Palimpsest
A History of the Written Word
by Matthew Battles
(W.W. Norton, New York, 2015)
Reading has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, but writing is a recent invention.
Page 5.
While writing is a recent invention, the needs it answers are ancient ones.
Page 6.
In the process of evolutionary change, writing has buried its roots deep within our cultures, our very consciousness.
Page 6.
Writing can be absent from the brain without causing trauma in a way that cannot be said of langue.
Page 7.
Writing needs us more than we need it.
Page 7.
The first uses of the word “character” in English refer not to letters per se, but to graven marks and symbols of all kinds; it didn’t come into use for alphabetic letters until the introduction of printing.
Page 9.
A measure of writing’s power also springs from its limits.
Page 11.
God is a creator, not a communicator.
Page 12.
With writing there is always the uncertainty of reception, the mystery of the reader.
Page 13.
Only when there are no more readers left to be discovered will the words have exhausted their possibilities.
Page 13.
We evolved to communicate face-to-face and side by side; gesture accompanies word like leaner fishes clinging to the body of a shark.
Pages 13-14.
Despite massive technological changes in the media of writing, mere handwriting remains an impulse for even the computationally sophisticated, as the many-petaled blossom of adhesive notes affixed to so many computer monitors attest. Even in a networked age, if handwriting didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.
Page 15.
Throughout its history, writing has conserved and innovated, maintained its ancient ways while extending them into new media and modes.
Page 16.
Throughout most of its history writing has developed by incorporating and supporting its predecessor forms.
Page 16.
The forms of cast type themselves were based in the shapes of letters rendered by the pen; from the emergency of movable type into the nineteenth century, changes in the technologies of handwriting inspired advances in the engraver’s art. Far from eliminating handwriting, print made I possible for calligraphy to develop a space of its own in lettered culture.
Page 17.
The tradition in the West has been to define writing in evolutionary terms, tracing a progressive lien from the pictograms and mnemonic hash marks of Mesopotamian cuneiform through complex ideogrammic systems like Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the austere, analytic simplicity of the roman alphabet with its twenty-six precisely modulate consonants and vowels.
Page 19.
The qualities that separate humanity from the other animals - qualities upon which the most magnificently developed aspects of civilization are founded - are also so basic to our species that they can properly be called instinctive.
Page 20.
The secret of writing lies in the very possibility of synthesis.
Page 22.
Writing, in addition t being a means of recording and expressing, is also a medium of play.
Page 23.
One of writing’s great achievements is that, like the languages it encodes or completes or parasitizes, it manages to be extensible: by means both cognitive and social it enlarges itself to address novel states of affairs.
Pages 26-27.
Writing marks a divide between savagery and civilization.
Page 27.
Throughout writing’s career, people have been looking at the letters they inscribe and seeing signs, wonders, and origins. The characters of the alphabet were adapted by their Semitic-speaking creators from a combination of cursive cuneiform figures and Egyptian hieroglyphs that had come to stand for syllables in polyglot ancient Western Asia.
Pages 31-32.
Humans strive to put rough-hewn pieces of the world together in useful combinations - a process which, before writing’s advent, first took form as myth.
Page 37.
Writing becomes the stuff of legend because it wasn’t invented but evolved.
Page 38.
Most forms of written character share profoundly similar traits: they’re made of lines that cross, connect, and loop, and they arrange themselves into linear sets.
Page 39.
Much of what writing looks like is determined by the limits … of our physiology.
Page 39.
The fundamentals of perception provide a basis for understanding why writing works for us, and why it has conserved these signs so well over these three millennia.
Page 40.
What were humans doing with their grains during the long centuries before the advent of writing? For many of those centuries they were engaging in symbolic behaviors of richness and complexity: honouring their dead, creating stone blades of elegance and symmetry far beyond the all of mere utility. There were probably singing, almost certainly dancing. And they were drawing and painting, prolifically and sometime prodigiously.
Page 42.
Stone Age Europe was much colder; the Gulf Stream that gentles modern Europe’s climate today was deflected to the south, leaving the peninsula bathed in Arctic air.
Pages 42-43.
The cave painters’ portraits of animals are most striking when their detail and naturalism is compared to portraits of human beings, which are fewer in number and much more rudimentary.
Page 46.
