And, along with its gods, its objects of worship, and the language itself. In just one generation, everything disappeared. It has taken fourteen centuries to rediscover the key to that language. (p.53)
Or in this example on the origin of poetry, which makes sense and appears quite obvious once you think about it:
"In their effort to endure, denizens of the oral world realized that rhythmic language was easiest to remember, and on the wings of this discovery, poetry was born. During recitation, the melody helps the speaker repeat each line without alteration, since it is when the music is broken that the sequence falters. All of us were made to learn poems in school. Years later, after forgetting so many other things, we find we can still remember these poems with extraordinary clarity" (p. 81)
I also liked this example to please and annoy my friends in medical practice:
"What kind of education did those Greeks receive? They were steeped in culture in all its variety. Unlike us, they weren't remotely interested in specialization. They looked down their noses at knowledge of a technical nature. They weren't obsessed with employment; after all, they had slaves to work for them. Those who could avoided anything as degrading as having a trade. Leisure was more refined - in other words, it involved cultivating the mind, fostering friendships, making conversation, and leading a contemplative life. Only medicine, an unquestionable social necessity, demanded its own particular kind of training. As a result, doctors suffered from an overt cultural inferiority complex. All of them, from Hippocrates to Galen, repeated the mantra in their texts that a doctor is also a philosopher. They wished to avoid being confined to their field and tried to show themselves to be cultured, slipping the occasional quote by a key poet into their writings." (p. 179)
She also gives a reflection on her own academic research, and the book format gives her also the opportunity to write about herself, about her own experiences, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply personal.
As a PhD student she went to the Oxford Library to do some research, but she is confronted with the obligation to "take the oath":
"A bald man behind a desk interrogated me without making eye contact. I answered all his questions, justified my presence, and showed him the papers he asked for with somewhat intimidating politeness. There was a long silence while he entered my information into his vast database, and then, hands still on his keyboard, in a startling swerve in time, he suddenly stepped into the Middle Ages and informed me pompously that the time had come for me to take the oath. He handed me a small stack of laminated cards that showed, each in a different language, the words I would have to say. I did so. I swore to obey the rules. Not to steal, damage, or deface a single book. Not to set fire to the library or help cause a blaze and watch with diabolical pleasure as the roaring flames engulfed its treasures, reducing them to ash." (p. 44)
Or this even more personal reflection, which again lifts the book out of the academic space into a more personal environment, the perspective that is obviously excluded from any scientific research and publications:
"Violence among children and teenagers is protected by a barrier of murky silence. For years I took comfort in not having been the class snitch, the tattletale, the coward. Not to have stooped that low. Misplaced pride and shame made me follow the rule that certain stories aren't told. Wanting to be a writer was a belated rebellion against that law. The stories that go untold are exactly the ones you must tell. I decided to become the snitch I was so afraid to be. The roots of writing are often dark. This is my darkness, the darkness that nurtures this book, and perhaps nurtures everything I write. (p.226)
But of course the main message is the power of literature, of writing, of books in all their forms, how they made ideas accessible to anyone around the world, to start sharing common values and a common culture, or at least to value that they're might be other perspectives to look at the same reality:
"In a time when the vast majority of Greeks scarcely set foot outside their native village, Herodotus was a tireless traveler. He enlisted on merchant ships, moved in slow caravans, struck up conversation with many people, and visited a great number of cities in the Persian Empire, to give an account of the war with knowledge of the terrain and a range of perspectives. When he met the enemy in his daily life, he offered a different and more precise vision than any other writer. In the words of Jacques Lacarriere, Herodotus strove to topple his Greek countrymen's prejudices, teaching them that "the line between civilization and barbarism is never a geographic border between countries, but a moral border within every people, and beyond that, within each individual." It's curious to note, so many centuries after Herodotus wrote his work, that the earliest history book begins in a ferociously modern way. There are wars between East and West, kidnappings, mutual accusations, differing versions of the same events, and alternative facts". (p.162)
It is an ode to knowledge, to intellectual curiosity and debate ...
"In its ambiguous state as a Greek city outside of Greece and the seed of Europe beyond the bounds of Europe, Alexandria came to see itself from the outside. During the Library's greatest era and following in Alexander's wake, the Stoic philosophers were bold enough to teach for the first time that all people belonged to a community without borders and were obliged to accept humanity wherever and under whichever circumstances they encountered it. We should remember the Greek capital of the Nile delta as the place where this effervescence was born, where the languages and traditions of others began to matter, and where the world and knowledge were understood to be a shared territory. In these aspirations we find a precursor to the great European dream of universal citizenship. Writing, books, and libraries were the technologies that made this utopia possible". (p.232)
... and of course the incredible value of the freedom of speech:
"Days before The Satanic Verses appeared in bookstores, during the publicity campaign, an Indian journalist asked Rushdie, off the record, whether he was aware of the row that was coming. The writer's response was unequivocal: 'It is a funny view of the world to think that a book can cause riots."
If we look back at the general history of book destruction, we'll see that in fact, the funny view of the world - the oasis, the strange paradise, the Shangri-La, the forest of Lothlorien - is freedom of expression. Over the centuries, the written word has been stubbornly persecuted, and the times when bookstores receive only peaceful visitors who do not wave flags or wag fingers, break windows or set things on fire, or give themselves over to the primitive zeal for prohibition, are in fact the unusual ones. " (p. 294)
The scientific study of writing and books becomes a personal story as well as a humanistic manifesto. At times it is not easy to follow the logic or the thread of her narrative, because so many pieces of information are provided. It is this wealth that makes the book so entertaining and a pleasure to read.
Highly recommended!
