When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  Information inflations produce distinctive shock waves. For the first time, because the excavation of classical literature and the proliferation of printing presses were so fortuitously self-documenting, we can clearly pick out common features of the newly disturbed landscape of memory. New media, be it print, audio recording, or digital cartography, always spawn new writers working in new genres for new audiences, struggling to get attention, throwing in sensational effects to grab eyeballs. Translations of ancient philosophers, historians, and poets such as Aristotle, Caesar, Suetonius, Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid appealed to a small though influential group of readers. More to the taste of most readers were sensational accounts of travels to strange lands across the Atlantic Ocean, replete with illustrations of unimaginably strange flora and fauna; or the picaresque tales of scoundrels, ogres, and fair maidens told by Rabelais and his imitators. Above all, people read the Bible, recently released from the prison of ecclesiastical Latin and made available in a variety of common spoken languages. The Bible, as those who read the Old Testament know, is full of sex, violence, floods, famine, plagues, family melodramas, miracles, ghosts, apparitions, burning bushes, and assorted scary bits—a full menu of popular entertainment.

  The second characteristic of a disturbed landscape of memory is extreme disorientation. All the signposts and road markers have been tossed about or simply buried under the waves of unfiltered information. Once the accustomed barriers to reading and writing are gone, words and images circulate freely, chaotically, and people inevitably experience a kind of vertigo, unable to sense up from down, front from back, past from future. The borders between what is true and what is false become fuzzy. This effect did not even require that printed books reached readers. The ideas almost floated free of the pages and wafted about in the wind, spreading casually in conversations at the market and the local well like stories swapped over water coolers among bored office workers. In Montaigne’s day, true facts and made-up facts traveled well beyond the boundaries of the small and coherent urban centers that produced books. Through print, ideas and opinions acquired a physical life of their own and a passport to travel. Made-up facts were particularly powerful agents of opinion making and persuasion. The mere fact of print carried with it an implicit imprimatur of authority. (You can picture them asking each other: “If someone went to the trouble and expense of printing it, it has to be true, right?”) Quite contradictory notions of what constitutes value, human dignity, sin, and salvation were released into the oceans of the world’s information and created waves of confrontation, competition, and confusion among the reading public and everyone they came into contact with. Print generated buzz: No one needed to read to be influenced by ideas in books.

  Montaigne was keenly aware that there was as much humbuggery and pedantry to be found in the books he read as wisdom.

  I have known books to be made out of things never either studied or understood, the author entrusting to various of his learned friends the search for this and that material to build it, contenting himself for his part with having planned the project and piled up by his industry this stack of unfamiliar provisions; at least the ink and the paper are his. That, in all conscience, is buying or borrowing a book, not making one.

  But his chief complaint was not against the merciless cobbling together of redundant and inane books in the cut-and-paste fashion we are familiar with today from blogs and sites that compile lists and hyperlinks. He most disliked books that harangued the reader and gave voice to censure and intolerance. He refused to follow this example, making great show of his skepticism and doubt. “My ignorance will excuse me,” he half-boasts to his readers. “In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.”

  In such times, when the confusing circulation of contradictory ideas and so-called facts cry out with equal force to be given credence, we face a crisis of authority. As authorities and institutions fail, we are forced to decide for ourselves which sources are trustworthy and which are not. The question of what to believe becomes, almost imperceptibly, a question of who to believe. Because once there is this much information swirling around us, we turn instinctively to the individuals and groups whose authority to speak on the matter seems most trustworthy. We turn to friends. And when they fail us, we turn to experts and hope for the best.

  Montaigne did not fight his times, but he did refuse to recognize any authority other than his own experience and reason. “Que sais-je?” What do I know? After years of self-interrogation faithfully recorded in his essays, he concluded that in fact he had little certainty about the world or about himself—other than the constancy of change. He came to see life as a state of becoming, not being. Everything is in flux. He, too, is never fixed. “I aim [in my essays] only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.” That is how he came to perfect the art of living amid uncertainty. Memory provided for him a sense of continuity across time, allowing him to bend and change rather than break under the extraordinary pressures of his turbulent times. In the end, rather than learning how to die well, he learned to live well.

