The Written World
How Literature Shaped History
by Martin Puchner
(London, Granta, 2017)
Literature isn’t just for book lovers. Ever since it emerged four thousand years ago, it has shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth.
Page ix.
While the human Apollo crew might not have contributed much to science, it did contribute to literature.
Page xv.
Foundational texts were often presided over by priests, who enshrined them at the center of empires and nations. Kings promoted these texts because they realized that a story could justify conquests and provide cultural cohesion.
Page xv.
It was only when storytelling intersected with writing that literature was born. Previously, storytelling had existed in oral cultures, with different rules and purposes. But once storytelling was connected to writing, literature emerged as a new force.
Page xvii.
In order to tell the story of literature, I had to focus on both storytelling and the evolution of creative technologies, such as the alphabet, paper, the book, and print.
Page xvii.
Writing itself was invented at least twice, first in Mesopotamia and then in the Americas.
Page xvii.
Writing inventions often came with unexpected side effects. Preserving old texts meant that their languages were kept alive artificially. Students have been studying dead languages ever since.
Page xviii.
It is a world in which we expect religions to be based on books and nations to be founded on texts, a world in which we routinely converse with voices from the past and imagine that we might address readers of the future.
Page xix.
Homer’s epic had been a foundational text for he Greeks for generations. For Alexander, it acquired the status of an almost sacred text, which is why he carried it with him on his campaign. It is hat texts, especially foundational ones, do: They change the way we see the world and also the way we act upon it.
Page 4.
Alexander came to regard Homer’s Iliad not just as the most important story of Greek culture, but also as an ideal to which he aspired, a motivation for crossing into Asia.
Page 8.
Alexander had come to Asia to relive the stories of the Trojan War. Homer had shaped the way Alexander viewed the world, and now Alexander carried out that view through his campaign.
Page 9.
Alexander’s Macedonian and Greek army was smaller than the Persian force but better trained, and the Greeks had developed formidable battle tactics.
Page 9.
While his adversary Darius usually hung back when is armies fought, Alexander would lead the attack, throwing himself into the fray whenever he could.
Page 10.
It was as if Alexander had decided that faithful re-enactment of scenes form Homer was the path to victory.
Page 11.
The strength of these writing systems was also their weakness. As long as signs were based on meaning, there would be no end of them. In response, they came up with a radical solution: Writing needed to cut its ties with the world of objects and meaning. Instead it would simply represent language, and more specifically sound.
Page 13.
The Iliad wasn’t cobbled together by different scribes and different singers over many generations, the result was much more coherent than other scriptures such as the Hebrew Bible.
Page 15.
With each new battle won, with each new territory subjected, it became clear that the world was much larger than previously known to Greeks.
Page 15.
The task of holding the occupied lands became increasingly difficult the farther east Alexander got from Greece.
Page 16.
Alexander no longer thought of himself as the king of Macedonia. In possession of Babylon, he began styling himself “king of Asia.”
Pages 16-17.
Greeks were famously reluctant to learn foreign languages, let alone foreign writing systems. Their disdain for most non-Greek peoples was closely tied with language and writing.
Page 17.
The Iliad was the text through which everyone learned how to read and write, the chief vehicle for spreading the Greek language and alphabet. It became a foundational text par excellence.
Page 17.
As Greek became a world language, the people who spoke it felt like world citizens.
Page 18.
Alexander’s export of the Iliad proved that a foundational text could be carried far outside its place of origin and yet retain its power, becoming a truly cosmopolitan text.
Page 18.
Today, only East Asia is holding out against the alphabet, and even there phonetic writing systems and syllabaries have been advancing.
Page 19.
Literature turned Alexander into the cosmopolitan king of the East he had always wanted to be.
Page 21.
The ruins of two types of buildings were left standing, at least partially, dominating the sites: theaters and libraries. These were the buildings to which the greatest resources were devoted, a testament to their significance. Both were connected to literature.
Page 21.
The strategic location of the city, which quickly became a major port, was crucial for the library’s success.
Page 22.
All the center of the library were the epics of Homer, which were copied, edited, and annotated with a painstaking intensity otherwise reserved for scripture.
Page 22.
Humans had been telling stories orally ever since they had learned how to communicate with symbolic sounds and use those sounds to tell talks of the past and of the future, of gods and d demons, tales that gave communities a shared past and a common destiny. Stories also preserved human experience, telling listeners how to act in difficult situations and how to avoid common pitfalls.
Page 28.
Writing was used by scribes to centralize power in cities and to control he hinterland.
Page 29.
The Epic of Gilgamesh not only asked its readers to admire urban civilization and shudder at its destruction, it also boasted of the tablets on which the story was written.
