Positioned in 24K window seat to Prague via Dubai, any time
of day, which turns anytime soon to night, can be spent touching the in-flight
screen. A poke of the dropdown box gives eight pages of Essential Albums. A
deft jab with the index finger will display enough movies to watch for several
circumnavigations of the planet. A nudge with a knuckle gets the screen keeping
constant updates on the flight, including camera shots of terra firma below and
nimbus or cirrus or astra ahead. But interestingly, in all of this magical
mystery tour of 2012 culture, not one text screen. Not one file of great Czech
poems to inform the traveller of the Bohemian soul. Not one short essay by
Vaclav Havel. Touching is changing how we access our listening, watching, and
reading. It is changing how we access. The flight screen is an in-your-face
reminder of the contemporary declaration that the fold is dead. Books fold,
magazines crinkle, we dog-ear the page before taking a catnap. But the flat
screen is altering the habits of a lifetime, if not precisely replacing them. A
child of five knows which spot on the screen to touch next, quicker than I know
how to find the table of contents in my compendious monographic companion.
Travelling at a ground speed of 581 miles per hour toward Prague I choose
instead to sit back and enjoy through headphones the sensationally great opera
that had its world premiere in that city in 1787, Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’.
Rumours of the death of the fold are greatly exaggerated.
Delegates at the Tenth Carmelite Librarians’ Meeting (Decima Riunione
Bibliotecari Carmelitani) know in advance that the information technology
revolution has clarified the role of librarians. In particular, it has shown us
that books are not the main business of librarians. Our main business is the
keeping of memory, the provision of reading, the selection of essential
knowledge. By which I mean, reading in whatever form it may be presented, via
whatever carrier the words are delivered. The codex, or fold, was not the first
mode of transmission left to the care of librarians, and it won’t be the last.
Nor do we hear laments from the rooftops for the loss of the fold, even if some
of our borrowers ask inappropriate questions about whether librarianship is a
thing of the past, now that ‘everything’ is online. Plainly our job is not to
waste time explaining away their misconceptions, but to ask what it is they are
looking for. Chances are we will have the answer, or know where to find it for
them. More than likely the answer will not be online, but in the lines of a
folding item in the library. Thus the conference kicks off, delegates ever sensitive
to what our users read and how they read.
As the distance increases between writer and reader, reliant
on robots as intermediaries, it is unsurprising that words have become text –
undifferentiated and perpetual text. Streaming of information creates an
illusion that one set of words is of equal value with any other set of words,
just as the stupendous availability of music online has created the illusion
that all music is simply downloadable product, without distinction, notated
wallpaper. The word ‘robot’ is a Czech contribution to English vocabulary. In
his science fiction play of 1920, Karel Capek introduces to the stage robots,
who are mass-produced out of organic matter in a factory. These are artificial
humans who can do all the work for humans, which is helpful, until some of them
turn hostile and end up destroying the world, leading to the extinction of all
humans. Not helpful, and not very bright. ‘Robot’ has a fraught history in
English usage, as a robot can be a creative and practical extension of human
utility, but also an unmanageable and dangerous threat to human potential. It
can be a good servant, but a bad master. When it comes to reading, this paradox
can have consequences. How much text can we take from the robots until it is
all too much? The robots keep on keeping on. While the robots keep on sending
text in unmanageable quantities daily, how do we, the fragile humans with our
soft retinas, decide what is readable, and not? For every librarian replaced by
a robot, there is one less conversation about knowledge that could make a
difference to our future.
After Capek wrote his robot play he recognised that it was a
re-telling, probably unconsciously, of a Jewish legend closely associated with
the city of Prague: the legend of the golem. This Hebrew word occurs once in
the Bible, at Psalm 139, 16. John Wyclif in English makes golem “unperfect
thing”, out of which the King James Bible (1611) says “Thine eyes did see my
substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written.”
