Translator: Amanda Chu
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Am I as handsome as he said I was? All right, well, I'll take that. (Laughter) Thank you. I'll take that as a "no." This is a scroll. I am not here to tell you
how to make money. I am not here to tell you
how to found a startup. I am here to tell you
how to read and write. And in order to understand
how to read and write, you need to know something
about the history of reading and writing. And so my theme today and the subject of my research
and of my teaching is the relationship among writing, reading, technology,
the body, and cognition. And as we move from a traditional
literacy of the printed book to a digital world of screens and pads, we need to understand
that much of what we're going through is something that
earlier societies went through in moments of comparable transition. And so, what you see
before you here is a scroll. In ancient Greece, in ancient Rome,
in ancient Egypt, in the Middle East, writing was done not on bound books but on scrolls, and our word "volume"
comes from the Latin word "volumen," meaning something rolled up. Now scrolls are very hard to use.
They're very large. You cannot skim them;
you cannot access them with ease. Scrolls are part of the tradition
of Jewish religious culture much as they were a part of the tradition
of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. And as a scholar, when I see a scroll,
I think of something classical; and as me, when I see a scroll,
I have bar mitzvah trauma. (Laughter) Now, when you were a student
in the scroll world, you took notes on a piece of wood
that was covered with wax, and you wrote on it with a stylus. And a stylus was a sharp stick on which you could incise the letters
and the words of your notes. And then you would memorize it or you would go home
and you would write it down - you would copy it - and then you would hold the wax
over a candle and it would melt, and you would have
your blank slate once again. And in the first and second centuries BCE, it occurred to students and teachers that if you took some of these blocks
of wood and sewed them together, you could make something
which they called a codex. A codex was a bound collection
of wooden boards. And then several centuries later, it occurred to people that you could take pieces
of animal skin or sheets of papyrus and you could bind them together
in a comparable way, and thus, what you would get
would be a bound book. Now the bound book
differs in many ways from the scroll. It differs technologically; that is, your access to the bound book
is vertical rather than horizontal. You can open a bound book at random. You can skim. You can put your finger in a book
and flip someplace else. But a bound book differs from a scroll
also ideologically. The scroll was the book, the volume for ancient Greece,
ancient Rome, and ancient Jewish thought. When the early Christians
in the first century of the Common Era wanted to write their scriptures in a way that was different in kind
from classical or Jewish scripture, they used the bound book, the codex. The codex was also available to them
because it was smaller than a scroll. It was surreptitious; you could put it in your pocket
and not be caught. St. Augustine. St. Augustine, the great
father of the church, who wrote his confessions in the year 394, imagines himself
as a young man beset by sin, stealing fruit from a neighbor's garden,
learning rhetoric and language, teaching but still hungry
for the knowledge of divine truth. And in this medieval representation
of this late antique saint, we see him sitting beneath a fruit tree
with an open book. In his confessions, he talks about how one day,
beset by anxiety and fear, he took a copy of the bound book
of Saint Paul's Epistles, and he opened the book at random, and he read, "not in reveling
and drunkenness," and he says, "I put my finger
in the passage and I closed the book, and at that moment,
I need not read any further." St. Augustine is converted
to Christianity through the bound book, but what St. Agustin recognizes and what Christian theologians
throughout the Middle Ages recognized was that the bound book
gave you a different way not just of reading texts
but of reading the world. One of the things that the early
Christian theologians developed was a theory of allegory. Allegory literally means
saying one thing and meaning another, but for the early Christians, allegory was a special kind of way
of saying and meaning. What they wanted to do is they wanted to read
the stories of the Old Testament as allegorical prefigurations of stories
in the New Testament. In other words, the belief was that somehow
the New Testament completed in a figural
or imaginative way the Old Testament. So let's imagine you're reading
an Old Testament story about a father and a son, and the son has a load
of wood on his back and the father is taking him up a hill, and the father
is intending to sacrifice him. Now you might say that this is the Old Testaments story
