A Reader on Reading

Today my electronic screens partake of both book forms: “scrolling” a text and yet, if I wish, capable of flipping simultaneously to another section on a separate window. But in neither case do they have the full characteristics of their elders: they don’t tell me, as the scroll did at a glance, the full physical measure of the text’s contents. Nor do they allow me, in spite of windows, to skip and choose pages as dexterously as the codex did. On the other hand, my computer is a better retriever: its sniffing-out and fetching functions are infinitely superior to its dog-eared ancestors of parchment and paper.

Augustine knew (and we seldom remember) that every reader creates, when reading, an imaginary space, a space made up of the person reading and the realm of the words read—what Keats called “that purple-lined palace of sweet sin.” This reading space exists either in the medium that reveals or contains it (in the book or in the computer) or in its own textual being, incorporeal, as words preserved in the course of time, a place in the reader’s mind. Depending on whether the written word lies at the end or the beginning of a given civilization, whether we see it as the result of a creative process (as did the Greeks) or as the source (as did the Hebrews), the written word becomes — or does not become, as the case may be — the driving force of that civilization.

What I mean is this: for the Greeks, who assiduously wrote down their philosophical treatises, plays, poems, letters, speeches, and commercial transactions and yet regarded the written word merely as a mnemonic aid, the book was an adjunct to civilized life, never its core; for this reason, the material representation of Greek civilization was in space, in the stones of Greek cities. For the Hebrews, however, whose daily transactions were oral and whose literature was entrusted largely to memory, the book—the Bible, the revealed word of God—became the core of their civilization, surviving in time, not space, in the migrations of a nomad people. In one of his scriptural commentaries, Augustine, coming directly from the Hebrew tradition, noted that words tend towards the quality of music, which finds its being in time and does not have any particular geographical location.

My computer apparently belongs not to the book-centered Hebrew tradition of Augustine but to the bookless Greek tradition that required monuments in stone. Even though the Web simulates on my screen a borderless space, the words I conjure up owe their existence to the familiar temple of the computer, erected with its portico-like screen above the cobbled esplanade of my keyboard. Like marble for the Greeks, these plastic stones speak (in fact, thanks to its audio functions, they literally speak). And the ritual of access to cyberspace is in certain ways like the rituals of access to a temple or palace, to a symbolic place that requires preparation and learned conventions, decided by invisible and seemingly all-powerful computer buffs.

Augustine’s reading rituals, performed around the space of his desk and within the space of his room, were nevertheless dispensable, or at the very least kept changing. He could choose to move about with the text he was reading, or lie in bed with his codex, or leave the room and read in the garden (as he did when he heard the words that led to his conversion) or in the solitary desert. Augustine’s book, as a container of the text, was essentially variable. For the humanist reader of Carpaccio’s time, this variability was of the essence, leading to Manutius’s invention of the companionable pocket book. And throughout the centuries, the book became increasingly portable, multiple, replaceable—able to be read anywhere, in any position, at any time.

My rituals at the computer, though also translatable, depend on a complex technology many times beyond a layperson’s knowledge. Even though a laptop or Blackberry can allow me to transport my reading to a cliff in the Grand Canyon (as the ads proclaim), the text still owes its existence to the technology that created and maintains it, and still requires my surrendering to the physical “monument” of the machine itself.