Last week I was asked to read the scripture in church. I tried to be as conscious as I could of the words I read, and to sense the bodily act of speaking and the presence of all those people (I was momentarily amazed when they all remained expectedly standing until I remembered to say "please be seated" after the hymn). I received from the experience something that came from the words and their meaning, but went beyond the words.
The other day I ran across Aaron Swartz's 'How to Run a Good Conference' blogpiece, especially the remark (from Tufte) 'Speech is a bad medium for communicating information'. This came within a day of reading the wonderful essay 'On the Cult of Books' in Borge's Selected Non-Fictions. The essay starts discussing the early natural predominance of the spoken word, and notes "the exact instant ... when this vast process [of the switch to the written word] began.", as revealed by St. Augustine around AD 384 in Book VI of the Confessions:
When he [Augustine's teacher Ambrose] was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. ... We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer ... who might wish to debate some difficult questions [and so he'd] get through fewer books than he wished. Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading.We have to note that the lack of written punctuation and the scarcity of books both made reading aloud valuable, and reading silently a thing for conjecture and awe. But given my pet subject of the inadequacy of our written words as a substitute for physical presence, I enjoyed the reminder that there was a time when people spent more time talking to each other than reading silently.
Back to Borges: From this milestone -- the advent of silent reading -- Borges goes on to introduce the later notion of the book as an end in itself. Finally he segues to a survey of the attitudes that various religions and philosophers take to the written word, culminating with Scot Carlyle, who said that universal history is a Sacred Scripture that we decipher and write uncertainly, and in which we too are written; and Leon Bloy, who says "History is an immense liturgical text".
From this rambling batch of semi-associated happenings and reading, I find I can glean two things:
- To the extent that speech is more than the mere passing on of facts, there's value in reading and speaking aloud.
- Existence is writing ourselves into it.