It seems to be variously translated inanimate matter, amorphous unformed
material, unformed substance, or embryo, depending on your translator, but was
used previously in the Middle Ages for a human made from the earth. In Jewish
mysticism this clay person was brought to life by the insertion of a slip of
paper with one of the mystic names of God, under his tongue, rather as we
validate a ticket to go on the metro, or write in a password to go to the next
part of a website. As with Capek's robot, the golem would then follow the
directions of the one who created him. Related to this new found power over an
inhuman human was the fear that the golem might get out control and take things
into his own hands, making him a precursor of Frankenstein and other
technological inventions that do the opposite of their creator's wishes. As
with robots too, the golem in some stories turns on his own creator and kills
him, thus exemplifying one of the more unhappy metaphors for human invention.
Yehudah Liva ben Betsal'el, Chief Rabbi of Prague in the late 16th century, is
the person given highest profile as the creator of the golem, and when I say
'creator' I don't mean literally, because the golem is created out of reading.
Reading makes him so. He is a magical creature invented from stories, from a
Jewish mystical tradition involving Hebrew Scripture, letters and numbers. That
a golem might or might not exist seems to be at the heart of subsequent stories
emanating from the Jewish Quarter of Prague. At different times in history
there have been serious attempts to identify an actual golem, including
unsuccessful inspections of the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in the city,
where legend has it that a golem has lived in secret for centuries.
The Carmelite Czech Delegation welcomed delegates. We were
given a potted history of Carmelite presence in Bohemia, which started in 1347,
and not by accident at the same time as the founding of Charles University. In
the first period there are no surviving books. They were possibly transported
to Vienna, all lost. But by chance a liturgical book was discovered more
recently, a book containing two late medieval books bound together. The first
book is a little less than 100 years older than the second book. The first is a
Gradual with Carmelite themes, circa 200 pages. The book itself contains no
date, but on one page there is a mention of King Wenceslas and Bishop Jan,
however the Pope's name is missing; which suggests that it might proceed from
the time of King Wenceslas IV (the son of Emperor Charles IV, who founded
Charles University), because in that time the Prague Bishop was Jan. This idea
is supported by the fact the name of the Pope is missing, which is probably
because of a schism, which coincided with the reign of Wenceslas IV. From this,
the conclusion is the first book is about a century older than the second book.
Maybe the book is around 1390. The book is so ancient that there is no
reference to the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a date that later became
central to the Carmelites’ year. But Our Lady of the Snows is mentioned, with a
special dedication, leading to the conclusion that the book must be Carmelite.
(One of the great churches of the city is named for this dedication.) The
colophon to the second book is dated 11 April 1473. The book contains a Latin
poem about a legend of Mary in which it snows in Rome in August. This legend is
related to the formation of Santa Maria Maggiore, the basilica church in Rome
dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. These books had been used by Benedictines
for their Christmas Vigil. It was only through reading an article in a journal
that the attention of local Carmelites was drawn to this bound set, and thus a
link with their more remote past. Today the historic volume is held in the
National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square. Such stories remind us that
generations of readers gave their complete attention to the ultimate meaning of
the words of worship, only very secondarily to such niceties as provenance or
date. The words themselves, properly used, their meanings repeated and learned,
make redundant the demands of time and place. In hearing about the two books in
one, I could not help seeing it as a descriptive metaphor of Bohemia itself, in
which different periods of history, at odds with one another, are squashed
together unceremoniously. The physical layout of the city, seriously attractive
as it is, is also a record of historical periods pressed against one another.
It is left to the visitor to differentiate one thing from another, one period
from the next, as for the locals this has already been absorbed, the
continuities registered.
Going out into the city, there are various ways of finding
your bearings. You can download the Prague App, which gives a full guide to the
city simply by hitting your hand screen. A couple of delegates took this
option. ‘Top 10 Prague’ (D&K Eyewitness Travel, 2011, c2003) is big on main
features, contains lift-out maps, and has a droll commentary (“…
architecturally it embraces every epoch from Romanesque to the Brutalist style
of the Katva department store.” Why do tourist guides abound in errors? It had
to be pointed out that the name of the store is in fact Kotva, which means
Anchor).This full colour Baedeker has clearly not been updated however, as the
Globe Internet Café (“An expatriate institution”) I found closed, empty and
covered in graffiti, due to the onset of wifi. Indeed, at airports, hotels, and
every other tourist locale, it is now assumed that the traveller has her own laptop
and can just plug in. I could find only one internet café in all of Prague,
down a side street, rate of one crown per minute. Or, if you are a Melburnian
for whom sitting for hours on trams is a form of spiritual sustenance, then the
way to discover Prague is to buy a 110 crown all-day ticket and let the next
tram take you where it will. Prague is blessed with one of the best tram
(Habsburgs) and metro (Soviets) systems in the world. Furthermore, English
readers are privileged everywhere they travel, as most public signs are in
Czech and English.