of Abraham and Isaac, but if you were a medieval Christian, you might say, Where is there another story
of a son with a load of wood on his back, walking up a hill
to be sacrificed by the father? That, of course, is the story
of the passion and the crucifixion, as the son Jesus walks
with the wooden cross up a hill to be sacrificed by his father, God. And so the medieval theologians saw these two stories
as allegorical or figurally related. And the technological way
of enabling that interpretation was the bound book, that enabled you to take
the Old Testament and read a story and stick your finger in that passage
and then flip to the New Testament. So my point is that
the technologies of reading are not just simply
about accessing information, they are about changing the way
in which you think about the world, they are about changing spirit, and they are about changing
the metaphors by which we live. I talked about the volume and volumen;
let me talk about the rubric. The word "rubric" comes
from the Latin verb "rubricare," which means "to write something in red." In the medieval scriptorium, the world
where the manuscript was written, there was a particular division of labor, and one person
had a job to write the red stuff, and he was called a "rubricator," and what you wrote
in red were chapter titles, as you can see that word
"capitulum" here, the chapter title, and they wrote in red
things that were important, things that became rubrics. So when we think of a rubric, we should think of something
written in red that is important, and when we think of a rubric, we should think
of reading a chapter title. Dante, who wrote The Divine Comedy. But before he wrote The Divine Comedy, in the 1290s, he wrote a lovely little book
called "The New Life." It's a story of how he meets Beatrice
when he's nine years old and how when they are 18,
he sees her once again. Let me pause and say
when I taught the Divine Comedy and when I taught the La Vita Nuova
to my students here in Revelle Humanities, and I told them the story
of Dante meeting Beatrice at eight, and then waiting another
nine years to see her again, and then he sees her and he practically passes out
and writes a poem that said, "Okay." So, (Laughter) Dante begins the - actually,
I won't tell you what they really said - but Dante begins La Vita Nuova
and he says in that book of memory, "Where one finds the rubric,
here begins the new life," and he sees his memory
as a bound book - your mind is made up of chapters,
and for each chapter, there is a rubric. That is the first line
of the first work that Dante wrote. And one of the last lines
of the last work that Dante wrote, the Paradiso, the story of paradise
at the end of the Divine Comedy, Dante, in Paradise, in canto xxxiii, looks at the very Godhead itself,
at divinity, and he says, "In its depth, I saw, going inside bound by love into a single volume, that which was previously scattered
as pages throughout the universe." Dante begins and ends
his career as a poet, as a writer, with the image of the book, remembering the chapters of his mind and then imagining the blessed
spirituality of communion with God, as, in effect, binding the book together. This is what I'm getting at - the technologies of reading and writing provide culture with metaphors
of understanding. And if I had more time, I'd talk about Gutenberg
and the printing press, I'd talk about the way
in which the very word "impression" changed dramatically with movable type, but what I want to look at now are the ways in which
not simply our minds but our bodies are shaped by the experience of reading. This magnificent picture
by Rembrandt of a woman reading shows us that the reading of a book traditionally is what I call "absorptive." To read a book is an act of absorption - you look down, you hold it in your hand, you are oblivious
to that which is going on around you, you curl up over and around the book. When computers began
to proliferate at the '80s and '90s, screen reading became not absorptive
but what I would call "theatrical" - you did not look down, you looked out. As you can see in this very picture, the way in which these individuals
are pointing at the screen shows that the very physicality
of reading changed when we moved from book to screen, that the acts of bodily movement
and the acts of social cognition changed as well. Little wonder, then,
that what we miss in the book is the absorptive moment. And so the rise of the ebook is,
I would suggest to you, an attempt to recapture, in the form
of an electronic "simulacrum," the experience of reading. This is not a book. It's book-like.
It's a book-like experience. And the very words we have today
for our e-readers evoke in our minds the metaphors
of mystery and imagination - the Kindle, that kindles
the fire of the mind. Why are you asleep in the front row?
Would you give him a poke, please? (Laughter) I am working up here.
Come on, come on. Ah, sit up! You're in the front row.
Enhance my self-esteem. (Laughter) Thank you. Anybody else want to mess with me? (Laughter) Kindle the kindling fire of the m - Now he's going to take a pic.
