## Metadata - Author: [[Matthew Battles]] - Full Title: Palimpsest - Category: #books ## Highlights - “Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones,” Duke Senior instructs in As You Like It, “and good in everything.” ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=81)) - The ancient Indo-European root of “palimpsest” denotes devouring; a “character” is a thing that is cut; “to write,” too, derives from an ancient clan of Germanic words for scoring, slicing, and tearing. ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=150)) - Writing presents us with enormous, nearly insurmountable cognitive hurdles—so much about it resists the easy transmission of thought and sensibility made possible by half a million of years of human evolution. We evolved to communicate face-to-face and side by side; gesture accompanies word like cleaner fishes clinging to the body of a shark. The flicker of eyelids, the rhythm of the breath, even the odor and heat of the body, contribute to the conversation. Writing does more than simply strip all this away; it presents the reader with a new set of challenges: decoding and computation, assembly and algorithm. When schoolchildren struggle to learn the craft of the personal essay or the short story, they’re addressing the same questions faced by the scribes of ancient Sumer who turned the rude numeracy of gouges in clay into a net for catching language. Pushing arithmetic scrawl beyond the hash mark entailed a leap into symbolic life, into games of metaphor and this-for-that. Into poetry. And what did the ancient scribes have to draw from but their own lives as readers-already, as watching children glimpsing monsters in the cedars and gods in the clouds? ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=186)) - 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. I mean memory, and the longing for it—the impatience to make a mark, to see one’s being figured in time; I mean language, its meaning-making drive, which most often (but not always) takes the form of oral speech; the everywhere-emergent urge to name and to describe but also to promise, to vow, to lie, and to tell stories; the impulse to see pattern for pattern, to transpose color into music, growth into movement, event into tale, speech into line. Before the emergence of a particular group of letters, before all the sets of hieroglyphics and pictograms and syllabaries, writing is contrived of a deeper-foundationed alphabet: the visible provinces of the electromagnetic spectrum; the neural reflexes that have our eyes follow flickering movements, giving rise to the perception of figure and ground; and the tragic sensation of time’s passage, which makes speech and all of life into line and punctuation. ([Location 265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=265)) - Take numerals: Most of us have little difficulty counting by twos, threes, or fives, or even backward starting anywhere in the set of real numbers, often without a conscious sense of arithmetic or calculation. And yet try doing the same with another series of symbols that take a definite order: the alphabet. Right now, try to say the alphabet backward. Try writing it backward, if you have a pencil handy. Unless you’re practiced at it, or a savant, it’s impossible to do this without enormous mnemonic exertion.* It’s as if the alphabet has a grain, like the bark of a tree or a shark’s skin; it’s only smooth when you rub it in the right direction. Number, at least in the first instance, seems bidirectional, ambidextrous. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=277)) - metaphor, the world’s uncanny habit of speaking to itself through us ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=288)) - You may not be able to say the alphabet backward, but msot poelpe cna raed wirtetn smatetetns taht srcmalbe teh ltetres wtiihn wrdos—a powerful example of writing’s powers of cognitive domestication. Writing teaches our brains to do all kinds of somersaults and tricks. ([Location 350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=350)) - Underlying the riotous diversity of writing systems, the essential shapes or configurations—we could say the true graphic roots—of the conjoined marks that compose the letterforms are remarkably few. The cross, the circle, the line (to name most of them) together give scope to considerable meaning-laden variation. It has been suggested that the source of these configurations consists in the junctures or overlappings of forms in the human visual experience. The skeins of roots and limbs in the forest; the long curl of the river across the plain; the scatter of tracks made by birds in wet sand; such perhaps are the templates (or better, the muses) of writing. ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=550)) - characters don’t evolve only to be seen and read but made. Written. And the line is a handy tool for this kind of making. ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=560)) - Are letters like roots, or are they more like flowers? Are they, in other words, fundamental units of meaning, as they often enchant us into believing; or are they blossoms, at once beguiling and spectral, which individual imaginations issue forth in order to invite others to take up our stories and ideas and reproduce them? ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=562)) - Beginning about 32,000 years ago, Paleolithic people across what is now Western Europe filled caverns like those at Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France with images of game animals, predators, and sometimes, themselves. Lascaux cave alone contains some two thousand images. These prolific artists of the Paleolithic continued to draw in their dark, smoky caverns for more than 20,000 years—a record of continuous cultural production that may be unmatched anywhere on Earth save Australia. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=586)) - But the art of ancient Europe’s cave painters did not give rise to the writing of today. Five millennia pass between the last painters in the Dordogne and the emergence of writing on the other side of the Mediterranean. ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=636)) - The connection I want to draw between the painters of the Paleolithic and the first scribes is not causal or even chronological; instead, we should look for ways in which all of these mark makers, widely separated by time and culture, answer similar problems and respond to similar urges. Before the practical conveyance of information or the skillful telling of tales, the mark makers come together in the more basic urge to play. ([Location 639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=639)) - The linguist Max Weinreich popularized an aphoristic explanation of the difference between a language and a dialect: a language, he said, is a dialect with an army and a navy. ([Location 1330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1330)) - Superficially, the powers and relations of written things seem to have a uniformly masculine character; from the clay-smudged scribes of the Fertile Crescent to the Chinese elite and their calligraphy examinations to Grub Street hacks who strove to colonize writing’s provinces with all the rough vigor of a commoditized vernacular, writing has been overwhelmingly a male enterprise. But this doesn’t tell us anything important about writing itself, except to remind us what Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau have already said—that it is born as an instrument of power. As such it suffers the gendered cramps and tensions of all such instruments. For Woolf teaches this as well: alongside writing’s career as an instrumentality of power, it has pursued a flickering existence as a modality of consciousness. It’s this career, I’d wager, that matters more to most of us in the end. And in this regard, writing has far to go in achieving anything like a full flowering. Writing’s achievements are woven through with a yellow thread of injustice and alienation; pull it, and the whole thing unravels like a tawdry tapestry. But there is always new weaving to be done at the loom. ([Location 1567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1567)) - “Literature,” writes poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst, “involves the use of language more for purposes of discovery than for purposes of control. It is a part of language itself: present, like language, in every human community. There are no natural languages without stories, just as there are none without sentences. Yet 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.” In ([Location 1586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1586)) - One of Ong’s themes is the ramifying effect of writing upon the minds of literate speakers. Linearity, classification, all forms of “study” in its recognizable sense, as well as the awareness of vast archipelagos of words beyond one’s immediate cognitive and expressive control, are some of the enriching endowments of literacy in Ong’s reckoning. ([Location 1600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1600)) - The word “Qu’ran” itself likely derives from the Syriac and Arabic words for “recitation” (Syriac qeryana, Arabic qara’a). “Torah,” too, is a word meaning recitation or instruction. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1627)) - Writing layers, it weaves, it jumbles, it confounds, it clarifies, it classifies, it collates, it effaces, it preserves. The effect is never one of ordering (although that is the ideology of many writing systems), but of interweaving. Writing is always palimpsestic; there is no setting-down that is not a setting-among, a setting-upon. ([Location 1682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1682)) - Tags: [[writing]] - To trace the loops and whorls of unspooling meaning is a practice called hermeneutics, a word deriving from the Greek god Hermes. A messenger and a trickster, Hermes delighted in the strain felt by recipients in the parsing of divine missives—a ([Location 1684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1684)) - In the mid-eighteenth century, French physician Jean Astruc systematically began to tabulate the discrepancies and idiosyncrasies of the Torah. In particular he took notice of the “doublets”—passages that told the same story or relayed the same factoid, albeit in slightly different (and sometimes contradictory) detail. A striking pattern emerged: throughout these doublets, God was almost invariably called JWHW in one and Elohim in the other. In teasing out these doublets and comparing