More than a way to pass the time, play is adaptive; through it we accustom ourselves to novelty and calculation, learn to predict outcomes, and to intuit the motives of others.
Page 46.
Our playful activities take place on a razor’s edge between the dictates of natural selection and the costly wages of obsessive behavior.
Page 46.
Children love to elaborate upon rules; they concoct elaborate cant, codes, and mythologies of their own ephemeral devising.
Page 47.
The mapping of coastlines made by modern Inuit people of the circumpolar north, like ancient cave paintings, offers evocative suggestions of the human impulse toward graphic representation - and the desire to look for primordial traces and concoct just-so stories about the meaning of signs.
Page 48.
We’ve searched long-sealed caves, ancient desert mounds, and fractured memorial stones for the roots of writing; everywhere, we find fully formed human imaginations already at work. … We keep looking for easy narratives lacing the primitive to the progressive - but the closer we look, the more we find that it’s human complexity all the way down.
Page 50.
The first writing system, known to the modern world as cuneiform, arose in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BCE, most likely in the city-state of Uruk. The ancient scribes didn’t call it “cuneiform,” of course; this Latinate term was first used to describe ancient writing by the Romantic literary scholar William Taylor in 1818.
Pages 50-51.
The Sumerian word sataru, “to inscribe,” named the act of writing as well as its effects, becoming in time a metaphor for the fame of kings.
Page 51.
At some point in the last centuries of the fourth millennium, someone mixed counting and marking with picture making.
Page 51.
The numerate writers of Mesopotamia graduated to cutting their reeds in wedge-shaped cross-section and pressing the end into the soft clay to make neat, sharp-edged marks, and to combine them cleverly into signs for things, concepts, and ultimately words and the sounds and parts of speech.
Page 52.
As mark making grew in economic importance, it would have been taught as a skill to children, the prototypes of the scribal academies we know from the literature of cuneiform itself.
Page 52.
It may seem farfetched, this image of writing’s emergence as a product of children’s play. And yet in a vastly different time, using vastly different tools and media, a similar dynamic is flourishing today. It goes by the name of social media.
Page 52.
The Sumerian tongue is what linguists call an isolate; it lacks clear relationships with any known language family. Through the long centuries of turmoil and transformation, Sumer became the sacred and scholarly language of Mesopotamia, giving way to Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, and others - Semitic and Indo-European languages that had little in common with the original Sumerian.
Page 53.
Writing is utterly natural to the plastic fantastic that is the human brain. We don’t need writing to be fully human, but full humanity means that the emergence of writing is always and everywhere possible, even likely.
Pages 53-55.
It’s in the nature of writing - it’s in the nature of cultural things - to change, to break and remake themselves.
Page 55.
Writing begins in China at about the same time it first appears in Mesopotamia.
Page 56.
The earliest Chinese writing, the “oracle bone script” of the late Bronze Age’s Shang dynasty (as early as the fourteenth century BCE), also called “shell and bone” script, was used in divinatory practices now called scapulimancy, pyromany, and plastromancy.
Page 57.
In all likelihood, Chinese writing matured in the centuries at the start of the second millennium BCE in media more ephemeral than the bones of the ox and the turtle.
Page 58.
Writing emerges in full, committed not to ideas or images but to language in all its complexity and flexibility.
Page 58.
Writing emerges around the Shang court of Anyang in Henan Province seemingly fully formed.
Page 58.
A pictogram … is a picture not of a single thing but a kind of thing.
Page 59.
The recursiveness, abstraction, and sheer complexity of conveying meaning through written means quickly multiply the challenges to developing a written system out of pictures.
Page 62.
Shapes develop in response to a selective pressure that favors their susceptibility to visual perception and discrimination over the ease of their mechanical production.
Page 81.
If writing evolves readily from such basic facets of the human visual experience, we have to ask why it didn’t emerge ten or one hundred thousand years ago, instead of so recently in the human career.
Page 82.
I want to say we’re wired for writing - although it’s more evocative (and possibly even more accurate) to say that writing employs our wiring to express itself in the world.
Page 84.
Writing is a perceiving-through: a look through a window, or more properly a lens (for of course even a window is already lens, however subtle its refractions). One forms letters while attending to something that stands beyond them.
Page 85.
Rather than its avowed purpose of allowing us to record the past, learn from our mistakes, and share knowledge in the service of progress, writing everywhere has ‘favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.”