The privilege of reading is an originating cause of the
European Reformations, the Czech version of which defined national character.
What is the Christian religion? The foundation words of the Gospel? The practices
that arose out of those Gospels? In every generation we observe the pull
between the knowledge setting of society and how Gospel is used to interact and
interpret that setting. The Catholic priest Jan Hus knew his Wyclif. Wyclif
translated Scripture into the native tongue and believed that the uneducated
could understand the words just as well as the educated, the laity as well as
the clergy. His sermons were direct expositions of Scripture itself, something
not common from pulpits at the time. Scripture may be, indeed must be read in
the vernacular, where it is available to all. Hus was not some local Prague
troublemaker, he was the Chancellor of the University, and the challenge he
gave to the established order in Bohemia was to have vast repercussions across
Europe, one hundred years before Martin Luther. He preached in Czech, inspiring
both aristocracy and the common people. How do we read Scripture? And who has
control of the interpretation? Hus placed Scripture as superior to church
authority, indeed as the only authority, making himself predictably enough
unpopular with church authority.
The abiding influence of Jan Hus on Czech identity is
evident in many subtle ways in Prague. Their way of noticing the opposite
position and veering towards it, is one basic example. When Hus was betrayed
and killed at the Council of Constance (1414-1418), his martyrdom forced the
latent divisions within Bohemian society. War followed and, eventually, the
assertion of Habsburg authority over the country. When the Catholic Reformation
reasserted the power of Rome (and Vienna), one way was to build vast and
impressive buildings. The term re-Catholicisation is used in their history
books for the process. This mission strategy by architecture resulted in two of
the most impressive building complexes in Prague, the Loreto and the
Clementinum, the latter an educational institution built by the Society of
Jesus upon a Dominican foundation. It shouldn't be a surprise to learn that the
indefatigable Peter Canisius SJ was responsible for the construction: is there
anywhere in the world he didn't go? Today the Clementinum is not run by the
Jesuits, but houses the National Library. It holds the national
treasure, an 11-th century illuminated Gospel Book called the Codex Vyssegradensis,
which records the foundation of the kingdom of Bohemia as well as containing
the earliest known representation of the Tree of Jesse. As though to keep
things in balance though, the library also contains original documents signed
by Jan Hus, the surviving library of astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe, and
a superb collection of Mozartiana. A deal was announced last year with Google
Books for two hundred thousand Czech books in the Clementinum to be digitised
for common use, nearly all imprints between the 16th and 18th
centuries.
In ‘The Secret Miracle’, a short story by the blind
librarian Jorge Luis Borges, the main character, a playwright named Jaromir
Hladik, has a dream about the Clementinum where the librarians look for God in
the books of the library. Borges wrote this story during the Second World War,
when Prague was occupied by the Nazis. Hladík, who is living there during the
occupation, is arrested and charged with being Jewish as well as opposing the
Anschluss. He is sentenced to die by firing squad. He goes through raw terror
at the prospect of death, but then turns to an unfinished play, titled ‘The
Enemies’. His previous works he feels to be unsatisfactory and wants to
complete this play, the one by which history will judge and vindicate him. With
two acts left to write and his death sentence imminent, it seems impossible
that he could complete it in time. On the last night before his death, Hladík
prays to God, requesting that he be granted one year in which to finish the
play. That night, he dreams of going to the Clementinum, where one of the books
contains God within a single letter on one of the pages, which the cranky old
librarian has been unable to find despite looking for most of his life.