Page 33.
Control of territory, the concentration of power in a single place, was made possible by the fact that decrees could be delivered by messengers (written on clay tab lets and placed in clay envelopes), and that records could be kept in archives.
Pages 34-35.
Originally, scribes had passed their craft down within families from father to son. But as writing gained in importance, demand for these highly prized professionals increased, and scribal schools were set up.
Page 35.
Scribes were the first bureaucrats, sitting comfortably indoors counting grain, fixing contracts, and keeping records while their brothers labored in the fields.
Page 36.
Divination practices required interpreting special calendars and reading commentaries.
Page 37.
Writing, begun as an accounting technique, had changed the way humans viewed the world around them.
Page 38.
In Nineveh, scribes could be more powerful than a king, even a king with rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing.
Page 38.
For Ashurbanipal, rising to the highest rungs of scribal art meant that he would be the first king not at the mercy of his interpreters, because he would be capable of disputing the findings of his divinatory scribes.
Page 38.
Writing meant power, that power could be displayed not only through the heads of enemies on stakes but also through writing skills and a large collection of cuneiform tablets.
Page 39.
Ashurbanipal had realized that writing was not just useful for long-distance warfare and administration, or for economic transactions. Because cuneiform tablets were artificial extensions of human minds, they would allow him to accumulate more knowledge than anyone before him. The entire library would be like an artificial memory, making him the most knowledgeable human in the history of the world.
Pages 40-41.
Having accumulated more information than anyone had before, Ashurbanipal realized that his store of knowledge was useful only if it was organized. Confronted with this challenge, he created the first significant system of information management.
Page 41.
Sumerian scribes couldn’t save their civilization, but they could pass it on to their captors by teaching Akkadians how to write.
Page 42.
As long as languages were only spoken, they died when all their speakers disappeared. But once stories were fixed by marks on clay, the old languages persisted.
Page 42.
Writing, it turned out, was a tool for holding an empire, not only because of its effects on governance and the economy but also because of literature. Writing, centralized urban living, territorial empires, and written stories were closely aligned and would remain so for the next several thousand years.
Page 43.
Writing not only allowed readers access t the past but also allowed them to imagine how literature might endure into the future and inspire readers not yet alive.
Page 43.
The only thing that can ensure survival is continual use.
Page 44.
Overly impressed by the endurance of writing, the world forgot that everything was subject to forgetting, even writing.
Page 44.
Giving readers access to the past was a most profound consequence of writing. As long s stories were told orally, they were adapted to new audiences and listeners, coning alive n the present. Once captured by writing, the past endured.
Page 44.
Writing creates history.
Page 44.
Foundational texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Homeric epics survived by inspiring powerful kings to create institutions that increased their longevity.
Page 46.
The greatest difference between the Hebrew writing and other epics was that the Hebrew collection was shaped by a people enduring long periods of exile.
Page 48.
In sending Ezra and his party back to their ancestral homeland, the |Persian king wasn’t acting out of charity. He was sending Ezra to secure an imperial outpost.
Page 51.
The loss of the temple had been especially hard for the Judeans because it was the dwelling place of their god. … This concentration was what set them apart form their neighbors. When they had lost Jerusalem, they had lost not only the seat of their king, but also the seat of their god.
Page 52.
The words of the scripture weren’t meant for continuous reading to a general audience because they had been cobbled together from many sources.
Page 54.
Ezra’s decision to establish portable scripture as the means to worship their god proved crucial. An idea born from the experience of Babylonian exile, it suited the new exile equally well. With the temple gone again, Jews would worship in synagogues, and their services would be administered not by priests but by rabbis, scribes who could read and interpret the scripture.
Page 56.
At the moment when Jews were forming an ethnic identity by setting themselves apart form the people of the land, they were also becoming a people of the book.
Page 56.
The Hebrew Bible survived because it was not dependent on land, on kings and empires; it could do without them and create its own worshippers who would carry it wherever they might be.
Page 56.
Thanks to its continuous use, the Hebrew Bible was able to bind the exile communities together, ensuring its own survival.
Page 58.
Reading aloud and interpreting written words became important religious activities, making religion a matter of literature. Since there was always something hidden and unknowable about god, sacred words could not be taken at face value. It became necessary to read between the lines and come up with ingenious interpretations that mighty reveal hidden truths.
Page 58.
In the wake of Ezra, poring over obscure passages, connecting distant parts of a text, and bringing ingenuity to the interpretation of scripture became tantamount to religious service.
Page 59.
The presence of water was certainly one reason why Jerusalem was so contested throughout its history.