Page 89.
With writing’s advent, language ends its prelapsarian phase, trading oral language’s mythopoeic effusion, innocent and promiscuous, for precision and fixity.
Page 91.
The arts and sciences - not mere observation and expression but the institutional practices of the liberal arts, foundationed upon writing - provide endless tools for restraining man’s natural passions and occluding his perceptions.
Page 91.
It’s not wonderstruck barbarians but spellbound readers who believe most fervently in the magical powers of the written word. Thinkers touched by writing tend to attribute to it a unique capacity to give voice to the absent and the dead.
Page 92.
The richness and immediacy of orally based culture contrasts starkly with the ignorance and inaction in which the illiterate seem mires; the literate know memory, the law, and literature, but for it they lose the Garden of Eden. These two takes on writing rhyme with two major Western ways of understanding the past and human nature itself.
Page 92.
Writing is less a machinery of power and authority than it is a discipline, a mode, a school of thought.
Pages 93-94.
Our means of self-domestication were too varied and subtle for that - and what is essentially wild about the human species may be expressed as well in writing as in hunting or sleeping or migration. There is no noble savagery for which to atavistically pine, any more than there is some ignoble savagery from which we escaped. Or this: there is always already ample savagery, noble and ignoble, and we’ll never write our way out of it.
Page 94.
In terms of the life of our species and the history of human culture, we and Gilgamesh are contemporaries. It’s no wonder we continue to find resonance and relevance in his tale.
Page 95.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the race was on to show that the Bible’s wonders and miracles were as real as Darwin’s finches, as venerable as the bones of the Neanderthal.
Pages 96-97.
Since the time of Gilgamesh, the most powerful and widespread languages have been written ones … The power of such languages can persist long after the decay of the empress that birthed them.
Page 99.
Clearly, writing and power are deeply intertwined.
Page 99.
In the West, written Chinese has been understood as a language that divides its speakers into classes; the gulf between a tiny literate elite and the illiterate masses, it’s often said, has been created and enforced by the difficult tuition of written Chinese. And yet with its compound of dense allusiveness, compacted vocabulary and spacious syntax, the rudiments of Classical Chinese texts can be decoded by most speakers of the modern tongue with a felicity unthinkable for non-learned speakers of Western languages faced with Latin.
Page 100.
The Phoenician letters, transformed by Breeks into the alphabet, share an origin with the Hebrew characters; they crossed the Aegean Sea with trade that flourished between the Greek peninsula and the Canaanite mainland in the ninth century BCE.
Page 102.
The artistic culture of ancient Greece had little need of writing; its power was held by the performers, the singes, to whom scribes and “authors” could appear only as rivals.
Page 104.
Writing, for all its powers of memory, crumbles again and again at the implacable forces of time, war, and change.
Page 105.
Monasteries were isolates of order organized around writing.
Page 106.
Writing for the monks, while central, was seasonal, restricted to the sunny months along with sowing, tending, and harvest.
Page 106.
Where medieval scribes found textual invention proscribed, they gave vent to enterprise in the art form that we call illumination.
Page 107.
Libraries aren’t just collections of books, they’re also totalizing statements, manifestos of graphic endurance, writing made powerful not through its expressiveness but by its prolix abundance, so ubiquitous it can afford to act n longer as mere transcription of utterance but as brick and stone, elemental stuff expanding to fill space.
Page 109.
Few authors’ lives reveal the emancipatory potential of writing better than that of Charles Dickens, who wrote himself out of obscurity and poverty.
Page 109.
Throughout the history of writing, glyphs have been granted standing as objects, talismans, and tokens.
Page 116.
Writing has been overwhelmingly a male enterprise.
Page 116.
Literature is not the cause of writing. Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
Page 117.
The word “Qu’ran” itself likely derives from the Syriac and Arabic words for “recitation” (Syriac querana. Arabic qara’a). Torah,” too, is a word meaning recitation or instruction.
Page 121.
Three times the Bible gives the Israelites’ relationship with God the shape of vassalage, in the covenants of Noah, Abraham, and Moses; only in the last of these does the arrangement take written form explicitly in the narrative.
Page 122.
The Sinai covenant, God’s “treaty” with Israel, is based on precedent - specifically, those earlier, oral covenants made with Noah and Abraham, both of which take the form of ancient Near Eastern royal grants.