(Interestingly, in Borgesian terms, he complains of almost going blind looking
for this letter.) God is in one of the letters of one of the pages of one of
the four hundred thousand books of the Clementinum. Someone returns an
atlas to the library; by chance Hladik touches a letter on a map of India and
hears a voice that says to him, "The time for your labour has been
granted". The next day at the appointed time, two soldiers come and Hladík
is taken outside and lined up before the firing squad. The sergeant calls out
the order to fire. Time stops. The entire world becomes motionless, including
Hladík himself, standing in place before the firing squad. However, although he
is completely paralysed, he remains conscious. After a time, he understands:
God has granted him the time he requested. For him, a year of subjective time
will pass between the sergeant's order and the soldiers firing their rifles,
though no one else will realize that anything unusual has happened - hence, the
secret miracle of the story's title. Working from memory, Hladík mentally
writes, expands and edits his play, shaping every detail and nuance to his
satisfaction. Finally, after a year of labour, he completes it; only a single
epithet is left to be written, which he chooses, and time begins again and the
volley from the soldiers' rifles kills him.
It was not possible for anyone to look for this letter during the week of
the Meeting as the Clementinum was closed for repairs. Alchemy and numerology
had to wait; the delegates had to look elsewhere. Meanwhile our conference enjoyed
raising the perplexities of reading and storage. We heard about the ageing of
print. The text on photocopies using outdated chemical methods is literally
disappearing before our eyes. Yet the instant solution of digitising these rare
copies is itself risky if, as we are being warned, the CD or the file itself
could become redundant or inaccessible as one technology supersedes another.
What will last and what will not? Built-in obsolescence is nothing new and can
make new into nothing. We hear about reprint books where the old lettering
blurs on the flat page, rendering words illegible. We can see the letters
perfectly in the incunabula, but the 21-st century reprint turns them into
swatted flies. Print-on-demand, an astonishing publishing explosion directly
caused by the digital revolution, is a mixed blessing. A scanner that
misinterprets accents produces a book that is a schemozzle of indistinguishable
signifiers and signifieds. This must be particularly problematic with Czech, a
language bristling with acutes, haceks, and dipthongy things. O, one utters,
for the ancient text in all its papery glory! Spinoffs of this sort glut the
market, ghosts of the originals, and not least on Amazon.
The keyboard itself has entered a whole new era, now that
computers can only be spoken to by keying and mousing. There are times when we
speak our mind to the computer, but that’s another matter, and only a matter of
time. The qwerty has become the subject of international dispute, where nerds
with time on their hands may write petitions for a better way of arranging the
letters. These arguments do not have much leverage while qwerty is an
historical and international reality as fixed as diplomacy. Having said that,
Czech keyboards are fun for the novice, as their range of diacritics requires
extra keys and registers. (The Arabic keyboards at Dubai Airport had more
graphemes than there are stars in the sky above.) This led to a comedy of
errors when I needed to send emails, as my passwords included figures that are
located in unorthodox Czech parts of the console. Frustration gave way to
relief as it was explained how the settings can be changed from Czech to
English via a feature on the toolbar. The keyboard has become our means of
touring the internet, our readiest way of finding what we wish to read next,
our search guide for reading the newspapers, but it is fallible and prone to
error.
Everyday the newspapers are full of all the most awful news
about what humans can do. Even though we tell ourselves we will stop reading
the newspaper, enough is enough, still we go back and read more of this
awfulness. We seem to have a compulsion to go back for more, taking it all in
with private relish and reacting in the same old appalled way. These thoughts
were given, but much more succinctly and in perfect German, by Franz Kafka in
his diaries. (One of the most famous entries is for 2 August 1914: “Germany has
declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.”) I relate Kafka’s
thoughts from memory as I do not have the Diaries in front of me. Newspapers.
Does anyone still cut columns from them to paste into scrapbooks? Does anyone
cut and paste from online newspapers and store them in their cloud? And if so,
do they go back and read them later?