Pages 59-60.
Sacred scriptures are a subset of foundational texts, all of which create cultural cohesion, tell stories of origin and destiny, and connect cultures to the remote past. In addition to these features of foundational texts more generally, sacred scriptures inspire worship and obedience.
Page 60.
A good indicator that we are in the presence of a sacred text is the existence of an exclusive group of readers charged with interpreting it, from religious authorities to the United States Supreme Court.
Page 61.
Today, a vast majority of humans claims adherence to some form of sacred scripture. How we choose to interpret these texts has become one of the crucial questions of our time.
Page 61.
The texts revolving around teacher and students, by contrast, tap into an experience almost everyone can share: We all were students once and carry that memory with us for the rest of our lives.
Page 63.
Writing wasn’t just n alternative to the old ways of memorizing words. It was something entirely news, a technology that would bring with it profound changes that were difficult to predict.
Page 68.
All the accounts of the Buddha we have today are based on texts written hundreds of years after his death, texts that would ultimately acquire the status of sacred scripture.
Page 70.
It is possible, although ultimately unproven, that China invented writing independently from Mesopotamia and Egypt, though the very idea of devising a code to capture language may have been borrowed from Mesopotamia. The Chinese writing system itself was certainly unique. Words were not divided into single sounds, as in alphabetic writing; rather, concepts and things received their own signs, which grew in complexity and number. Today’s Chinese writing is directly derived form this ancient origin, resisting the spread of alphabetic writing to this day.
Pages 72-73.
The expense of papyrus, which had to be imported, was a drag on literacy.
Page 78.
Socrates … didn’t use writing in his teaching method. Instead he found potential students at the gymnasium or in the marketplace by drawing them into conversation. He wasn’t always successful, because he was so odd. He was ugly, with a broad face and snub nose, and not well groomed. … He had developed a following among the aristocratic youths of the city. What Socrates offered them was a new way of thinking in which everything was open to questioning.
Page 78.
Among all the great teachers who refused to write, Socrates was the one to reject writing most explicitly. This rejection showed the extent to which writing had become a cultural force.
Page 80.
As a technology keyed to language, writing had extended and altered how humans communicated and even how they thought. This triumphal rise of writing was causing a backlash spearheaded by charismatic teachers like Socrates.
Page 80.
Plato was in the process of securing his masters legacy through written words. |He wasn’t writing down Socrates’ words as speeches. That would have been too much of a betrayal. He honored his teacher’s method of question and answer by writing everything as dialogues.
Page 80.
Everything we know about Socrates - his ability to drink his companions under the table, his disheveled appearance, the love he inspired in his students - comes to us through Plato’s dialogues.
Page 81.
Producing new scripture would have been an unheard-of act of blasphemy. He would accept the existing scripture, declaring, “Do not think that I have cone to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” What did this mean, to fulfill the scriptures? It meant putting himself into these scriptures.
Page 83.
Written accounts of Jesus emerged less than a century after his death, based on oral traditions among his students.
Page 84.
By focusing on their master’s humiliation and death, the authors of the Gospels created an unusual type of hero, a rebel who was also a victim.
Page 84.
Libraries like those at Pergamum and Alexandria housed the writings of Plato, as well as Home, and were part of the export of Greek culture across Alexander’s realm.
Page 86.
Though conversant with the Hebrew Bible, Jesus had spoken Aramaic, the common language of the |Middle East. But when his students turned his words into writings, they did so in the most prestigious language of the region, brought by Alexander: Common Greek.
Page 86.
At first, the followers of Jesus considered the texts that had sprung up around their master to be independent of the Hebrew Bible
Page 87.
The ensuing struggle between Christians and Jews over the Hebrew Bible became a struggle over different writing formats. Jews stuck with the traditional papyrus scrolls, such as the one Ezra in Jerusalem had held up to be worshipped. Christians, by contrast, availed themselves of two complementary inventions.
Page 88.
Christians used parchment, and they combined it with a Roman invention that favored this new writing surface, a new system of stacking sheets, binding them on one side, and placing them between covers. The Romans called it the codex, and we know it as the book.
Page 89.
Soon a format war was raging among Jews and Christians in which Jews faithful to the Hebrew scripture stuck to the papyrus scroll, used in Jewish services to this day, while Christians adopted the parchment codex. Paul was an early adopter of this new form.
Page 89.
In the long run, the codex became the dominant format. Compact, easy to handle and transport, it also enable readers to flip through pages and browse. The two formats had been drawn into a battle between an older type of scripture, based on a foundational text, and a newer type of scripture, based on the recent lessons of a charismatic teacher.
Page 90.