Page 122.
The polysemous nature of the Bible, Fry avers, lends it an aspect - which it shares with literature - of perpetual renewal.
Page 123.
Talmudic commentary takes its color and significance form the development as an oral engagement with the written law - a law that, primarily, is not mere list of instructions but is composed of an extraordinary entanglement of levels and senses.
Page 125.
The wax tablet was the most common medium for writing form ancient times well into the Middle Ages, from the near East and North Africa to western Europe. … By the seventeenth century, however, they were out of use, largely thanks to cheap paper.
Page 126.
The business of writing in antiquity was still a labor that required many craftspeople to maintain.
Page 127.
The ever-changing practice of the interpreters throughout the life of the Bible have been part of its writing.
Page 127.
In the nineteenth century, a German scholar names Julius Wellhausen brought together insights from archaeological discoveries and increasingly sophisticated historical linguistics to create a complex picture of the Bible mosaic of authorship, now called the Documentary Hypothesis.
Pages 129-130.
Despite the central importance of writing in the development and practice of the faith, however, a Christian militancy against the word, against the book and the law and the learned, has asserted itself periodically throughout the history of the Church, gaining special force in Protestantism.
Page 130.
Latter-day biblical literalism presents another theory of writing specifically of the univocal authorship of the holy writ. Literalism imagines scripture as a voicing, as utterance - robbing it of the powers of writing in one stroke. In this view, the contradictions and confusions of biblical narrative stem not from the many braided streams out of which it flows but our own imperfection and temporal limitation.
Page 131.
With Jesus, his whole insurrection, as it is shaped in the written Gospels, militates against a thing that happens in wiring: most crucially, his offer of salvation stands as a rebuke of the written contract whose story is the chief drama of the Old Testament. In place of the written, graven law as bond and covenant he offers his flesh, his blood.
Page 131.
Paul too lived in a scribal age. Writing materials were expensive; secretaries and amanuenses were the norm; composition, for most writers, consisted of dictation.
Page 134.
Part of the ancient writer’s job was to wrangle secretaries, to employ and master them, to bend them to one’s voice and vision - author as the original auteur. If the author was the master, the secretaries were highly skilled supernumeraries. Scribal writing was not limited to penwork; ink and stylus needed to be prepared, papyrus procured or produced, notebooks and wax tablets cared for. The literate author was rarely possessed of the full panoply of writerly skills.
Page 135.
The difficulties of writing with papyrus and reed pen meant that revision would have been rare in the ancient world, too costly of time and materials. Indeed, our modern draft-and-revision habit of composition (now giving way to the infinite draft of writing on computers) - with sheets ripped from notepads or typewriters, balled up, and thrown into the waste can - has a distinctly modern stamp upon it.
Page 136.
There is a backdrop of discourse and controversy, of schism and debate, to the letters of Paul - of argument and foment couched in writing, referring to writing, shot through with writing.
Page 144.
Writing, it is often said, offers complete and unbroken record keeping, the springboard of historical consciousness. But in fact it is its nature to create gaps, holes, lacunae.
Page 145.
Wax tablets were often bound along their edges into codex-like assemblages, and parchment leaves were bound into erasable booklets for note-taking as well. For reading texts, it was the scroll that ruled.
Page 145.
Writers didn’t write on scrolls; they wrote on single sheets, which were later combined into scrolls. Moistening, pounding, and rolling - these were the means by which books were produced as objects in the ancient world.
Page 145.
Paul’s letters were collected not as literature but as scripture - as self-sufficient revelation. What mattered to their first readers weren’t their correspondences with other contemporary writings but with the Gospel stories - not yet collected as books in Paul’s time but still an oral tradition of sayings and periscopes, or particles of narrative.
Page 146.
The result looks like cherry-picking, but it’s really the artifact of a mode of reading and writing that’s native to the biblical mind.
Page 147.
Bound booklets in codex form were part of the scribal toolkit of Paul’s time. There is little doubt that for Christians of Paul’s time, the written word was a world of notebooks.
Page 147.
Paul’s letters were in codex form from the very start. Paul was part of a generation of Christian writer practicing a new economy of writing and reading.
Page 147.
It’s because of writing, not reading, that the codex becomes important to Christians, and ultimately becomes the world’s dominant book form.