Now he's really going to die. (Laughter) Nook - the quietude, the solace,
the silence of sitting in a corner. The Kindle and the Nook. Although I have to tell you -
and I've said this many times before - that when these ebooks happened,
I called my mother and I said to her, "Would you like an ebook
for your birthday?" She said, "What will you get me?" I said, "You want a Kindle or a Nook?" She said, "A kindle or a nook?
It doesn't sound right. Where is that nook in that kindle?
Where is that kindle?" "It's in the Nook." It sounds all wrong,
especially after St. Agustin. And it also sounds all wrong when I think of my own students
who don't even get these jokes, who think I'm the oldest man in the world, who read my emails
as if they were business letters and find me distant and detached in the rhetoric
of my electronic epistolarity. Here
(Laughter) is an email from a student
I received almost 10 years ago when I taught at Stanford University: "prof. Lehrer - on my way out to class today,
i got a piece of glass stuck in my foot. it was bleeding and hurting a lot
so I had to come back and clean it up. sorry about the absense,
but I'll get the notes from someone. apologies." Okay. So, I read this and I thought to myself, "How can I make something
meaningful out of this text? I have a PhD. I can take anything
and turn it into literature." And I realized at that very moment - (Laughter) I realized at that very moment that there was a lilt
of American colloquialism here, that the world of email
is not the world of stupidity, it is the world of
what I would call "faux intimacy" - it is the world of affectation, as if the idea of grammar, spelling,
punctuation, and correct diction would be distancing, as if intimacy were to be accomplished,
rather, through the irregular. But I read it again. And as I read it to myself again,
I heard the lilt of the American poet: "prof. Lehrer - on my way out to class today,
i got a piece of glass stuck in my foot. it was bleeding and hurting a lot
so I had to come back and clean it up. sorry about the absense,
but I'll get the notes from someone. apologies." And I could not but think of William
Carlos Williams's "This is just to say": "I have eaten
the plums that were in
the icebox and [which]
you were probably saving
for breakfast. forgive me
they were delicious so sweet
and so cold." (Laughter) These are letters, my friends. (Applause) My friends - and you are my friends - how does the email of a student resonate with the language
of American poetry? These are post-it notes
on the refrigerator of life. They are apologies
for damage or destruction, just as St. Augustine
flung himself under the fruit tree to recreate the imagined sense
now of taking a bite of the fruit not in sin but in knowledge. William Carlos Williams asks apology
of the reader for taking stolen fruit. And as I thought to myself, "How can we understand the relationship between the modern
and the ancient in this way?" If I could find in a modern email
the resonance with a great American poem, surely, we can find something in this: (Laughter) "Be right back -" These are actually texts
that I personally have received. [BRB]
"Be right back." [DWPKOTL]
"Deep with passionate kiss on the lips." [GGN]
"Got to go now." [ILICISCOMK] "I laughed, I cried,
I spilled coffee on my keyboard." [T2UT]
and "Talk to you tomorrow." (Laughter) And yet, because I am
a scholar of the past and I have four seconds left, I see this as exactly the same
as this cuneiform tablet, in which the ancient scribe has written, "Nu nizza-an ezzateni vadar-ma ekuteni" - "Now you eat the bread,
then you eat the water." This is Hittite cuneiform, in which the words
for "bread" and "water" are written out not as words
but as idiographic signs. This is the cuneiform equivalent
of "I heart New York." (Laughter) And so, my argument at the end is that these forms of literacy
are not damaging, but they are constantly changing; that in this world,
we need to understand that text messaging and email
are a kind of code. And if there will be
a future for literacy, it will be a stratified future, a future in which everyone
uses a different discourse of language. I remember a time when I could walk into a classroom
with a bound book and stick my finger in it. And I could talk
about William Carlos Williams and stolen fruit
and temptation and apology. And today the only fruit
I walk into a classroom with is my Macintosh. (Laughter) My students read their assignments
on their iPhones, and I know that somewhere up in heaven, Steve Jobs is looking down
and finding that it's good. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)