Buddhism had been able to exert influence in China because its sutras were not addressed to a particular culture, nor tied to a particular territory, as many older texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics, or the Hebrew Bible had been. The universal appeal of these texts, and the missionary zeal of many Buddhists, allowed these texts to find adherents in all classes and far outside India.
Page 91.
Paper made a difference. Previously, texts in China were written on bones, strips of bamboo, or silk, all either cumbersome or expensive. Paper, by contrast, was cheap yet durable, so that written matter could be efficiently stored and preserved. Its smooth surface and thinness allowed much more information to be condensed into a small space, making it feasible to keep extensive records, which laid the foundation for sophisticated bureaucracies. It was also easy to transport.
Page 92.
Four world-changing inventions are attributed to China: the compass, gunpowder, paper, and print. Two of four were inventions in writing technology.
Page 94.
Because Confucius had been a servant of the state and had taught the importance of maintaining public order, his teachings became of particular interest to rulers and bureaucrats.
Page 96.
While most cultures revere long epic narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Odyssey as the foundation of their culture, in China it had been the so-called Classics of Songs, a carefully arranged poetry collection, that served as the most studied test (and was later attributed to the editorial hand of Confucius as part of the Confucian classics). The very idea of establishing Japanese literature through a poetry anthology thus followed a Chinese tradition.
Pages 99-100.
Murasaki Shikibu’s secret knowledge of Chinese literature shone through in many allusions to Chinese poetry, but the final work bore little resemblance to Chinese literature. A new literary form, it signaled Japan’s growing sense of cultural independence.
Page 100.
Paradoxically, the discrimination against women had put them in a better position to innovate than their privileged male colleagues, who remained fixated on tradition and Chinese writing.
Page 100.
High-born women were difficult to see, and almost impossible to approach. The barriers separating women from men came in layers: stone walls, wooden fences, bamboo blinds, fabric curtains, and paper screens.
Page 101.
Even sons, male siblings, and uncles might never meet their female relatives face-to-face. A woman of marriageable age could go about her life unseen by any man other than her father.
Page 102.
A good poem was supposed to take something from the natural world - a plant, a flower, an animal - and relate it to the occasion being written about.
Page 102.
In a society in which much depended on hints and allusions, poems were a crucial means of communication.
Page 102.
The ability to manufacture high-quality paper had ushered in a golden age of calligraphy, an art required of women and men who hoped to succeed at court.
Pages 104-105.
For hundreds of years, Japan had adopted Chinese civilization and science, an extreme case of one culture accepting most of the products of another. … Rome had similarly assimilated Greek culture.
Page 106.
Because Chinese signs were not phonetic, the Japanese had been able to adapt them to their own language, pronouncing the Chinese signs in Japanese.
Page 106.
Women were supposed to use a different writing system known as the kana script - the script in which The Tale of Genji was written as well.
Page 107.
Buddhism emphasized detachment from the world and an appreciation for fleeting moments of beauty. Many poems exchanged at the Heian court were written to capture this sense of an ephemeral world.
Page 107.
The earliest surviving examples of print in China, Korea, and Japan were all of Buddhist sutras.
Page 108.
In Muraski Shikibu’s time, The Tale of Genji taught readers how to behave so effectively that it was used as a manual of court etiquette.
Page 112.
Woodblock printing made sense only for short works that would be reproduced by the thousands, such as Buddhist sutras, not a large work written for an extremely small readership. The Tale of Genji circulated in copies that had been written by hand on paper.
Page 113.
We know much more about life at the Heian court during the Middle Ages than about almost any other place on earth during that time because of the incomparable Tale of Genji.
Page 114.
The entire Tale of Genji erupted into Western consciousness only with the translation by Arthur Waley in the early twentieth century, almost a thousand years after this text was first composed.
Page 115.
A first rule of creative wr4iting programs is “Write what you know.” But the history of literature shows just how unusual autobiographical writing really was. Like all things, it had to be invented. There is a widespread belief that autobiographical writing was invented by Saint Augustine, writing in late antiquity in order to give an account of his conversion to Christianity.
Page 118.
As soon as a new form of entertainment is invented, One Thousand and One Nights presents itself.
Page 121.
One Thousand and One Nights delights in the market because the market was the environment in which this story collection came into its own. Intended for a broader audience than court literature, it was born and for sale in the market, a favorite among merchants.
Page 124.
The key to One Thousand and One Nights was not the origin of this or that story but what held them all together, namely their unforgettable narrator.
Page 127.
The impulse to tell stories, to put events into a sequence, to form plots and bring them to a conclusion, is so fundamental that it is as if this impulse is biologically rooted in our species. We are driven to make connections, from A to B and from B to C.
