Translator: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Am I as handsome as he said I was?
All right, well, I'll take that.
(Laughter)
Thank you. I'll take that as a "no."
This is a scroll.
I am not here to tell you how to make money.
I am not here to tell you how to found a startup.
I am here to tell you how to read and write.
And in order to understand how to read and write,
you need to know something about the history of reading and writing.
And so my theme today
and the subject of my research and of my teaching is the relationship
among writing, reading, technology, the body, and cognition.
And as we move from a traditional literacy of the printed book
to a digital world of screens and pads,
we need to understand that much of what we're going through
is something that earlier societies went through
in moments of comparable transition.
And so, what you see before you here is a scroll.
In ancient Greece, in ancient Rome, in ancient Egypt, in the Middle East,
writing was done not on bound books
but on scrolls,
and our word "volume" comes from the Latin word "volumen,"
meaning something rolled up.
Now scrolls are very hard to use. They're very large.
You cannot skim them; you cannot access them with ease.
Scrolls are part of the tradition of Jewish religious culture
much as they were
a part of the tradition of ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
And as a scholar, when I see a scroll, I think of something classical;
and as me, when I see a scroll, I have bar mitzvah trauma.
(Laughter)
Now, when you were a student in the scroll world,
you took notes on a piece of wood that was covered with wax,
and you wrote on it with a stylus.
And a stylus was a sharp stick
on which you could incise the letters and the words of your notes.
And then you would memorize it
or you would go home and you would write it down -
you would copy it -
and then you would hold the wax over a candle and it would melt,
and you would have your blank slate once again.
And in the first and second centuries BCE,
it occurred to students and teachers
that if you took some of these blocks of wood and sewed them together,
you could make something which they called a codex.
A codex was a bound collection of wooden boards.
And then several centuries later,
it occurred to people
that you could take pieces of animal skin or sheets of papyrus
and you could bind them together in a comparable way,
and thus, what you would get would be a bound book.
Now the bound book differs in many ways from the scroll.
It differs technologically;
that is, your access to the bound book is vertical rather than horizontal.
You can open a bound book at random.
You can skim.
You can put your finger in a book and flip someplace else.
But a bound book differs from a scroll also ideologically.
The scroll was the book,
the volume for ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and ancient Jewish thought.
When the early Christians in the first century of the Common Era
wanted to write their scriptures
in a way that was different in kind from classical or Jewish scripture,
they used the bound book, the codex.
The codex was also available to them because it was smaller than a scroll.
It was surreptitious;
you could put it in your pocket and not be caught.
St. Augustine.
St. Augustine, the great father of the church,
who wrote his confessions in the year 394,
imagines himself as a young man beset by sin,
stealing fruit from a neighbor's garden, learning rhetoric and language,
teaching but still hungry for the knowledge of divine truth.
And in this medieval representation of this late antique saint,
we see him sitting beneath a fruit tree with an open book.
In his confessions,
he talks about how one day, beset by anxiety and fear,
he took a copy of the bound book of Saint Paul's Epistles,
and he opened the book at random,
and he read, "not in reveling and drunkenness,"
and he says, "I put my finger in the passage and I closed the book,
and at that moment, I need not read any further."
St. Augustine is converted to Christianity through the bound book,
but what St. Agustin recognizes
and what Christian theologians throughout the Middle Ages recognized
was that the bound book gave you a different way
not just of reading texts but of reading the world.
One of the things that the early Christian theologians developed
was a theory of allegory.
Allegory literally means saying one thing and meaning another,
but for the early Christians,
allegory was a special kind of way of saying and meaning.
What they wanted to do
is they wanted to read the stories of the Old Testament
as allegorical prefigurations of stories in the New Testament.
In other words,
the belief was that somehow the New Testament
completed in a figural or imaginative way the Old Testament.
So let's imagine you're reading an Old Testament story
about a father and a son,
and the son has a load of wood on his back
and the father is taking him up a hill,
and the father is intending to sacrifice him.
Now you might say
that this is the Old Testaments story of Abraham and Isaac,
but if you were a medieval Christian,
you might say,
Where is there another story of a son with a load of wood on his back,
walking up a hill to be sacrificed by the father?
