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Palimpsest Lib/E: A History of the Written Word
A profound, eloquent meditation on the history of writing, from Mesopotamia to multimedia. Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. Portrayed in mythology as either a gift from heroes or a curse from the gods, it has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine; a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition. Now, as the revolution once wrought by the printed word gives way to the digital age, many fear that the art of writing, and the nuanced thinking nurtured by writing, are under threat. But writing itself, despite striving for permanence, is always in the midst of growth and transfiguration. Celebrating the impulse to record, invent, and make one's mark, Matthew Battles reenchants the written word for all those susceptible to the power and beauty of writing in all of its forms. 15 illustrations
Audio CD
First published March 11, 2013
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About the author
Matthew Battles
10 books39 followersMatthew Battles is a Curatorial Fellow with metaLAB, a project of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
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May 25, 2020
Making a Mark in Life
Writing is a fundamentally different use of language than talking. So different that in most languages, the vocabulary, grammar, and intention of each are categorised separately. Talking is mostly dialogue; writing not. Talking is direct, personal, and literally (!) subjective; writing inserts a barrier between writer and reader so that the text appears to be talking while it refuses to respond in conversation. Talking is usually simple communication about life-events. Writing is thought embodied. Writing is what permits reason as a special kind of story-telling.
To make the gap with speech even wider, writing persists and talking does not. What has been written stays written unless it is destroyed, while talk evaporates immediately. These contrary default conditions mean that writing is as important an evolutionary phenomenon as the development of language itself. Writing might even be thought of as the primordial compulsion of language to free itself from dependence on organic life - the first leap to Artificial Intelligence.
Human memory for speech even with mnemonics has limited capacity. The astounding feats of memory among the saga-telling sages of purely verbal cultures are capable of recording only the minutest fraction of individual and group experience. And the inevitable inter-generational modifications, mistakes and political edits are impossible to distinguish from the original as they wipe out whatever was recounted before. The development of language and the accumulation of language-based skills through talk, therefore, is an evolutionary dead end.
Hence the writing, editing, redacting and selection of various sacred scriptures. Even with their often embarrassing claims and inaccurate rapportage, such writing is a far more powerful religious force than verbal myth. Writing has no genetic limit. Its memory-capacity is effectively infinite. It is a technology which generates further technology, the purpose of which is to ensure not necessarily the welfare of the language-using species, us, but of language itself. Pace Battles’s assertion that, “Writing needs us more than we need writing,” It is clear that writing needs fewer and fewer of us as it creates its own more sophisticated, faster, and more reliable technology. So the future of writing is in its hands not ours.
The anthropologist/theologian/philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, had a vision of this trajectory of language long before the concept of Artificial Intelligence had been formulated. He called this concept the Noösphere, that state of affairs in which language, that is, reason, becomes independent of those who created it. Emerging from the inert Geosphere, the Biosphere, of which we are a part, generates the Noösphere, the domain of pure mind.
What Teilhard missed was the connection among language, technology and thought, which is to be found in writing. Like Darwin before the discovery of DNA, Teilhard could identify an evolutionary process but not the mechanism which operates it. And as DNA contains the genes which direct physical development , so writing contains the memes which direct conceptual development. The technology of writing is the bridge between genes and memes, just as the chemical composition of DNA is the bridge between dead matter and life.
Teilhard calls the completion of this process of evolution the Omega Point, at which everything, according to the logic of language, is effectively spiritualized as writing writes itself. Whether one understands this as a desirable ideal or even as a completion is open to question. Desirability is an aesthetic question; completion a theological one. Battles recognises both issues:
Battles is perceptive about the past and agnostic about the future. But the future will really be the determinant of what is considered relevant about the past. So Palimpsest is questionable as definitive history. Teilhard’s ‘end’ is optimistic so all of history is rationalised as divinely directed. This is also implied by Battles’s praise of writing. But the beauty of writing is mesmerising; its infinite potential makes it appear divine; and its subtle claim to ‘represent’ what is not-language is the source of immense suffering. The history of writing, therefore, suggests an Omega Point of Hell not Heaven, an eternal progression of writing writing to and about itself.