Page 129.
For the longest time, storytelling had existed prior to and then below the radar of literature. Stories were told orally by professional storytellers or amateurs, and only on rare occasions did stories insinuate themselves into the exclusive world of literature. But ultimately, more and more popular stories found scribes willing to preserve them and assemble them into larger collections.
Page 130.
Invented in China, the art of making paper was kept secret for hundreds of years.
Page 136.
Because paper was unusually smooth and yet could absorb ink cleanly, t allowed for unheard-of precision in writing, which resulted in a flowering of calligraphy.
Page 136.
For hundreds of years, the secret of papermaking remained in the Chinese cultural sphere.
Page 136.
The Arabs improved on the newly acquired technology. Chinese paper was usually made form fibers of the mulberry tree, important to Chinese culture because it also hosted silkworms.
Page 137.
Paper powered an explosion of writing and intellectual activity.
Page 138.
Because of the importance of Baghdad to writing culture, large sheets of fine paper became known as Baghdadi.
Page 138.
Foundational texts are often at the center of a writing culture and are therefore in the best position to profit from new technologies. At the same time, new technologies tended to make writing cheaper, thus lowering the bar for entry into the written world.
Page 139.
Thanks to paper, literature became more compact and lighter than ever before.
Page 139.
We still count paper in reams, a word that was adopted into Spanish from the Arabic rizma. From there, paper slowly filtered into Christian Europe, where it first encountered resistance from scribes accustomed to parchment.
Page 140.
Paper here reveals its two sides, leading to a high culture based on calligraphic qualities and a popular culture based on its widespread availability.
Page 141.
What matters is not the origin of the stories but the ingenuity of those who collect them, write them down, distribute them, and use them.
Page 143.
There is a temptation to think of an invention as the work of a genius who single-handedly changes the world. But this is rarely how inventions are made.
Pages 149-150.
Gutenberg was not the first to think of using movable letters and combining them to form pages that could be printed.
Page 150.
What took place in Mainz was a reinvention, an adaptation of techniques already developed elsewhere.
Page 151.
The first and perhaps most crucial step was not how to print, but how to make individual letters.
Page 151.
Mass-producing letters made it possible to mass-produce books.
Page 152.
Once a page was set, it needed to be inked. Normal inks were too liquid and needed to be thickened through a process of trial and error. The thickened ink was more difficult for the pages to absorb, so the pages needed to be carefully moistened beforehand.
Page 152.
In East Asia, print and paper had been combined to form paper money. Marco Polo had marveled at this almost magical invention whereby valueless paper could be made to stand in for gold. Europe didn’t have paper money yet, but the mass-produced indulgences Gutenberg was printing were nearly as good.
Page 155.
Without realizing it, Gutenberg was repeating the pattern that had been established in East Asia, where print had been used primarily for religious tests such as the Diamond Sutra. Once again a foundational and sacred text proved an early adopter of new writing technologies.
Page 156.
Gutenberg planned to print in two colors, adding a ruby red, the way many calligraphers did when they copied the Bible in two different colors, to make the mechanical Bible look like a handwritten one.
Page 157.
The printed Bible would have the look and feel of a handwritten book.
Pages 157-158.
Gutenberg’s Bible didn’t just look as if it was written by hand. It looked much better, achieving a level of precision and symmetry undreamed of by even the most pious monk. Having started out with the hope that the printed Bible might approximate the look of a handwritten one, Gutenberg ended up exceeding his task, creating a new standard by which books would be judged. Print wasn’t just a way of mass-producing books; it completely changed the way books should look. A machine had triumphed over the human hand.
Page 158.
For a parchment Bible, the skins of well over a hundred calves were needed.
Page 158.
The mechanical mass production of books favored paper.
Page 158.
What would the Church say about these printed bibles? Gutenberg had asked no one for permission.
Page 159.
It was Saint Jerome’s Latin Bible, commonly called the Vulgate, that had become the Bible of European Christianity. Recently, some scholars had questioned the quality of Saint Jerome’s translation, but Gutenberg used it anyway. The Vulgate was the traditional, authorized version favored by the Church, and Gutenberg wasn’t going to risk his capital outlays on a new and untested translation.
Page 159.
Gutenberg’s method promised to reduce the countless errors that copyists introduced into the holy text.
Page 160.
Overall, the errors introduced by human scribes would stop. Print was perfect for allowing the Church to exert control over its scripture. The Church and print were made for each other.
Page 161.
Without realizing it, Gutenberg and the Church had set in motion forces that would change the Church by changing the role of writing and reading.