Franz Kafka was a writer I discovered when I was at
secondary school. His effect was direct and subversive. Perhaps his best known
story today is ‘Metamorphosis’, about a young man who wakes up one morning to
find he has turned into a cockroach. An insect at least, but always cockroach
in my mind. Even today, after living with this story half a lifetime, there is
still something utterly shocking about it that defies easy explanation. He
wrote ‘The Trial’, a novel about a man who is arrested for a crime that he
doesn’t know about, but by the end has come to believe he is guilty of
committing. And then there is ‘The Castle’, another story about sinister and
inexplicable bureaucracy that controls people’s lives. All of these stories
express the state of existence in late imperial Prague, most evidently ‘The
Castle’ because the inner city is overseen, from almost any river vista, by the
immense hilltop edifice known as Hradcany Castle. Kafka was a novelist deeply
aware of the multiple demands for attention on the modern educated reader, hence
his agony about why he wastes so much time reading newspapers. He knew that
there was no point writing a novel unless it was going to have an immediate and
lasting impact on the reader. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within
us,” was not said by someone intending to produce a nice read, or who saw
reading as simply a way to pass the time. Any book written by Kafka had to be
powerfully memorable. It had to change your life. It is this high personal
expectation that is behind Kafka’s directive to destroy all of his manuscripts
at his death. Fortunately his literary executor defied the author’s wishes,
which is why visitors to Prague today can seek out the city’s Kafkaesque
aspects, whether obvious or not.
One morning our Carmelite guide distributed the tram tickets
for our trip through town, across the Vltava and up Hradcany to the Strahov
Monastery. This is one of the great historic landmarks, founded around 1140 and
the scene of the fortunes of Prague itself: false starts, constructions, additions,
fire, plunder, rejection, reclamation, repairs, triumphs, disasters, quiet,
noise, looting, closure, destruction, decoration, re-opening, almost everything
but defenestration. Holy people do not throw people out of windows. Ushered
through large portals and long corridors we arrived at an unassuming door that
led us into one of those library rooms we only dream about. Heavy floorboards
led the eye inward toward the invisible point of perspective. Sunlight glowed
across shelves matched strictly to the height of the books, surely nothing
after 1900. Above us swirled one of those Baroque stucco ceilings that seem to
have been modelled on whipped vanilla icecream. Frescoes circled above us as
well, each one containing a scene with a scriptural passage that links
knowledge with Wisdom. Above the door was painted the well-known saying:
Initium sapientiae timor Domini (Psalm 110). This is the Theological Hall,
completed in 1679. We put our shod feet into big felt slippers in order to
slide across the boards without making a dint. It was difficult to restrain the
temptation to pull large folios from the shelves, to read their title pages, to
check out the inscriptions, to gaze inside some of these rare imprints, to
listen to long ago theologians forwarding a premise. Not only is the readerly
impulse as natural as breathing to a librarian, so is the interest in finding
out how the books are arranged, how did they bind that multi-volume Augustine,
and what is the truly rarest, by which we don’t mean the oldest, of all the
books. (Google Image ‘Strahov Monastery’ if you are wondering what I am talking
about.) So many rarities, so little time.
The monastery is Premonstratensian and even though the
library rooms themselves are post-medieval it is unavoidable in such a setting
not to think of the different kinds of reading practised by those Benedictine
men throughout the Middle Ages. The existence of the book as a practical means
of individual memory evolves in that period. Single manuscripts of theology
were circulated to houses, where they would be read aloud (lectio) and
in silence (meditatio) until the readers had memorised the contents.
Public and private reading were organised for optimum remembrance. The ideas
promoted in such works then became the personal knowledge of each reader, their
added collective possession. The teachings became their teachings, though
dispute was inevitable where newfangled notions were introduced. When it came
to worship this was all the more important. It becomes self-evident that a
single illuminated missal, or other liturgical or scriptural work, would be
treated with the utmost care and reverence by individuals for whom this was the
only copy in their house and maybe the only copy they would use in a lifetime.
The words were their way into wisdom, so methods of reading, whether voiced or
studied in silent retreat, were vital to existence. We can see, in such a
world, why the coming of the printing press had such a rapid effect on their
way of life, and also on their actual ways of thinking, trained as they had
been for generations in reading solitary texts, solitarily together.