  We see in Montaigne’s essays early evidence of the power of direct access to a multitude of texts. For the first time, the collective memory of the West had expanded beyond the monoculture of ecclesiastical thought and sacred texts. The diversity of human experience was revealed to Europeans through the recovery of their own classical past. And then, there was the ongoing discovery of new worlds across the Atlantic Ocean. In the century following Montaigne’s death, literacy rates in Europe and the British Isles grew apace, though at different tempos in different places, concentrated chiefly among males in urban areas. But the ideas carried by books, pamphlets, and maps reverberated well beyond the circle of those who could read to include those who were read to in their homes, in the pews of their local church, and in the growing number of public houses (“pubs”) that served alcohol and the wildly popular imports from the New World and the Indies, coffee, cocoa, and tea. A new genre was invented—the newspaper—to meet the growing appetite for novelty, information, and gossip.

  With the advantage of hindsight and knowing that the Enlightenment is to follow, we can detect the idea that knowledge we acquire from the books of our choosing is a path to autonomy, a way to be free from blindly heeding authority. The power of the printed word took on its own aura of truth and righteousness, and here was born the notion that the Bible was literally true. Such an idea was not possible before scripture had been translated from Latin into the common tongue. And in classic pushmi-pullyu fashion, people began to see many different things in the same lines of scripture and headed off in completely different directions. In similar fashion, today the sheer speed of communication across the Internet has accelerated a race to the extremes of intolerance between fundamentalists who urge a return to roots and futurists bent on accelerating the pace of change.

  While Montaigne was a public servant and political man until his final years, his sole ambition was to know himself. He reveled in the public acclaim that came from his bestselling books. But he never anticipated, let alone intended, that anything he wrote would shape the course of history or influence the mind of politicians, as Machiavelli intended when he published The Prince. It would take another revolution in thinking, the Enlightenment, to canonize the idea that knowledge has the power to change human destiny. Montaigne’s library served his private purposes. In the Enlightenment, libraries took on public and very political purposes as well.

  In Montaigne’s last essay, fittingly called “Of experience,” he tells us that “there is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails, we use experience.” In the seventeenth century, the quest for knowledge becomes the epicenter of a culture that raises logical and scientific reasoning to new heights, builds instruments to investigate the natural world, and bases its reasoning about Nature on empirical facts. In t
he eighteenth century, the educated elite came to see reason and experience as the primary tools for building the high road to progress, freedom, and the well-being of mankind. The world of unified Christendom that had failed so spectacularly in Montaigne’s lifetime was reborn into a continent of nation-states with vast colonial empires where these ideas were transplanted to native soils. By the time Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 in a far distant tobacco-growing colony of the British Empire, curiosity had shaken off the noxious reputation it gained in the Garden of Eden. Jefferson grew up believing that curiosity was a natural desire, and to enlightened minds, whatever was natural was good.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE DREAM OF THE UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

  If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON TO CHARLES YANCEY, JANUARY 6, 1816

  Thomas Jefferson (1743–1825) knew Montaigne’s essays well and shared Montaigne’s passion for Cicero. But he was a political man, and when he read Cicero, it was for political advice, not lessons about how to live well in the face of certain death. Jefferson was studying how to move his countrymen from being subjects of a king to citizens of a republic. Having won the war of liberation from the British monarch, he turned quickly to the business of forming a new man, a free enlightened man, an American citizen. There had not been a free citizen of a republic since Cicero’s time. History would be the sole instructor.

  For men and women of the Enlightenment, knowledge was something to be acquired, organized, and shaped into an instrument of progress. The Founders believed ideas freely shared among people of goodwill would speed the process of enlightenment. In a letter to Isaac McPherson on the matter of patents and property, Jefferson wrote that “an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain” cannot be the exclusive property of one.

  Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, extensible over all space, without lessening their density in any point.

  In this prophetic vision, Jefferson describes a virtual network that transmits ideas across time and space, without any natural barriers—except those placed by men claiming ownership. (His letter is an extended argument against long copyright or patent terms and other impediments to the free flow of ideas.) We recognize this network as the Internet. The centuries of technical innovation from Jefferson’s day to the present have been energized by a natural desire for knowledge that could be put in the service of the moral instruction of man and the improvement of his condition. These aspirations were born in the Enlightenment and are fully visible in the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson. This new faith in progress valued knowledge for its instrumental purposes—its ability to change the world, influence people, and secure happiness and liberty for all. Ever an impatient dreamer, Jefferson tried to hasten the arrival of the future and championed the power of organized knowledge to change the world. He dreamt of a library that would provide unfettered access to the sum of human knowledge, to be grown from the seed of his own library in Monticello. Ironically, war and fire played the part of creator, not destroyer, of a library for perhaps the first and only time in history.

  KNOWLEDGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF POLITICS

  In late April 1813, Yankee soldiers invaded the capital of Upper Canada, York (present-day Toronto). They burned down the parliament building, and with it imperial records and the parliamentary library. In war as in peace, one good turn deserves another. In August the following year, British soldiers returned the favor: They set fire to the U.S. Capitol and destroyed the congressional library.

  To replace its stocks, Congress bought the private library of Jefferson, then living in retirement at Monticello. They acquired his collection of 6,487 volumes comprising 4,931 unique titles—the books, maps, manuscripts, and musical scores that in their day made up the largest, most diverse, and most comprehensive collection of recorded knowledge in the Western Hemisphere.

  So, the story goes, it was with this casual act of vengeance that the dream of a universal library was born in America. The dream was a simple one: all human knowledge brought together in a single collection and made accessible to all for the general enlightenment of the people. This creation story has come to define the culture of knowledge in America, where it is held that the enlightenment of the people will invariably lead to democracy and wise self-rule. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” Jefferson, America’s most devoted bibliophile and hyperopic optimist, became the patron saint of American libraries.

  In the seventeenth century, books arrived on American soil already sanctified by divine purpose, so it is not surprising that they assumed a lofty status among the Founders. The first libraries were collections of religious books, packed in the luggage of religious pilgrims from the Old World. The Protestants who settled the northern colonies were people of the Good Book. Scripture and theological works were the primary furniture of their spiritual lives. These collections had one purpose—to impart knowledge of God and his ways. And they were read with one goal in mind—personal salvation.

  By the eighteenth century, the Republic of Letters—an imaginary community of enlightened people whose spiritual homeland was wherever they dwelled—had expanded from continental Europe to the distant shores of the Atlantic and began to encroach on and eventually crowd out the zealous. Continental ideas about enlightenment and secular learning came into port with books from Europe, and there were increasing numbers of colonists who assembled libraries for quite secular purposes, including agriculture and trade, governance, political enlightenment, and entertainment. Jefferson’s was by far the largest, but he lived among men and women who shared his love of books and learning.

  For Jefferson, the goal of reading was not salvation but freedom. By his lights, to live as a free man one had to possess knowledge. After the colonies achieved political independence from Great Britain, Jefferson and his peers grappled with the great responsibilities that freedom entails. They believed these responsibilities could only be borne by an informed citizenry, with knowledge of current events, trade and agriculture, history and political theory, and above all, knowledge of themselves.

  These were moral as well as civic purposes, and the Republic decided early in its life that the moral sphere could thrive in civic life only in a nondenominational way, with no state religion and no privileged clerisy. We hold that democracy demands equal access to goods, services, and knowledge. The culture of knowledge in America has been a servant of democratic governance. This instrumental view of knowledge meant that three principles would become fundamental to American-style democracy: The press must be free, the government must be open and accountable to the people, and the education of the citizenry must be a right and responsibility of the governed and their representatives.

  Libraries became vital instruments in guaranteeing all three. But it was not always so. And it was far from clear that in order for libraries to perform these obligations they would need to provide access to a universal collection. That was pure Jeffersonism. When Congress set about reconstituting the collection of law books, treaties, and maps that perished in the War of 1812, they were not seeking to assemble a universal collection. But Jefferson had his own reasons to offer his library for sale as what he modestly called “a replacement.”

  JEFFERSON THE GRAND ACQUISITOR

  Thomas Jefferson knew personally what it was like to lose a library to fire. In 1770, when he was twenty-six years old, his ancestral
home in Shadwell, Virginia, burned and with it, his library of several hundred volumes. He quickly began to assemble another collection, and within three years he recorded in his notebook that he had a total of 1,256 volumes at his new home, Monticello. He no doubt had more than this, as these notes record neither his music collection nor the books he had in his office in Williamsburg.

  Jefferson was more than a man of learning who loved his books. He was a self-confessed bibliomaniac—a grand acquisitor—and he used every possible opportunity to pursue the purchase of more books. He thought about books, he dreamt about books, he drew up lists of books that he desired, and wherever he found himself, no matter how busy he was, he contacted book dealers and set up standing orders for the purchase of what was on his desiderata list. He enjoyed the chase so much that during his years in Paris, where from 1784 to 1789 he represented the newly independent states as commissioner and minister to France, he made fast friends with book dealers throughout the continent and the United Kingdom. He was one of their best customers, collecting not only on his own behalf, but also for friends such as James Madison and James Monroe. “While residing in Paris, I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand, and putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science.” He had not brought his entire collection with him to Paris, and this was an excellent reason—if he needed one—to buy second copies of books he liked. In 1789, for example, he picked up another edition of Montaigne’s essays, though he already owned the title.