Page 161.
The theses carefully handwritten by Luther in Latin, were not meant for public consumption, but … friends thought they should be published anyway. In Nuremberg, a councilman translated them into German, and within weeks the theses were available in several towns.
Page 164.
In the first sixty years of print, most printed matter had been drawn from works that were already well known, such as Gutenberg’s Latin grammar or the Bible. In Italy, so-called humanists, entranced with the literature of classical Greece and Rome, printed ancient texts (print had arrived just in time to preserve the Greek scrolls that had been brought to Italy after the fall of Constantinople).
Page 164.
Print had fueled the wide availability or indulgences and now it fueled the polemics against them.
Page 165.
The presses didn’t take sides, and they happily fanned the flames of a fight that was increasingly defined by their output.
Page 166.
Luther, the poor monk who was merely pointing out abuses, who was learning how to speak to and for common people, managed to acquire more authority than the Pope because he was an author.
Page 166.
A full one-third of all works published in Germany during Luther’s life were by Martin Luther.
Page 166.
Book-burnings were no match for the flood of print, which Luther had become adept at channeling against the Church. Printers were able to print Luther’s sermons more quickly than the Church could burn them. Book burnings only led to new editions and reprints. In the new world of print, paper was stronger than fire.
Pages 166-167.
Thanks to Gutenberg, more Bibles had ben printed, and their prices had kept falling and their formats shrinking, until individual priests and monks could possess their own copies.
Page 167.
Luther’s letter to the archbishop, his arguments against indulgences, against the authority of the Pope, were all based on is close study of his copy of the Bible
Page 167.
Gutenberg would have been amazed. His Latin Bible had stood as the first achievement of bookmaking by means of print, but it hadn’t yet tapped into the real source of power of the press: the mass audience. Gutenberg had merely sought to meet an existing, finite demand, namely large bibles for churches and monasteries, more cheaply. He hadn’t realized that his invention would radically expand demand and thereby change it. Sixty years after its invention, the printing press was reshaping how books were read and by whom.
Page 168.
Inventions: They are often the result of independent developments that suddenly converge, and those we call inventors are people who see those conferences for the first time.
Page 170.
While print popularized the Bible, wrestling it from the control of the Church, print also empowered a Christian form of textual fundamentalism, demanding of its readers that they live according to the rules set down in a text from the remote past.
Page 170.
The Incas, for all their impressive roads, and buildings, were ignorant of writing.
Page 173.
Pizarro did not know how to write his own name. Like his Inca adversary, he was illiterate.
Page 174.
Maya writing did not overly impress Cortes, however, perhaps because he was comparing everything he saw to Europe and Asia. In Eurasia, every early civilization from China to the Near Eat had been in occasional contact with others. The single landmass, stretching from east to west along roughly the same climate zone, had allowed laboriously cultivated crops and domesticated animals to spread form one culture to the next in a continent-spanning web of exchange. This exchange included writing. It was possible, even probable, that writing - the idea of writing - was developed only once, in Mesopotamia, and then spread to other early writing cultures like Egypt and perhaps as far as China. Writing, and with it literature, could be thought of as a single stroke of good luck.
Page 176.
Maya writing, paper, and books had not spread to South or North America because movement along a north-south axis, across different climatic zones and difficult terrain, was much harder than the lateral movement possible in Eurasia, which was oriented along an east-west axis.
Page 178.
Maya books were closely connected to the Maya science of “reckoning of years, months and days,” as Landa realized - the one thing everyone now associates with the Mayas: their calendar. It was an elaborate system, or rather several interlocking systems, beginning on August 11, 3114 B.C.E., and ending on December 31, 2012. Since that date, we have been living in the second 5,126-year cycle of the Maya calendars. (In 2012 some people believed that the end of the cycle meant the end of the world, cycle meant the end of the world, but that turned out to be a wrong reading of the Maya calendars.)
Page 179.
The history of literature is a history of book burnings - a testament to the power of written stories.
Page 181.
What draws me to creation myths in general is that they put on display the ability of literature to create worlds. While these myths putatively prise some powerful creator god, they also compete with the gods in imaging what creation would look like.
Page 184.
“Our Word Is Our Weapon” - the battle cry since the dawn of the written word.
Page 192.
It was with Cervantes that the features of modern authorship, from the printing press and a market for literature to ownership, plagiarism, and literary piracy, came together as never before. He was the first modern author.
Page 194.
This was one of the consequences of print: a market for stories.
Page 197.
Cervantes lived during the golden age of theater in Spain, comparable to that in Shakespeare’s England, an art form equally adept at entertaining kings and the illiterate masses.
Page 197.