them, further differences in style and detail could be discerned. It seemed to Astruc as though the doublets were the residue of multiple sources—and so he claimed in a 1757 book, published anonymously, where he argued that the two strands represented separate sources Moses used to recount tales he did not witness. Astruc bent over backward to maintain Moses’s position as unitary author; nonetheless, the cat was out of the bag: in place of the traditional Mosaic theory, authorship in the Bible seemed to be a true mosaic of different authors bent to different tasks. ([Location 1733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1733)) - Using the method Astruc pioneered, nineteenth-century scholars ultimately identified no fewer than four separate sources—four different authors, essentially, whose works comprise what Jews call the Tanakh and Christians call the Old Testament. In the nineteenth century, a German scholar named 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. Roughly, the picture looks like this: the Jahwist and the Elohist were roughly contemporary; they likely wrote in a script called paleo-Hebrew, derived late in the second millennium BCE from the Phoenician script, which arose in modern-day coastal Lebanon and would later spawn the Greek alphabet. Another author, the so-called Deuteronomist, wrote around 600 BCE, during a time of monarchical recentralization of religious law and practice, and he emphasized the tales that supported kingship and priestly authority deriving from the priests of Shiloh. A final author, the so-called P or Priestly author, whose stories celebrate the line of priests descending from Moses’s brother Aaron. The four strands were likely brought together into a single Torah around 450 BCE, possibly by Ezra the Scribe, leader of the Jewish community during the Babylonian exile. During this time Jews in Babylon had adopted the Aramaic script, which also was derived from the Phoenician letters; their version of this script became the “square script” of the Hebrew alphabet we know today. ([Location 1755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1755)) - 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. ([Location 1769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1769)) - The ultimate justification for Jesus’s reign, the deep-rooted proof of his identity, could be found only through creative readings of polysemous, saturnine, shifting symbols found in the Old Testament. Unlike his great missionary Paul, Jesus was no epistolator. And with Jesus, his whole insurrection, as it is shaped in the written Gospels, militates against a thing that happens in writing: 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. ([Location 1780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1780)) - I’ve already wondered whether there isn’t something we might call Oedipal at work in Jesus’s avoidance of writing. A corollary query in a mystical key: if the Word was with God, and the Word was God, does that make writing itself—the attempt to render a reliable image of utterance, of the word—a kind of idolatry? ([Location 1792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1792)) - a newly risen island in the Bible’s already strange and far-flung archipelago of forms and genres. ([Location 1811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1811)) - Paul, like all Christian figures, is frequently depicted by artists, and those depictions often have him writing. (Less frequently is writing depicted in the scriptures themselves.) Modern artists have favored an image of Paul after the image of Jerome: a solitary epistolator, sitting in contemplative attitude with scribal gear arrayed about him, studying in solitude some conundrum of faith in manuscript. The truth is different—for Paul too lived in a scribal age. Writing materials were expensive; secretaries and amanuenses were the norm; composition, for most writers, consisted of dictation. There are moments in the Epistles when scribal practice shows itself—take Galatians 6:11, where Paul says, “Look how big the letters are, now that I am writing to you in my own hand.” It’s as if he has taken over from a secretary to conclude this urgent, vituperative letter, ([Location 1818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=1818)) - 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. ([Location 2288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2288)) - the craft and technology of the press didn’t so much erase the scribal arts as incorporate them. The intimate, artisanal, cognitively rich round of scribal craft—the preparation of vellum and parchment from hides; the mixing of inks and pigments; the pounding and pouncing and rubricating and illuminating and the slow penning of dusky, barbed letters, one at a time—dissolved by slow degrees in a rising sea of ink. ([Location 2300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2300)) - A printed letter of the late fifteenth century is a mélange and an archaeological site where ancient iconography, medieval expressiveness, and machine-age efficiencies mingle. Indeed the modern flexibility of type is fundamentally based in this archaeological character; the printer mixes the means and modes of many eras to produce the efficient, modulated, expressive qualities of typographical