Battles poses a crucial question through which to consider the future though: “It’s fair to ask: what does writing want?” Because it persists, because it can be done in secret isolation, because it has never been under anyone’s control, because it has effectively addicted our species to is use, this question is far from nonsensical. According to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, what writing wants is the elimination of the species in which it has temporarily found a home. In fact it appears from the praise heaped upon the future of language-based technology that writing has manipulated many people into believing that the replacement of organic writers would be an admirable development.
Perhaps, therefore, Battles hasn’t entirely thought through the implications of Emily Dickinson’s comments. Her emotional response to writing may be as much part of a dismal cosmic ruse as Kurzweil’s breathless predictions. Battles uses the word ‘magisterium’ to describe the authority writing has over us. This is the same word that the Catholic Church uses to define its authority over its official teaching, which, of course, is in writing. So it appears as if dogmatic religion has also willingly been pulled into the black hole of writing by its irresistible gravity, a revelatory anticipation of the eschaton foreseen by Kurzweil.
In fact it seems that all the ills of modern society - ideological conflict, consumerism, racism, environmental devastation, to name only a few - have their direct source in writing. The complementary fact that writing improves the quality of life for many - in terms of health, nutrition, and mobility for example - may just be the ‘come on’ for a bait and switch strategy that is writings’ end game. Writing generates death as well as prosperity, perhaps the former on an even more massive scale than the latter. The civilisation allowed by writing could well be not a mark of human progress but a trap of increasing discontent as Freud suggested. Battles notes that “the manner in which [writing] wields its power is all but invisible to us.” So how would we know what its real intentions are?
Minimally, therefore, writing affirms the classic theorem that ‘there is no free lunch.’ Both from a literary as well as technological perspective, writing is not just our route to species domination but possibly also our path to species destruction. It’s development has been inexorable from cuneiform to Python. Writing is a correlate, if not the source, of our consciousness. It is by far the most important aspect of our lives. Yet we have no ethics or moral code of writing. To create such things we would require an ability equivalent to seeing our own eye without distortion. So as the existentialist philosophers have said so forcefully: it is at least as likely that we are the marks of language rather than the markers.
Writing is a fundamentally different use of language than talking. So different that in most languages, the vocabulary, grammar, and intention of each are categorised separately. Talking is mostly dialogue; writing not. Talking is direct, personal, and literally (!) subjective; writing inserts a barrier between writer and reader so that the text appears to be talking while it refuses to respond in conversation. Talking is usually simple communication about life-events. Writing is thought embodied. Writing is what permits reason as a special kind of story-telling.
To make the gap with speech even wider, writing persists and talking does not. What has been written stays written unless it is destroyed, while talk evaporates immediately. These contrary default conditions mean that writing is as important an evolutionary phenomenon as the development of language itself. Writing might even be thought of as the primordial compulsion of language to free itself from dependence on organic life - the first leap to Artificial Intelligence.
Human memory for speech even with mnemonics has limited capacity. The astounding feats of memory among the saga-telling sages of purely verbal cultures are capable of recording only the minutest fraction of individual and group experience. And the inevitable inter-generational modifications, mistakes and political edits are impossible to distinguish from the original as they wipe out whatever was recounted before. The development of language and the accumulation of language-based skills through talk, therefore, is an evolutionary dead end.
Hence the writing, editing, redacting and selection of various sacred scriptures. Even with their often embarrassing claims and inaccurate rapportage, such writing is a far more powerful religious force than verbal myth. Writing has no genetic limit. Its memory-capacity is effectively infinite. It is a technology which generates further technology, the purpose of which is to ensure not necessarily the welfare of the language-using species, us, but of language itself. Pace Battles’s assertion that, “Writing needs us more than we need writing,” It is clear that writing needs fewer and fewer of us as it creates its own more sophisticated, faster, and more reliable technology. So the future of writing is in its hands not ours.
The anthropologist/theologian/philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, had a vision of this trajectory of language long before the concept of Artificial Intelligence had been formulated. He called this concept the Noösphere, that state of affairs in which language, that is, reason, becomes independent of those who created it. Emerging from the inert Geosphere, the Biosphere, of which we are a part, generates the Noösphere, the domain of pure mind.
What Teilhard missed was the connection among language, technology and thought, which is to be found in writing. Like Darwin before the discovery of DNA, Teilhard could identify an evolutionary process but not the mechanism which operates it. And as DNA contains the genes which direct physical development , so writing contains the memes which direct conceptual development. The technology of writing is the bridge between genes and memes, just as the chemical composition of DNA is the bridge between dead matter and life.
