Sarah Ruden
The Internet, on balance, seems to me to have been no
friend of scholarship. When you had to tramp to the library for books and
articles, you tramped only when well motivated, and you studied and evaluated
whatever you hauled home so as not to feel like a total chump. The current
capacity to pull up an article a minute on a screen creates an apparently
powerful temptation to staple together a nonargument from five hundred sources
and to stuff a bibliography with crap.
This head quote is a footnote
in Sarah Ruden’s book on Bible translating. She reminds us of a world in which
people went through rain, hail, and snow to gather invaluable source materials
from libraries; source material that can only be found in libraries. She is
deeply aware that her motivation was worth the effort.
Ruden’s trademark humour
points up the physical reality of reading and study. It might actually involve
you having to exert yourself bodily, having to travel measurable distances, and
having to spend measurable amounts of precious time working somewhere other
than at your own computer. By placing these kinds of activities in the past
tense, Ruden seems to be suggesting it no longer happens, though it does. Such
is the force of rhetoric.
The library was, and still
is, a great arbiter of time management. It tantalises with stores of knowledge
not otherwise procurable. It stands apart from the daily round of home and
work: you have to go there to make it happen for you. The library is the only
place where you can get the goods. It releases its bounty on reasonable terms,
giving its visitors a rightful sense of belonging and self-esteem. At least,
these are some of the things we can infer from Ruden’s descriptions of getting
physical with libraries. She places a value on libraries that she does not
place on the (capital ‘I’) Internet.
Ruden’s healthy objectivity
about the academic life is at work here. Her footnote is asterisked to the
following sentence, found in the thick of a discussion about Bible
commentaries: “Conversely, the exposition may be so dense and technical that
its writer’s own expert opinion drowns amid the innumerable citations and
intricate qualifications.” Any student of biblical books will recognise this
kind of commentary, thankful or overwhelmed depending on the time of the day.
Ruden is not being negative about such commentaries, in fact is insisting that
such works are a necessary good, even a blessing and inspiration. She knows
that such intricate scholarship has a sure foundation, when only the best will
do.
The Internet, though, is
another matter. In an environment where authority can be whatever you want it,
where every crazy view vies for equal attention, and where the quantity rather
than the quality of your citations is all that counts, the results will be
(obversely from the above) thankless and underwhelming. The implicit meaning of
her argument in this paragraph, that scholarship is more than just sitting
hourly at your computer and sorting everything into something halfway coherent,
goes with it a discernible belief in embodiment. She trusts the feeling,
arrived at by her own experience, that tramping to the library, getting all the
stuff together, and hauling home what you most urgently need, is an essential
part of the scholar’s life. She’s not rejecting the Internet out of hand, she’s
simply saying it’s not enough.
Quote from: ‘The face of
water : a translator on beauty and meaning in the Bible’, by Sarah Ruden (New
York, Pantheon Books, 2017), page 160.
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