style. ([Location 2307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2307)) - 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. ([Location 2341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2341)) - “Graffiti” as a term first comes into use within the potter’s craft, as sgraffito—an Italian word for carving clay to produce incised ware; it gains its modern specificity in the context of the archaeological discovery of inscriptions on the walls of Pompeii in the nineteenth century. ([Location 2541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2541)) - We have the poet Allen Ginsberg to thank, however, for the modern sense of the word “graffiti.” Ginsberg was a connoisseur and practitioner of writing on walls: the profane slogans he scrawled on the bathroom stalls nearly got him kicked out of Columbia University; later, in the New York State Psychiatric Institute on 168th Street (the Parnassus from which he would bring down Howl), Ginsberg noted the importance of wall-writing to inmates who were not permitted to converse with one another as normal human beings. It was Ginsberg who gave the name “graffiti” to such illicit, illegal, and offensive public scrawl—in explicit reference to the walls of ancient Pompeii, tying the angel-headed hipsters of the twentieth-century city to antiquity. ([Location 2545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2545)) - For Renaissance town-dwellers, however, graffiti had a more practical mien. In a world in which memorization systems consisted of imagined palaces filled with mnemonic messages, the early modern mentality was structured as much by walls as by pages and leaves. The plastered walls of the early modern era made ready supports for writing in the home and in public; a simple application of whitewash readied the page for revision. Montaigne inscribed aphorisms on the rafters of his library. ([Location 2551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2551)) - Perhaps Facebook got something right: for writing our selves, a wall is a better metaphor than a book; rather than fitting our electronic texts to the Procrustean bed of the book, we can look to walls, lockets, and doorposts, which find their digital analogues in blogs and feeds, mobile devices, and ever-present touchscreens. ([Location 2595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2595)) - From search engines to barcode readers, the world of reading and writing isn’t broken—it’s expanding. Emergent technologies bear the traces of the life of writing; in a very real sense, they’re its extension into new realms. To extend is in writing’s nature—which is to say, it’s in our nature. The rule of the alphabet is not tyrannical or dynastic; instead, it’s another form or style, one among many that have arisen to teach us how to bring meaning forth out of the world’s blooming, buzzing confusion. Writing doesn’t force or command; it teaches. The order it bestows on the emanations of human consciousness cultivates an architectural aspect to the imagination; into the forests and dark waters of myth and memory intrude the letters, those subtle conductors, cobbling together colleges and choruses of thought. ([Location 2806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2806)) - Writing didn’t create our impulses to order, to compare, and to taxonomize; it built upon these inclinations and brought them to flower. That many cultural forms—from music to architecture to politics—participate in such flourishing doesn’t point to an imperium of the alphabet but points instead to the more profound and rudimentary dispositions that evolved over millennia prior to writing’s emergence. ([Location 2817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2817)) - Where biology provides a slow but certain nursery for the cultivation of adaptations, culture (ultimately a province of nature, albeit an infinitely capacious one) provides a kind of hothouse to nurture a rough-and-ready tool kit of means to survive. What culture seems to do is offer an adaptive circuit with a quicker feedback mechanism than raw natural selection, one that operates on a cycle much shorter than the reproductive cycles of a species. And writing, in this sense, is a signal development in the speeding-up and intensification of culture’s capacity to develop new forms. ([Location 2825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2825)) - As Georges de la Tour dramatized in his painting The Education of the Virgin, books became an important component in domestic scenes: a candle, a glowing tome, and the rest of the world held in chiarascuroed abeyance. ([Location 2830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2830)) - For the sake of writing, we raze forests and burn coal by the trainload—but these are mere scratches compared with the vast, Ozymandian ruin our other civilized habits threaten to make of the Earth. 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? Whether in the form of spell or star gauge, scribal scrawl or machine-legible code, or in its increasingly abstruse and vibrant electronic modes, does writing give us the means to outpace, and ultimately to stay, the devastation wrought by our comprehensive material entanglements? ([Location 2884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007P01HP0&location=2884))