That, of course, is the story of the passion and the crucifixion,
as the son Jesus walks with the wooden cross up a hill
to be sacrificed by his father, God.
And so the medieval theologians
saw these two stories as allegorical or figurally related.
And the technological way of enabling that interpretation
was the bound book,
that enabled you to take the Old Testament and read a story
and stick your finger in that passage and then flip to the New Testament.
So my point is that the technologies of reading
are not just simply about accessing information,
they are about changing the way in which you think about the world,
they are about changing spirit,
and they are about changing the metaphors by which we live.
I talked about the volume and volumen; let me talk about the rubric.
The word "rubric" comes from the Latin verb "rubricare,"
which means "to write something in red."
In the medieval scriptorium, the world where the manuscript was written,
there was a particular division of labor,
and one person had a job to write the red stuff,
and he was called a "rubricator,"
and what you wrote in red were chapter titles,
as you can see that word "capitulum" here, the chapter title,
and they wrote in red things that were important,
things that became rubrics.
So when we think of a rubric,
we should think of something written in red that is important,
and when we think of a rubric,
we should think of reading a chapter title.
Dante, who wrote The Divine Comedy.
But before he wrote The Divine Comedy,
in the 1290s,
he wrote a lovely little book called "The New Life."
It's a story of how he meets Beatrice when he's nine years old
and how when they are 18, he sees her once again.
Let me pause and say when I taught the Divine Comedy
and when I taught the La Vita Nuova to my students here in Revelle Humanities,
and I told them the story of Dante meeting Beatrice at eight,
and then waiting another nine years to see her again,
and then he sees her
and he practically passes out and writes a poem that said, "Okay."
So,
(Laughter)
Dante begins the - actually, I won't tell you what they really said -
but Dante begins La Vita Nuova and he says in that book of memory,
"Where one finds the rubric, here begins the new life,"
and he sees his memory as a bound book -
your mind is made up of chapters, and for each chapter, there is a rubric.
That is the first line of the first work that Dante wrote.
And one of the last lines of the last work that Dante wrote,
the Paradiso, the story of paradise at the end of the Divine Comedy,
Dante, in Paradise, in canto xxxiii,
looks at the very Godhead itself, at divinity, and he says,
"In its depth, I saw, going inside
bound by love into a single volume,
that which was previously scattered as pages throughout the universe."
Dante begins and ends his career as a poet, as a writer,
with the image of the book,
remembering the chapters of his mind
and then imagining the blessed spirituality of communion with God,
as, in effect, binding the book together.
This is what I'm getting at -
the technologies of reading and writing
provide culture with metaphors of understanding.
And if I had more time,
I'd talk about Gutenberg and the printing press,
I'd talk about the way in which the very word "impression"
changed dramatically with movable type,
but what I want to look at now
are the ways in which not simply our minds but our bodies
are shaped by the experience of reading.
This magnificent picture by Rembrandt of a woman reading
shows us that the reading of a book
traditionally is what I call "absorptive."
To read a book is an act of absorption -
you look down, you hold it in your hand,
you are oblivious to that which is going on around you,
you curl up over and around the book.
When computers began to proliferate at the '80s and '90s,
screen reading became not absorptive but what I would call "theatrical" -
you did not look down, you looked out.
As you can see in this very picture,
the way in which these individuals are pointing at the screen
shows that the very physicality of reading changed
when we moved from book to screen,
that the acts of bodily movement and the acts of social cognition
changed as well.
Little wonder, then, that what we miss in the book
is the absorptive moment.
And so the rise of the ebook is, I would suggest to you,
an attempt to recapture, in the form of an electronic "simulacrum,"
the experience of reading.
This is not a book. It's book-like. It's a book-like experience.
And the very words we have today for our e-readers
evoke in our minds the metaphors of mystery and imagination -
the Kindle, that kindles the fire of the mind.
Why are you asleep in the front row? Would you give him a poke, please?
(Laughter)
I am working up here. Come on, come on.
Ah, sit up! You're in the front row. Enhance my self-esteem.
(Laughter)
Thank you.
Anybody else want to mess with me?