Another type of story enjoyed great popularity: tales of knights roaming medieval Christendom, slaying monsters, worshipping damsels, and obeying a strict code of honor. These stories catered to a desire for a simpler world in which good and bad were easily identified and heroic action rewarded.
Page 198.
The wider availability of books fueled literacy, and literacy in turn fueled t5he demand for more books, a cycle that was turning with increasing speed. This cycle also expanded the types of literature that were circulating.
Page 199.
The demand for romances was so strong that Parisian booksellers didn’t even wait for whole works to be translated and instead sold them part by part.
Page 199.
Cervantes had realized that the proliferation of stories through print meant that more and more people saw the world through literature.
Page 200.
Book burning was ineffective in the world of print. Against the power of storytelling, only more storytelling would prevail.
Page 201.
The new industrial-scale production of paper and print took the tools of the trade completely out of the hands of writers and put them into the hands of entrepreneurs and industrialist.
Page 204.
In the era of foundational texts, sacred scripture charismatic teachers, and story collections, authorship and originality were of minor importance.
Page 205.
With the explosion of print, the quest for originality and ownership of new plots gained importance and found its way into the law.
Page 206.
In this new world of machines, authors clearly got the short end of the stick.
Page 208.
The division of labor between people who invent stories (authors), people who own the machines for producing printed books (printers and publishers), and people who sell those books (distributors and booksellers) has certainly benefited authors, allowing them to reach many more readers than ever before. But it has also limited their control over their own works.
Page 208.
Even though the idea of individual authorship had first emerged in the classical world, it5s breakthrough occurred only once it intersected with print and the mass production of literature.
Page 209.
Female authorship became a career option in an age when few such options existed. For women.
Page 210.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to control access to literature. Women, former slaves, every group and class was pressing into the world of literature, and there was no way to stop them.
Page 210.
It was in the form of printed newspapers and broadsides that the United States first declared its independence from England.
Page 214.
The problem with books was that they were prohibitively expensive to make, requiring significant t capital investments in paper, type and binding, not to mention labor.
Page 217.
The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel would compare the ritual of reading he morning paper to the morning prayer.
Page 217.
The colonies possessed fewer newspaper but more towns with printing presses than the mother country, where printing was centered in London and could e more easily controlled.
Page 218.
As the cheapest vehicles for spreading new ideas, broadsides and pamphlets had contributed to the climate of democratic unrest among the colonists.
Page 219.
Of all the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, Franklin knew the most about he technologies that had made this document possible because most of those technologies were concentrated in his own hands.
Page 222.
There was too much to know; new devices for filtering and organizing knowledge were necessary.
Page 223.
Newspapers were good at creating a lively but chaotic atmosphere of colliding ideas. Encyclopedias were good at ordering knowledge.
Page 226.
Together, newspapers and encyclopedias helped create the explosive Enlightenment mixture that would lead to the Declaration of Independence.
Page 226.
Franklin was in a most enviable position as an author: he could write what he wanted, print it, and force I down the throats of the public.
Page 228.
World Literature: Goethe realized that literature was expanding, that ore literature from more periods and places was becoming available to more people than ever before. Hitherto confined to particular places and traditions, literature was becoming a single, integrated whole.
Page 235.
Begun for purely economic reasons, imperialism made it useful, even necessary, to learn something about foreign cultures.
Page 241.
Through force and suppression, but also through print technologies, colonialism was connecting literary traditions in new ways.
Page 241.
World literature depended on the painstaking and underpaid work of translators and that it was based on a market, the unlikely by-product of European imperialism.
Page 242.
In many ways, the Odyssey is an early example of travel literature.
Page 246.
Because cotton and cotton-based products were central to the new machine-based economy, the smokestacks of Manchester had become the emblem of the Industrial Revolution.
Page 253.
If Manchester was the center of the Industrial Revolution, Berlin was the center of a philosophical one.
Page 254.
In Berlin … philosophy concerned itself with thinking in historical terms, recognizing that all its definitions, abstractions, and insights were subject to change, to historical evolution. The person who had taught this history lesson was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Page 254.
Other influential texts in the history of literature accrued their power over time, sometimes over hundreds or even thousand s of years. The success of The Communist Manifesto was more immediate: It unfolded its greatest influence barely seventy years after its first publication. No other text in the history of literature had such an impact in so short a time.
Page 255.
Marx had developed a powerful alternative to Hegel. In Hegel’s version imagination and ideas were the driving forces of world history. In Marx’s version, it was humans transforming the world through their labor. This meant that the new key discipline was not philosophy but economics.
Page 257.