One of the most exquisite practical objects in the
Theological Hall at Strahov is a rotating desk. Called a compilation wheel, it
has ledges taking three or four books each, fitted into a circular hold that
can be turned by a handle. The ledges keep to the horizontal by gravity, the
engine having about six or eight of these ledges, so that a reader or
translator can have as many as a dozen or more books open at once at a glance.
This 17th century marvel provides ideal service for intertextual
research, with no fussy delimiting of screens, tiresome online searches for
forgotten quotes, or piles of sources to trip over. It is an object lesson in
the needs of the Renaissance and Enlightenment reader, who worked with many
texts at once and would work for the first time with many of them open, pages
turned at a moment’s notice. With the tip of a hand a small library of books
was available to read, all in real time.
Another exquisite object is in the adjoining Philosophical
Hall of Strahov Library. It was all explained to us in impeccable Czech by the
librarian, then through our charming translator into English. A tall free-standing cabinet bookcase is
situated along one side of the room. It was the gift of the Austrian Princess
and second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, Marie Louise. In the autumn of 1812 she
sent books to Strahov, a Viennese set of porcelain, and a four-volume catalogue
listing the printed works in the first Louvre museum. This set was a piece of
high culture propaganda, a political stunt masterminded by the French Emperor
himself. However, when the exclusive publication was completed, he had the
whole print run destroyed, after it was explained that it listed a large number
of works that had been looted from other countries during his campaigns, most
especially Italy. The Bonapartes’ propaganda coup turned into what nowadays is
laughingly called a public relations disaster. Even as the donation was being
received Napoleon was engaged in his ill-conceived Russian invasion, thus in a
very short time leaving Prague with one of the handful of first edition Louvre
catalogues still in existence. It is safely locked behind the cabinet glass, a
curiosity kept from the cataclysm, like so many curiosities in this place. The
reader can only wonder at libraries lost and found as she studies these
grandiose records of unbridled ambition.
A developed reading habit will begin to distinguish between
information and propaganda, between the presentation of the words and their
maker’s intentions. We were reminded of this truth after leaving Strahov
Monastery and arriving down the street at the Archbishop’s Palace, directly
adjacent to Hradcany Castle. The plan was to say Mass in the chapel of the
Palace, but first our Carmelite guide, the erudite Father Gorazd Cetkovsky,
told us a story at the castle gate about Josef Beran, Archbishop of Prague from
1946 until his death in 1969. In 1948 the archbishop declared in a sermon that
the Catholic news in Czechoslovakia was not official but was being controlled
by the Communists. At the time church services were being interrupted by
hecklers and at this service the Reds derided Beran, whistled and yelled
loudly. In a detail already suggestive of legend, Fr Gorazd said that the
children in the church ran crying to the altar, which one took to mean a place
of security for the children. Consequently the archbishop was put under house
arrest by the State, leaving one to ask: what are we reading? What reading is
official? What official publications are in fact not official? What do the
officials want us to know? When living in a police state, either pre-1945 Nazi
Prague or post-1948 Soviet Prague, how much is being made public? What is being
repressed? Especially when the organization is the church, which
philosophically disagrees with the State but publicly maintains an appearance
of cool agreement with or tolerance of the State, simply in order to survive?
Beran was separated from his people and his diocese for twenty years.
Ordinations were conducted secretly, sometimes in the small chapel that we were
about to worship in. Unable to minister properly to the congregations and their
clergy, Beran lived a life of suffering and prayer. When Rome advised that it
wished to make him a cardinal, the Communist authorities told Beran that if he
went to Rome he was not to come back. After painful deliberation he left
Prague, attending the last session of the Vatican Council, and dying in Rome. It
was therefore with a sober sense of history and religious commitment that we
filed through the large rooms of the Archbishop’s Palace and into the ornate
Baroque chapel, aware that for all its beauty this was a place of prolonged
imprisonment, suffering, and dedicated service.
