Tolle Lege
In the twelfth chapter of his Confessions, Saint Augustine reveals that he once flung himself down under a fig tree in tearful agony and prayed, “Why is there not this hour an end to my uncleanness?” At that moment he heard, “the voice as of a boy or girl coming from a neighbouring house, chanting and oft repeating, 'Tolle lege! Tolle lege!'" (“Take up and read! Take up and read!”) He continues,
Saint Augustine, in other words, interprets the overheard cry of a child to mean that God wants him play a game of sortes Biblicae. We find him in his room a few minutes later meditating on the verse from Romans at which his Bible has fallen open. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus calls God, obscurely, "a shout in the street." I like to imagine that the voice did come from God but that Saint Augustine's interpretation is too narrow, too precise.
"The reading of good books," says Descartes, "is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries; in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts," (Discourse on the Method, 1637). Milton, in Areopagitica, 1644, agrees and elaborates, "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." Milton's words, his assertion that books contain an intellectual "potency of life," prepares the way for Jorge Luis Borges who, in Coleridge's Flower, evokes and develops the idea of the Spirit of Literature,
It is probable Borges' is presenting a hyperbole for an intellectual community of writers and readers and that he does not really believe in a living Spirit of literature. (In How to Read and Why, 2001, Harold Bloom makes the point more prosaically when he instructs his readers to, "read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.") Nevertheless, if one attempts to proceed experimentally on the assumption that Borges wants us to take his fantastic conjecture at face value, there are one or two tentative propositions that can be advanced in favour of it.
People who are accustomed to seeking the sublime in stars, crashing cataracts and storms, are liable to baulk at the suggestion that it could be found compressed between the pages of books but it may turn out that the difference between the real world and the world of books is less obvious than common sense would compel us to believe. Physicists trying to explain the black hole information paradox, for instance, have suggested that the three-dimensionality of the universe is an illusion that breaks down at the subatomic level, just as the three-dimensions of a hologram are reduced under a microscope to a two-dimensional scattering of clouded dots. (Medieval theologians saw the visible world as a flat surface like the page of a Holy Book on which each natural object bore the meaningful stamp of the Divine; the interpretation of these signatures, they believed, was an exercise in exegesis). In a flattened universe, there is little difference between the page of a book and a flock of birds or the moon. What we are faced with is a vast surface of information, a kind of living cosmic parchment. And if, with one eye on this theory, we consider the teleological argument that the universe has evolved with the purpose of creating and sustaining intelligent observers, then those patches of the cosmic parchment where the information is most lucidly organized and consciously self-referential, in other words, its texts, might justifiably be regarded with a certain sacred astonishment. In his monogram on synchronicity, Carl Jung remarks that, "we are so accustomed to regard meaning as a psychic process that it never enters our heads to suppose that it could exist outside the psyche," and then speculates that, "besides the connection between cause and effect there is another factor in nature which expresses itself in the arrangement of events and appears to us as meaning." It is not more unreasonable than the supposition this numinous organizing force exists to imagine that its natural medium is words and texts. To this strange theogony Borges has elsewhere provided the mechanism: Each time an ardent reader repeats a line by Shakespeare or declaims one of the apophthegms of Christ, he is, in some way, that instant when Shakespeare wrote that line or Christ spoke those words; he is, in some way, Shakespeare and Christ. Perhaps the child's cry that Saint Augustine heard existed in some mysterious relation to a force sustained and promulgated by a diverse and ever-changing number of sympathetic readers and writers whom it unites to each other and to itself, just as a given brain state is defined and sustained by which of the total number of neurons in the brain are active at a given moment. Perhaps we create and participate in God when we take up and read. When the visible universe is reduced to a surface that accommodates information, and meaning understood as the highest state into which this information can be organized, the objects the universe contains are reduced to protowords; the event which began the universe a primal scream; the evolution of life a stammering, incomprehensible speech that slowly achieves articulation. The day may come when scientists will, with a slight substitution of terms, accept a literal interpretation of the first chapter of John. It begins, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” |