(Laughter)
Kindle the kindling fire of the m -
Now he's going to take a pic. Now he's really going to die.
(Laughter)
Nook -
the quietude, the solace, the silence of sitting in a corner.
The Kindle and the Nook.
Although I have to tell you - and I've said this many times before -
that when these ebooks happened, I called my mother and I said to her,
"Would you like an ebook for your birthday?"
She said, "What will you get me?"
I said, "You want a Kindle or a Nook?"
She said, "A kindle or a nook? It doesn't sound right.
Where is that nook in that kindle? Where is that kindle?"
"It's in the Nook."
It sounds all wrong, especially after St. Agustin.
And it also sounds all wrong
when I think of my own students who don't even get these jokes,
who think I'm the oldest man in the world,
who read my emails as if they were business letters
and find me distant and detached
in the rhetoric of my electronic epistolarity.
Here (Laughter)
is an email from a student I received almost 10 years ago
when I taught at Stanford University:
"prof. Lehrer -
on my way out to class today, i got a piece of glass stuck in my foot.
it was bleeding and hurting a lot so I had to come back and clean it up.
sorry about the absense, but I'll get the notes from someone.
apologies."
Okay.
So, I read this and I thought to myself,
"How can I make something meaningful out of this text?
I have a PhD.
I can take anything and turn it into literature."
And I realized at that very moment -
(Laughter)
I realized at that very moment
that there was a lilt of American colloquialism here,
that the world of email is not the world of stupidity,
it is the world of what I would call "faux intimacy" -
it is the world of affectation,
as if the idea of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and correct diction
would be distancing,
as if intimacy were to be accomplished, rather, through the irregular.
But I read it again.
And as I read it to myself again, I heard the lilt of the American poet:
"prof. Lehrer -
on my way out to class today, i got a piece of glass stuck in my foot.
it was bleeding and hurting a lot so I had to come back and clean it up.
sorry about the absense, but I'll get the notes from someone.
apologies."
And I could not but think of William Carlos Williams's "This is just to say":
"I have eaten the plums
that were in the icebox
and [which] you were probably
saving for breakfast.
forgive me they were delicious
so sweet and so cold."
(Laughter)
These are letters, my friends.
(Applause)
My friends - and you are my friends -
how does the email of a student
resonate with the language of American poetry?
These are post-it notes on the refrigerator of life.
They are apologies for damage or destruction,
just as St. Augustine flung himself under the fruit tree
to recreate the imagined sense now of taking a bite of the fruit
not in sin but in knowledge.
William Carlos Williams asks apology of the reader for taking stolen fruit.
And as I thought to myself,
"How can we understand the relationship
between the modern and the ancient in this way?"
If I could find in a modern email the resonance with a great American poem,
surely, we can find something in this:
(Laughter)
"Be right back -"
These are actually texts that I personally have received.
[BRB] "Be right back."
[DWPKOTL] "Deep with passionate kiss on the lips."
[GGN] "Got to go now."
[ILICISCOMK] "I laughed, I cried, I spilled coffee on my keyboard."
[T2UT] and "Talk to you tomorrow."
(Laughter)
And yet, because I am a scholar of the past
and I have four seconds left,
I see this as exactly the same as this cuneiform tablet,
in which the ancient scribe has written,
"Nu nizza-an ezzateni vadar-ma ekuteni" -
"Now you eat the bread, then you eat the water."
This is Hittite cuneiform,
in which the words for "bread" and "water"
are written out not as words but as idiographic signs.
This is the cuneiform equivalent of "I heart New York."
(Laughter)
And so, my argument at the end
is that these forms of literacy are not damaging,
but they are constantly changing;
that in this world, we need to understand
that text messaging and email are a kind of code.
And if there will be a future for literacy,
it will be a stratified future,
a future in which everyone uses a different discourse of language.
I remember a time
when I could walk into a classroom with a bound book
and stick my finger in it.
And I could talk about William Carlos Williams
and stolen fruit and temptation and apology.
And today the only fruit I walk into a classroom with
is my Macintosh.
(Laughter)
My students read their assignments on their iPhones,
and I know that somewhere up in heaven,
Steve Jobs is looking down and finding that it's good.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)