An unexpected course of behaviour is recounted in an essay
by the novelist Milan Kundera. Himself an atheist, Kundera started supporting
the Christians through this period, and even started going to Mass, when he saw
them being bullied publicly and privately by the Communists. We may call his
reactions honourable; they were also very Czech. Czechs are conscious of their
religious inheritance, even when they disagree with the religion, and see any
outside imposition of injustice as unacceptable. Obviously Kundera’s reactions
have a political motivation as well, but he was defending the freedom and right
of religion. To judge by his essays, Milan Kundera’s central belief is in
literature, and in particular the centrality of the novel as the locus of
changing human consciousness. In this respect he is not very distant from Franz
Kafka. Anyone who believes that the novel says it all, or says it best, will
have an enormous faith in readers. He must also of necessity have faith in the
reader to get it right. Kundera represents the Western Humanist tradition that
says a creative fiction has its own internal life and references that can only
be fully appreciated inside the reading life of that fiction. It is therefore
easy to understand why Kundera disapproved of the film of his novel ‘The
Unbearable Lightness of Being’, set in the period of the Prague Spring in the
late 1960s. In the Czech edition of the book, Kundera remarked that the movie
had very little to do with the spirit either of the novel or the characters in
it. As a result of this experience, he continued, he was no longer allowing any
adaptations of his works. Such a standoff plays right into the purpose of one
of the most common conversation openers in society today: was the film as good
as the book? Or, would you read the book after seeing the film? Et cetera. We
have become so used to book and film being interchangeable units, as though one
were the same as the other, that we have lost sight of the quite complex
differences that exist between the visual and the print media. Kundera will be
saying in words a hundred things that a film can only hint at, or cannot
communicate at all. How can it? Likewise, in a few frames we can see graphic
reconstructions of the events of August 1968 in Prague that Kundera must either
stretch to make credible or assume the reader knows about beforehand. The novel
has philosophical and literary connections from page to page that a filmmaker
may only be able to transmit by a choice of poses, sets of shades, or symphonic
hints. While Kundera may be right to give up on the idea that a film can ever
say what he says, the belief that a film could do that anyway is in itself a
mistake. Without being a snob about it, Milan Kundera’s decision seems to be
based on the belief that the reader will only really be able to understand him
by reading his words. The relationship between writer and reader is fixed on
the page; everything else, films included, is commentary after the fact.
The library conference continues behind closed doors in the
nearby inner suburb of Karlin. A session on the new gadgets prompts repeated
imaginary questions about the future. If tablets and smartphones become our
first mode of reading, is there something we are also losing in that exchange?
When a handheld device contains all of our reading for the next month, are we
even thinking of visiting a library? Will the touchscreen really replace flimsy
old breezy old paperbacks? Will there come a day when everything can be found
in an ebook? Or are we creating a world divided into ebook available versus
ebook unavailable? Can we concentrate for as long at a screen as we can at a
paper page? Is medieval meditatio, the practice of reading at depth in
silence, better done on some new untested microchip mechanism? Or is the
uncomplicated simplicity of the written or printed sheet of paper, by
definition, more conducive to meditatio? The same questions can even be framed for lectio. If
online periodicals become so expensive that no one can afford them, will there
be a publishing revolution that drives new available knowledge out online, for
free? Is much of the internet little more than journalism? How much of it will
be read in five years? Even more worryingly for those who believe in knowledge,
how much of it will not be available in five years? And where does that leave
the author trying to connect with her reader? How can we prove whether that
knowledge there yesterday is still there, or not? Is there a librarian keeping
tabs on the holdings of the world wide web? Is anyone cataloguing all of this
stuff? If our private reading and writing habits can be monitored online, then
may we not want to go private and stay offline? Are there secret police out
there who can read our emails and blogs without our knowledge? Call me
paranoid, but isn’t that an actual possibility? Even more worrying for writers
than their work being read by people they don’t know is the idea that their
writing is not being read and may even have disappeared offline, never to be
seen again. What then? Start a new chapter? What exactly is being read in this
world of saturation images? Are we even reading in the same way we did ten
years ago? What is the internet doing to our brains? What’s it doing to our
eyes? What’s it doing to our reading? Are we addicted to information but
forgetting about communication? Is copying from multiple sources off the
internet poetic license or creative plagiarism? If I admitted that my retelling
of ‘The Secret Miracle’ by Borges drew from various unnamed sources online and
off, does that make my version an unoriginal copy or a highly original mashup?