Page 148.
It helped to have a staff to be a prolific writer in the ancient world, and authorship was as much about managing human resources as it was about scholarship or well-balanced sentences.
Page 149.
It was by fomenting, supporting, and preserving further writing, as much as in their role as repositories of scripture, that books became important to the early Christians.
Page 150.
Teachers sought to ground their legitimacy to only by claiming descent from other teachers but by amassing written troves of magical and ritual lore that could be combined with various flavors of philosophy. Thus connoisseurs of philosophy, who in earlier generations had been zealous guardians of particular traditions became voracious collectors of esoterica. Where previously they sought the authentic and the pure, they now became open to the traditions of barbarian peoples as well - including the people of Palestine, with their Gnosticism, their messianism, and their Christianity.
Page 150.
More than any other book, the Bible helps to create the world in which writing talks to writing through books and time.
Page 153.
“Publishing” as we think of it in the age of the printing press, as machinic mass-production, did not exist; every book was written out by hand. Each instance of book production was a reading and an editing; each book thus produced became a future exemplar for further copying.
Page 153.
The life of a book in late antiquity was livelier - given, to a scholar or an elite patron, it would be given into the are of a professional scribe or slave for copying; its presence would be noted in letters to like-minded friends and colleagues, who might send a slave to copy it or ask to borrow it.
Page 154.
Acts of writing produced not only books but also community, serving as social glue in the far-flung worlds of poets, philosophers, and scribes.
Page 154.
If we can see the ubiquity of computing in modern life not as an interruption or insurrection but as a renewal and renascence of writing - as above all another iteration of what writing is and does - a refreshing new take on information technology begins to open up.
Page 160.
Gutenberg didn’t seek to disrupt the scribal traditions of medieval Europe, but to participate in them, further them, and augment them.
Page 163.
Writing and the arts of the book had gone commercial long before the advent of movable type. By the middle of the twelfth century, the scribal arts were no longer cloistered but had developed into a secular industry.
Page 164.
The press appeared in different forms in different parts of Europe, answering to different constituencies of authors, craft and mercantile guilds, and political and ecclesiastical authorities.
Page 166.
The printing press furthered a series of swift transformations in the very form and physical nature of writing itself, making the word the first machine-made, mass-produced material in history.
Page 167.
In sheer quantity, printed works swiftly overwhelmed books in manuscript; by the end of the fifteenth century, more books had been printed than had been produced in Europe thoughout the entire Middle Ages.
Page 167.
The craft and technology of the press didn’t so much erase the scribal arts as incorporate the.
Page 167.
Gutenberg was not a scribe or cleric, but a member of the goldsmiths’ guild; perhaps his crucial innovation was to turn the goldsmiths’ punches into the basis of a process by which many identical letters could be made.
Page 170.
The Gutenberg Bibles (no two he produced are identical), like most printed book produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were hybrid affairs, combining the tried-true means of pen, ink, and paint with the reproductive power of the press.
Page 175.
Well into the sixteenth century, printed books were produced with space in the margins for custom-painted borders and added illustrations. Far from putting the scribes and illuminators of the late Middle Ages out of work the technology of the press offered these artisans a new medium and new markets for labor.
Page 175.
Bruges was not only the place where the medieval manuscript made its final stand; it was also where the English language found its way into print. It was in Bruges that William Caxton produced the first printed book in English, his Recuyell of the Historye of Troye, in 1473.
Page 176.
In the usage of Caxton’s time, printing commonly was referred to as “artificial writing” - reminiscent of the way photography would later be understood and described as “drawing with light” when it first came into being.
Page 177.
The original sense of the word “pirate” with respect to literary work was used not to describe the unauthorized reproduction of someone’ else’s work but the use of a printing press without proper license form the commercial or governmental authorities empowered to use and share the technology. It was to the work, but the means of production, that was the jealously guarded product.
Page 179.
Most of the English printers who followed him didn’t hail from the scholarly or clerical estates. They were bourgeoisie, townsmen and merchants whose interests flowed through commercial channels. … Their lack of academic standing or clerical mandate made them both experimental (as with Gutenberg) and catholic in taste (as with Caxton).
Pages 179-180.
Writing is an accompaniment to civilization, a form of life that takes place largely amidst walls: walls to shelter, walls to separate, walls to discipline and control.