Teilhard calls the completion of this process of evolution the Omega Point, at which everything, according to the logic of language, is effectively spiritualized as writing writes itself. Whether one understands this as a desirable ideal or even as a completion is open to question. Desirability is an aesthetic question; completion a theological one. Battles recognises both issues:
“... a measure of writing’s power also springs from its limits. ‘A letter is a joy of Earth,’ Emily Dickinson writes; ‘It is denied the Gods’ - for omniscience would make writing unnecessary, destroying its pleasure and surprise. The gods are irretrievably beyond letter writing; for them there is no anticipation, no wondering about a letter’s (or a line’s, or a word’s) reception or interpretation. Dickinson’s brief poem concerns what might be called epistolary erotics, the pleasures of correspondence: its rhythms of composition and delivery, the intensity of expression and the swirl of anticipation.”
Battles is perceptive about the past and agnostic about the future. But the future will really be the determinant of what is considered relevant about the past. So Palimpsest is questionable as definitive history. Teilhard’s ‘end’ is optimistic so all of history is rationalised as divinely directed. This is also implied by Battles’s praise of writing. But the beauty of writing is mesmerising; its infinite potential makes it appear divine; and its subtle claim to ‘represent’ what is not-language is the source of immense suffering. The history of writing, therefore, suggests an Omega Point of Hell not Heaven, an eternal progression of writing writing to and about itself.
Battles poses a crucial question through which to consider the future though: “It’s fair to ask: what does writing want?” Because it persists, because it can be done in secret isolation, because it has never been under anyone’s control, because it has effectively addicted our species to is use, this question is far from nonsensical. According to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, what writing wants is the elimination of the species in which it has temporarily found a home. In fact it appears from the praise heaped upon the future of language-based technology that writing has manipulated many people into believing that the replacement of organic writers would be an admirable development.
Perhaps, therefore, Battles hasn’t entirely thought through the implications of Emily Dickinson’s comments. Her emotional response to writing may be as much part of a dismal cosmic ruse as Kurzweil’s breathless predictions. Battles uses the word ‘magisterium’ to describe the authority writing has over us. This is the same word that the Catholic Church uses to define its authority over its official teaching, which, of course, is in writing. So it appears as if dogmatic religion has also willingly been pulled into the black hole of writing by its irresistible gravity, a revelatory anticipation of the eschaton foreseen by Kurzweil.
In fact it seems that all the ills of modern society - ideological conflict, consumerism, racism, environmental devastation, to name only a few - have their direct source in writing. The complementary fact that writing improves the quality of life for many - in terms of health, nutrition, and mobility for example - may just be the ‘come on’ for a bait and switch strategy that is writings’ end game. Writing generates death as well as prosperity, perhaps the former on an even more massive scale than the latter. The civilisation allowed by writing could well be not a mark of human progress but a trap of increasing discontent as Freud suggested. Battles notes that “the manner in which [writing] wields its power is all but invisible to us.” So how would we know what its real intentions are?
Minimally, therefore, writing affirms the classic theorem that ‘there is no free lunch.’ Both from a literary as well as technological perspective, writing is not just our route to species domination but possibly also our path to species destruction. It’s development has been inexorable from cuneiform to Python. Writing is a correlate, if not the source, of our consciousness. It is by far the most important aspect of our lives. Yet we have no ethics or moral code of writing. To create such things we would require an ability equivalent to seeing our own eye without distortion. So as the existentialist philosophers have said so forcefully: it is at least as likely that we are the marks of language rather than the markers.
June 5, 2019
Oh boy, I should have checked out the Goodreads rating and reviews before buying this one. But I couldn’t resist! It was on sale at Chapters, and a whole book that seems to be about the history of writing? Sure, I flipped through the first few pages and detected a slightly pretentious tone—but I just thought it meant the author was very passionate and serious about their topic! I was seduced, I say! Seduced!
Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word is an investigation by Matthew Battles into the impetus and actuality of writing throughout human history. From painting on cave walls to computer code and text on glowing screens, Battles asks us to consider whether writing is what makes us human, whether humans inevitably—sorry, or I should say, as Battles loves to, ineluctably—had to write—and if so, why did we invent it when we did? Along the way, he connects writing to a number of social and cultural developments. However, he never really goes too deep into the subject. Indeed, his overall thesis is ultimately somewhat weak, while his writing and prose is cloyingly sesquipedalian. (In addition to the above-noted ineluctably, Battles’ second-favourite word is enjambment).
