An eternity ago I sent out an email survey to all of my friends:
In the Middle Ages there were monks who devoted their lives to the preservation of the written word.
They spent day after day copying books. They wrote them out by hand.
If a nuclear holocaust (or some other global disaster that would destroy civilization as we know it) happened and the Dark Ages returned, and it was up to you to preserve one book. A book you could only preserve by writing it out by hand. A book that would cease to exist without you - what book would you choose?
I got some really interesting responses and I never sent out the results. I should actually dig them up.
A lot of people said that they would copy the dictionary.
PRC said that he wouldn't have time to copy a book in the event of a global disaster. But he had a list of books that he would hermeticaly seal and store in his basement.
A few people said that they could probably keep up with more than one book. (these were my favorite responses.)
Momvee was committed to preserving "I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith. I think she was interested in preserving a second book by Ms. Smith the title fo which escapes me.
I had never come up with my own answer. It is so hard to choose. I think I might copy "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wind in the Willows" or "Microserfs" because I would enjoy that work. I guilt trip myself thinking that it would be more important to posterity to preserve "The Origin of the Species" or some weightier more meaningful book.
Nobody mentioned the Bible or Aristotle or Plato. Perhaps a very ambitious person might tackle the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or a print out of all of the pages of Wikipedia in the state they are right now.
I ask myself what book has been published in the past 36 years that encompasses what we know, what we have learned, how we felt, what we thought, did and believed and what happened. That book is probably different for each 36 year old on the planet today. In a time where we drown in a sea of information what record do we have of our collective wisdom? What is worth knowing?
Some people at a party some years ago were discussing how digital media have such short lifespans. Systems and machines become outdated, software devices wear out - tapes, diskettes, CD's, DVD's. I don't know how it is now but back in the day a very strong magnet could wipe your hard drive. i was happy to point out that clay tablets the Sumerians had to keep track of grain in the storehouse - they've survived pretty damn long and some of them are still legible as well.
They were not impressed.
The RM (roomate) and I were at the Metropolitan Museum in the Egyptian section and she pointed to a scribe and declared that he was our historical antecedent. Which is so true. And all of those papyrus scrolls covered in writing and drawings are not that different from the kind of work and output that is expected of us at Big Scienceville(TM). Although I wonder if an archaeologist will ever find one of my spreadsheets or her powerpoint presentations. And if she did, could she read it?
It was funny to see that we were the same scribes in a different age.
It doesn't seem like the world is going to end in the near future so I think we can just scan all those books and have them stored as pdf's in a big distributed digital library. At least that's what people tell me about the world of the future. We are spared writer's cramp and can go back to coping with our carpal tunel.
6 comments:
I worry about the ephemerality of digital media a lot. Probably because I'm lazy and worrying is so much easier than mopping the kitchen floor.
And just so everyone knows, I picked _I Capture the Castle_ with the assumption that I wasn't the only person saving a book. Otherwise I might have picked the Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare. Or at least _Mansfield Park_, the most underrated Austen...see, I'm getting into the esoteric realm again.
Not to be an asshole, but...
I think it's bad enough the Bible survived the decline of Mediterranean civilization to poison Medieval European civilization with its toxic blend of bogus cosmology, racism (YHWH orders the Hebrews to commit genocide on numerous occasions in the book of Exodus), misogyny (the Old Testament test to see if your wife was unfaithful was to give her a small dose of poison and see if she dies), homophobia (in both the new and old testaments), anti-family-values (Jesus orders his followers to abandon their families and follow him), anti-capitalism (Jesus orders his followers to give up their posessions and live in some kind of anarcho-hippie commune... thank G-d no one listened to that part of his message, else we'd never have modern medicine, mechanized transportation, computers, etc.), and bizarro nonsense (God orders Ezekiel to bake bread using his own shit as fuel?!?!).
In my opinion, the only indisputibly worthwhile parts of the Bible would be commandments #4-10 and the Golden Rule, reproduced below:
Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy... (in modern terms, take at least one day off work per week)
Honor your father and your mother... (unless they molest you or are drunken idiots)
You shall not murder... (as my war-mongering, born-again parents are so keen to point out, that's "murder", not "kill")
You shall not commit adultery... (though, given that polygamy was sanctioned in the Old Testament, "adultery" must be culturally relative - I certainly wouldn't translate this as "no sex without marriage")
You shall not steal. (Of course, we have centuries of Europeans stealing shit from every other civilization on Earth to thank for all our modern comforts and achievements)
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (Note that this is not a blanket condemnation of lying... apparently telling inconsequential lies just to be polite is OK)
You shall not covet your neighbor's wife. You shall not covet your neighbor's house... (Granted, the entire industry of marketing - and a good portion of our economic success - is based on making people covet things... for instance, by having Catherine Zeta Jones as their spokesman, isn't Cingular Wireless encouraging us all to covet Michael Douglas' wife? I'd definitely say "don't fuck your neighbor's wife" is a perfectly good rule to live by, especially if we're talking about your literal, next-door neighbor)
And lastly, the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Does that mean I should go around performing oral sex on beautiful strangers and handing people $100 bills? I actually find Buddha's version a little more sensible: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you". Okay, I won't walk up and punch people in the face, and hopefully they won't do the same to me. That's a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
For the record, if I could preserve only one book, it would be a heavily illustrated guide to first aid.
Scratch that - I'd actually preserve one of those heavily illustrated guides that relief agenices hand out in rural Third World backwaters, encouraging people to build and use outhouses located far away from their water supply, dispose of their garbage and dead animals in a location far outside their village, and wash their hands after they pee or dismember a dead chicken.
Y'know... basic sanitation.
Sorry for the rant, but realize this is coming from a person who read the B-I-B-L-E cover to cover 4 times before his 16th birthday. That book fucked my mind for life... though, admittedly, that had as much to do with the context in which I was reading it (i.e., as part of a strict religious upbringing). My wife, who was baptized and confirmed Catholic but essentially raised without religion, laughs at my religiously-induced neuroses.
In the end, the only truly valuable thing I learned from reading the Bible was how to read. Beyond that, it just gave me nightmares of eternal torment in Hell and a big, bearded man in the sky with scrutinizing my every thought, word, and deed. It sucks.
BTW, Momvee, I think Shakespeare's complete works would be an excellent choice!
That would be hard to pick one book!
I wonder if those scrolls we were looking at were just as boring as the spreadsheets we create at work....
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