These and other cheery questions keep the mind ticking over until the next
coffee break.
The people of Prague read books on the park benches of the
river islands. Mid-morning coffee drinkers return to their history book near
the Franciscan Gardens. Caricaturists, selling their charcoal sketches on the
Charles Bridge, read cartoon books while waiting for the next portrait to walk
by. On the red trams, old men read the tiny Czech print in immaculately bound
books. Locals sit with pilseners at open-air restaurants, reading the latest
trade paperbacks. Tourists stand in the glare of the square to read where they
want to stare next. The process of close reading goes on, checking where they
were last, what language on the present page links intimately to language
elsewhere in the text, links that only the mind can make that is paying
attention. The mind lives with the author's created world of words. Remembrance
is not just in the printed book but relies on the remembrances in the reader's
mind. Author and reader renew acquaintances, the better to achieve some stage
of advanced agreement, some place of shared recognition. The people of Prague
stay at their art nouveau upstairs windows, entering a book they haven't
entered for twenty years. In the bookshops filled to the ceilings over two
floors with books only in Czech, buyers while the time with new titles, getting
the angle of blurbs, tracing the pattern in a table of contents, gauging price
against contents. There seem to be not many ipads and it’s the tourists with
the smartphones. The soft slow turning of the page is the quietest sound along
the sides of the Vltava. There are amazing, gold-tinted towers, weeds mandatory
in footpaths and along sides of even large stately buildings, its seems, and
the climate is balmy before a summer shower. The vast Vltava moves at steady
pace and breezes down the barriers with ducks bobbing, as another page is
turned.
Access to in-flight
screens involves touching one of three choices on the homepage: I, C, or E.
Information, Communication, or Entertainment. A great pity there is no K for
Knowledge, L for Learning, or best of all, R for Revelation. That would be a
screen to die for, maybe. Information is little different to Communication on
this screen, readymade facts that serve the traveller's need for quick answers.
We hardly call this reading in the real sense of meditatio or lectio.
That everything else is Entertainment speaks for our age, where no
differentiation is made in consumer culture between works of depth and works of
inane skimming. While we can be thankful for small mercies - some of the films
are good and the music excellent - the image-heavy choices on the touchscreen
bespeak a view of the audience that is tellingly non-readerly. It reminds me
how much reading is an active process, not a passive one. Perhaps the airlines
still have to catch up with words. It is therefore with some relief that I
switch off the screen and pluck out the trusty in-flight magazine from the
rack. There is, furthermore, a lead article on the changing habits of reading.
The plane hurtles elegantly over Baghdad in the vague direction of Australia. I
have a scribbled conference pad full of jobs for home, all of them to do with
reading: emails to colleagues about indexing of journals, an article to scan
about 19th-century Carmelites, follow-up on documents to write on
librarianship, other emails to send to overseas libraries offering donations of
out-of-print books using cheap freight, lists of authors whose titles must be
ordered, lists of unheard of titles that I must read myself, follow-up emails
to colleagues post-Prague. But amidst the fiesta of news in the in-flight
magazine, I have to sort out in my mind the meaning of an article on open
innovation, Web 3.0 social financing, and crowdsourcing, deciding on the basis
of words received whether or not this is something to act on in the next six
months: “The platforms mentioned above only begin to scratch the surface of
distributed knowledge: its potential forms and applications are near boundless.
While there’s ample room in the world for individual innovators and geniuses,
this generation’s most elucidatory source of knowledge will likely be the
collective mind.” (‘The magical power of crowds’, by Eric M. Blattberg, in
‘Open Skies’ magazine, Emirates Airlines, July 2012, p. 92)
Philip
Harvey wishes to thank Fr Gorazd Pavel Cetkovsky, O.Carm. of the Province of
Bohemia and Moravia and Yaya Vanisova, Czech translator into English, for their
follow-up information on some details in this essay.
