Carried Across · Chapter 9
The new carriers
The man who forged the last link in this book's longest-waiting chain would end his career writing from inside a debtors' prison.
Simon Ockley was Cambridge's professor of Arabic, chronically poor in the way only minor academics of his period could be poor; within a decade of his great translation he was finishing other books from a cell in Cambridge Castle. In 1708 he published The Improvement of Human Reason, his English version of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, made directly from the Arabic of the Bodleian manuscript, bypassing the Latin that had carried the book until then. It was the third English rendering in thirty-five years, after the Quaker Keith's and another from the Latin, and it found a public still hungry for the tale: a child raised by a gazelle on an empty island, deducing the universe. Eleven years later Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, and readers have argued about the debt ever since; the connection is suggested often, proven never, and this book grades it exactly so.
Step back from Ockley's cell and look at the whole final segment of the chain, because something new happens in it. Ibn Tufayl's novel waited five hundred years for its European career, and when the career came, it came not as one crossing but as a burst: Latin at Oxford in 1671, Dutch at Amsterdam in 1672, English in 1674, English again in 1708, with Locke's circle, the Quakers and Spinoza's friends each reading their own preoccupations into the islander. The book had not changed. The receiving culture had finally grown the receptors, a Europe suddenly obsessed with what the unaided mind could know, and once the receptors existed, every available channel lit up at once. By 1708 the channels included print runs, learned journals, a market for retranslation, and a professor doing piecework from debtors' prison: transmission had become an industry with redundancy. The single fragile chain, severable at any link by one storm or one death, was becoming a mesh.
Three centuries on, the mesh is the planet. It is worth saying plainly what has happened to each of this book's mechanisms in our own time, because every one of them survives, in costume.
The bodies persist: the 1303 Hayy manuscript still sits in the Bodleian, but its body has been photographed, and the photograph multiplied beyond counting or destroying. Digitization is the deepest change in the economics of survival since parchment, and it has done for thousands of manuscripts what the multispectral camera did for Sergius's scraped Galen: returned bodies to circulation that the old arithmetic had written off. The carriers persist: the scanning projects, the catalogers, the editors of critical texts, the volunteers who proof transcriptions, every one of them a name attached to a decision that a text was worth labor. The patrons persist, as ministries, foundations and libraries, and the demand-side law persists with them: what gets digitized first is what someone has a use for, and the rest waits, exactly as Greek poetry waited outside the doors of Abbasid Baghdad.
And now there is a new reader, which is also, unmistakably, a new carrier.
Machine systems trained on the digitized record have begun to do, at industrial scale, what this book's carriers did by hand: take knowledge composed in one language and context and re-present it in another, on demand, to anyone. The resemblance to the old trade is not loose. Like the Toledo teams, the machines work through intermediate representations no one will ever read. Like Ibn al-Muqaffa, they adapt as they carry, smoothing the cargo to the receiving audience's expectations. And like every carrier in this book, they reshape what they transmit, with this difference: the volume is so large, and the unit cost so near zero, that the reshaping happens everywhere at once, and mostly without a name attached.
Which is why the oldest discipline in this story has suddenly stopped looking antiquarian. The hadith scholars graded every report by its chain of named transmitters, because they understood that at scale, with high stakes, the only defensible question about a claim is where it came from and who vouches at each step. Hunayn published his audit file. The stationers wrote their colophons. Print thinned the fingerprints and bibliography arose to recover them. Each cheapening of transmission, the last chapter argued, trades fingerprints for reach, and then has to reinvent the fingerprints. The machine era is the largest such trade ever made, and its reinvention is barely begun. The atlas behind this book is one very small attempt at the missing discipline: every crossing named, every claim sourced, every grade honest, the whole structured so that the new readers, the machine ones, can consume the chains without flattening them. Whether the practice spreads is, fittingly, a question of demand.
It remains to keep a promise from the first chapter, and end where the carrying began.
Burzoy's legend, you will remember, had a sage explain that the herb that raises the dead was a book. The fourteen chains have shown the metaphor to be more literal than the sage could have known, and exact in both directions. Books raise the dead: Galen practiced on ninth-century patients through Hunayn's Arabic, and Ibn Sina examined them in seventeenth-century Montpellier through Gerard's Latin; an Andalusi philosopher dead five centuries argued with Locke's England through the Pocockes' edition. And books are themselves the dead who can be raised: scraped vellum recovered by a camera, a lost Baghdad Aristotle reassembled out of its own Latin grandchild, a Sanskrit treatise surviving as the Latin of a revision of a vanished adaptation. Neither resurrection happens alone. Every single one required a carrier: someone, with a name, who decided the dead were worth the labor.
That is the whole argument of this book, and it fits in three sentences now. Knowledge does not flow; it is carried. The carriers are people, with communities, prices, appetites and loves, and the sum of their uncoordinated decisions is the largest cooperative achievement our species has produced without anyone being in charge of it. And the achievement is not finished, because carrying is not a phase of history but a permanent condition: every generation's knowledge is one uncopied, untranslated, unread generation away from silence.
The kings in the fables kept their wisdom locked in treasuries, and it did them no good; the physician who memorized it by night did more for them than their locks ever did. The treasury today is larger than any rajah's, and the night-copyists are an odder company than ever: scholars, librarians, volunteers, and machines. The test of our stretch of the chain is the same as the test of theirs. Not whether we possess the books. Whether we carry them.