A small part of me feels mean for criticizing someone’s writing like this. After all, I do enjoy beautiful writing. I enjoy someone who knows what words they want to use and uses them, even if they are perhaps uncommon. I enjoy a good turn of phrase or image skilfully painted with the text.
And then we get passages like this one:
Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.
There are two important and interesting points Battles manages to make in Palimpsest. First, that writing is linked to control and from there perhaps to slavery. Second, that writing inherently conflicts with the reliability of oral memory. Neither of these ideas are new to me, nor do I think Battles explores them particularly well. (Consider Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” for a meditation on the latter.) Battles discusses how this book took him over a decade to assemble, and I feel for him: this is a difficult, broad, chaotic topic to grapple with. Yet for all that effort, Battles really only grasps at the edges of what writing is or does for us.
Each of the chapters has its highlights. Battles dives deep into Chinese writing for a while. His chapter on holy texts (but mostly just the Bible) contained some things I already knew about the authorship of the various Bible books. However, he also points out that how the Bible mentions or doesn’t mention writing, particularly in Paul’s letters, can give us a lot of information about literacy and cultural ideas about writing at the time those books were written. This kind of archaeological sleuthing is highly appealing to me. Similarly, when Battles discusses the printing press, he avoids swooning over its revolutionary nature but instead points that it was part of a larger, ongoing development in writing, that people seized upon the printing press as one of many new technologies and ideas with which to spread their words across continents.
So you see, it isn’t actually his style that disappoints so much as how that style, combined with the futility of the book, disappoints me. I never returned to Palimpsest excited or eager for the next chapter of this quest; I slouched back towards it with a sense of dread. Why didn’t I give up? Well, I was learning some things. Battles has done his research, and he cites a lot of interesting ideas. It just never quite coheres into a full, rich, rewarding experience for the reader. I wish I could endorse this book and tell you about how I luxuriated in the richness of the prose for hours on end. Alas … reader, I ineluctably did not find my elation in the enjambments of word and idea reified by the ink-on-paper of this tome.
Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word is an investigation by Matthew Battles into the impetus and actuality of writing throughout human history. From painting on cave walls to computer code and text on glowing screens, Battles asks us to consider whether writing is what makes us human, whether humans inevitably—sorry, or I should say, as Battles loves to, ineluctably—had to write—and if so, why did we invent it when we did? Along the way, he connects writing to a number of social and cultural developments. However, he never really goes too deep into the subject. Indeed, his overall thesis is ultimately somewhat weak, while his writing and prose is cloyingly sesquipedalian. (In addition to the above-noted ineluctably, Battles’ second-favourite word is enjambment).
A small part of me feels mean for criticizing someone’s writing like this. After all, I do enjoy beautiful writing. I enjoy someone who knows what words they want to use and uses them, even if they are perhaps uncommon. I enjoy a good turn of phrase or image skilfully painted with the text.
And then we get passages like this one:
The nineteenth century was the Age of the Letter, the soot-colored ink of the press seeping like coal fire into every corner of public and private life. In Europe and America, men dressed like letters: their woolens dyed in inky tones, their top hats erect like the ascenders of the letters b, d, and h, their coattails and boot heels turned like serifs.
Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.
There are two important and interesting points Battles manages to make in Palimpsest. First, that writing is linked to control and from there perhaps to slavery. Second, that writing inherently conflicts with the reliability of oral memory. Neither of these ideas are new to me, nor do I think Battles explores them particularly well. (Consider Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” for a meditation on the latter.) Battles discusses how this book took him over a decade to assemble, and I feel for him: this is a difficult, broad, chaotic topic to grapple with. Yet for all that effort, Battles really only grasps at the edges of what writing is or does for us.
Each of the chapters has its highlights. Battles dives deep into Chinese writing for a while. His chapter on holy texts (but mostly just the Bible) contained some things I already knew about the authorship of the various Bible books. However, he also points out that how the Bible mentions or doesn’t mention writing, particularly in Paul’s letters, can give us a lot of information about literacy and cultural ideas about writing at the time those books were written. This kind of archaeological sleuthing is highly appealing to me. Similarly, when Battles discusses the printing press, he avoids swooning over its revolutionary nature but instead points that it was part of a larger, ongoing development in writing, that people seized upon the printing press as one of many new technologies and ideas with which to spread their words across continents.