Page 184.
Writing from the very start has never confined itself to purpose-made supports but has sought to infiltrate architecture and the landscape.
Page 185.
Writing in the modern era was restricted by implacable degrees to the private page and the commercial space.
Page 188.
The technology of movable type changed very little for nearly four hundred years. … But in the early nineteenth century, changes came to the technology of printing that would alter it fundamentally. The most important change came with steam power, automating the previously muscle-driven labor of printing. … The output of the press increased a hundredfold, a thousandfold. Newspapers became cheaper and more widespread; printing appeared on a variety of media, including signs, handbills, cards, placards, shirt collars, fabric, boxes, and cans. The nineteenth century was the Age of the Letter, the soot-colored ink of the press seeping like coal fire into every corner of public and private life.
Page 189.
Even more than steam power, the invention of the telegraph increase the ubiquity of letters in modern life.
Pages 189-190.
Multimedia by nature, Morse code can take the form of punctuated sound or blinking lights or flashing flags or puffs of smoke.
Page 191.
Punch cards were emphatically not writing; devised in the early nineteenth century to control the intricate weaves made by Jacuard looms, they were machine parts, specifying tasks for a given system to undertake in the correct order. Punch cards were modified to run other machines that required iterative modification of a narrow set of instructions.
Page 192.
Today we often think of computers as having emerged in the contest of World War II and the postwar military-industrial complex - but the needs of a burgeoning, diverse population and a growing society were key to the development of crucial early components of computing technology.
Page 193.
In the 1950s, a computer programmer rarely touched the machine that ran his programs; instead, he wrote out instructions, which an operator would translate into a deck of punch cards fed into the computer from a hopper.
Page 193.
Gutenberg’s invention wrought no single, easily identifiable revolution in the cultural history of writing. Instead it catalyzed a succession of diverse, local revolutions as authors and their various constituencies variously sought to do old things in new ways and to cloak novel things in familiar forms.
Page 198.
Memory in the Platonic definition is not about storage but revelation.
Page 199.
Computer technology plays a Oz-like game: pay no attention to the code behind the curtain. We don’t really see what we read; instead we see an instantiation, a ghostly apparition, an avatar.
Page 199.
Writing itself had already altered consciousness; the technologies that now emerge from it will alter that consciousness yet again.
Pages 199-200.
Neuroplasticity is the physiological dimension of the changes n consciousness made by writing.
Page 203.
To extend is in writing’s nature - which is to say, it’s in our nature.
Page 204.
Writing doesn’t fore or command; it teaches. The order it bestows on the emanations of human consciousness facilitates an architectural aspect to the imagination.
Page 204.
Similarity doesn’t imply causality - although perhaps it points to deeper causes. Writing didn’t create our impulses to order, to compare, and to taxonomize; it built upon these inclinations and brought them to flower.
Page 204.
Reading of the kind held dear in the modern West was hardly birthed solely by the printing press: the exposure of medieval children to books and reading also paved the way.
Page 205.
Writing is evolving still to colonize new media and adapt to new modes of expression.
Page 207.
Writing is civilization’s handmaiden and a tool of the powerful.
Page 208.
The crucial question is not whether our attention spans will evaporate, our cultural standards whither, our styles and genres fade. It is this: can writing help us undo what we have done with it? …. Does writing give us the means to outpace and ultimately to stay, the devastation wrought by our comprehensive material entanglements?
Page 209.
Politically and culturally, we have not yet come to grips with the enormity of our long-term impact on the planet, the catalogue of which extends beyond radioactive waste to encompass habitat destruction and mass extinction, pollution, and climate change.
Page 215.
Writing arose as an instrument of already-complex human societies.
Page 215.
For its ubiquity and durability, its proliferative vitality, its urge to record and connect and knit itself into the warp of the world, our writing will outlast ourselves.
Page 216.
When scholars became interested in the antique, the palimpsest would prove a crucial source in philology for the reconstruction and recovery of lost texts, a role that palimpsests still serve today in rare-books libraries and archives.
Page 218.
Making meaning out of the merely fortuitous: it’s what the written word needs of us, has called us to aid it in, all these millennia.
Page 219.
The written word is a thing made by organisms - and a thing that remakes those organisms in turn.
Page 220.