The more places in the world looked like Manchester, the larger the industrial proletariat would become, until it would be numerous enough to overthrow its oppressors. This was storytelling at its most powerful, transforming helpless victims into come-from-behind heroes.
Page 258.
By noticing an emerging world market in literature, Goethe had caught a glimpse of the powers of capitalism that Marx and Engels were now describing in much greater detail.
Page 259.
The Manifesto was published serially. … It was a sign of the power of serialization that The Communist Manifesto, numbering only twenty three pages, was published in this way despite the fact that it was written to e read in one sitting.
Page 260.
There was almost no response to The communist Manifesto, which had no measurable impact on events.
Page 261.
As more editions of the Manifesto came to fruition, an intriguing pattern emerged: The more copies of the Manifesto were published in a given place, the more likely that a revolution would occur.
Page 262.
Since the deaths of Marx and Engels, the Manifesto had found admirers not only among professional revolutionaries like Lenin but also among artists.
Page 264.
The Communist Manifesto kept finding readers converting them and inciting them to action until it became one of the most revered, and feared, texts in history.
Page 270.
Hitler’s long-winded rants made Mein Kampf the most unread book in history, a stark contrast to The Communist Manifesto, with which it competed so desperately.
Page 271.
Ever since Martin Luther had demonstrated what could be done with print, authorities had been trying to control publishers and authors.
Page 274.
Literary history didn’t move steadily forward, form oral recitation to cuneiform and then to print; it could move sideways, stall, and even move backward, depending on who cont4olled the means of literary production.
Page 279.
When I contemplate the fortunes and function of literature in the twentieth century, authors bearing witness to the horrors of fascism and totalitarianism rank high. … Literature was prepared to meet this challenge because it had learned to care about the lives of common people, not just the fates of kings and heroes.
Page 285.
In the twentieth century, these two developments, mass internments and literature, converged in the extraordinary literature of bearing witness.
Pages 285-286.
Europeans had first made contact with western Africa in the fifteenth century and subsequently established trading posts along the coast, leaving the interior relatively untouched. This changed with the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, when European powers, emboldened by superior war technology and steamships, carved up Africa among themselves.
Pages 301-302.
The dynamic process between oral storytelling and writing technologies continues to this day. The sea of unwritten stories is still infinite and waiting to be transformed into literature.
Page 305.
New nations need stories to tell them who they are. … Independence, it turned out, was a boom time for literature.
Page 306.
Finding the right language was connected to finding the right literary form.
Page 313.
This is what a foundational text has to do: translate a place, a culture, and a language into literature for the first time.
Page 314.
Making computers smaller, faster, and lighter for the space mission ultimately allowed them to enter people’s homes.
Pages 329-330.
Personal computers and computer networks have changed everything from how literature is written to how it is distributed and read. It is as if paper, the book, and print had emerged all at the same time.
Page 330.
A backup copy if the Internet Archive is housed in the Bibleotheca Alexrandrina, the rebuilt library of Alexandria, in the first such storage facility outside the United States.
Page 331.
Literature evolved from being the exclusive possession of scribes and kings to reaching increasingly larger numbers of readers and writers. This democratization of literature was aided by technologies from the alphabet and papyrus to paper and print, all of which lowered the barriers of entry, opening the literary world to more people, who then innovated new forms - novels, newspapers, manifestoes - while also affirming the importance of older foundational texts.
Page 335.
The rise of writing brought forth opposition by charismatic teachers in different parts of the world. New technologies led to format wars such as the one between the papyrus scroll and the parchment book, while sacred texts often became early adopters of new methods of reproduction.
Page 335.
The story of literature keeps changing.
Page 336.
Notice the combination of old and new. Most people had stopped scrolling ever since the papyrus scroll gave way to the parchment gook, but now, after two millennia, this act of scrolling has suddenly come back because the unending string of words stored by computers is closer to a continuous scroll than to discrete pages.
Page 336.
The more I look back, the more I see the past in the present.
Page 336.
The most striking feature of literature has always been its ability to project speech deep into space and time.
Page 337.
The endurance of electronic media over time has already emerged as a problem because of the rapid obsolescence of computer programs and formats.
Page 337.
Librarians warn that the best way to preserve writing from the vagaries of future format wars is to print out everything on paper.
Page 337.
The most important lesson from the history of literature is that the only guarantee for survival is continual use. A text needs to remain relevant enough to be translated, transcribed, transcoded, and read by each generation in order to persist over time. It is education, not technology, that will ensure the future of literature.
Page 337.
The world population has grown even as literacy rates have risen sharply which means that infinitely more writing is being done by more people, and published and read more widely, than ever before.
Page 338.