So you see, it isn’t actually his style that disappoints so much as how that style, combined with the futility of the book, disappoints me. I never returned to Palimpsest excited or eager for the next chapter of this quest; I slouched back towards it with a sense of dread. Why didn’t I give up? Well, I was learning some things. Battles has done his research, and he cites a lot of interesting ideas. It just never quite coheres into a full, rich, rewarding experience for the reader. I wish I could endorse this book and tell you about how I luxuriated in the richness of the prose for hours on end. Alas … reader, I ineluctably did not find my elation in the enjambments of word and idea reified by the ink-on-paper of this tome.
August 29, 2015
Got to page 68; couldn't go on. It's been a long, long time since I haven't finished a book. Thought we'd be an author/reader match made in heaven. He's interested in language and words, as am I. He uses lovely words. But, if he were a speaker, he would be the kind who likes to hear himself talk. Too many unsupported assumptions and presumptions. Just wasn't for me.
August 15, 2015
Not for me. I thought this would be a history of why writing exists. Instead, I found this to be a jumble and mishmash of stories, anecdotes and asides that don't really pull themselves together. Rather than it being a discussion of how writing evolved and the eventual need (that's discussed in the very beginning), it's really more about the history of types of writing, from literature to coding.
It was really frustrating to go through an explanation of computer coding and its purpose (plus how it works) and then go back through the history of computers. The book is somewhat like that. We get one particular angle and then explore the greater historical/cultural/societal context, which sometimes works but oftentimes doesn't. It struck me as aimless and ramble-y.
I guess I was disappointed because I was looking more for a historical/scientific discussion of the topic rather than the exploration of the concept of writing through its various forms, whether it's as literature or hieroglyphics or Chinese characters or whatever. I'm not sure the book answers the question: "Why does writing exist?" as listed in the book flap. Perhaps it addresses this question on a smaller scale via the Bible or computer codes or whatever, but *how* it came to be wasn't addressed as much.
Recommend the library if you're really interested.
It was really frustrating to go through an explanation of computer coding and its purpose (plus how it works) and then go back through the history of computers. The book is somewhat like that. We get one particular angle and then explore the greater historical/cultural/societal context, which sometimes works but oftentimes doesn't. It struck me as aimless and ramble-y.
I guess I was disappointed because I was looking more for a historical/scientific discussion of the topic rather than the exploration of the concept of writing through its various forms, whether it's as literature or hieroglyphics or Chinese characters or whatever. I'm not sure the book answers the question: "Why does writing exist?" as listed in the book flap. Perhaps it addresses this question on a smaller scale via the Bible or computer codes or whatever, but *how* it came to be wasn't addressed as much.
Recommend the library if you're really interested.
July 24, 2017
This book was very dry and sometimes ridiculous. The idea technical instructions should be written in more flowery language is just silly. It was wordy just to be wordy, as if it was impressing the reader (certainly not me). It was pretentious. I was approved for a review copy via Edelweiss in return for an honest review.
February 14, 2020
Battles presents his tightly restrictive and very specifically selected “history” within a poetic, lyrical coating which masks and softens the more hard-edged academic references included throughout, to “celebrate” the survival of the written word.
His main arguments seem to be (a) that the written word is “alive” and that it reproduces and replicates itself through varying historical periods, based on a kind of biological evolutionary process which accommodates the changing technological environments it encounters throughout history, and (b) that all writing is but a palimpsest (used only in its “extended” metaphorical meaning/definition) not only of its origins and developments but also, metaphorically, as a palimpsest of itself.
Both these propositions allow Battles to progress quickly throughout the “history”, its origins, its development in “making sense” of the world, the “changes” of the mode of writing: from markings in clay, through the observations of “signs” in the natural world; then through various types of styluses and writing materials, quills, pens, the presses, typewriters; then on via electronic typewriters to computers and eventually into the “machine writing” computer-code algorithms we now have in our global electronic communication systems of the internet.
All of these developments are, in a sense, “true”. Battles presents them all with his mixture of poetic and academic flourishes that are, each in their own way, indisputable, and they are piled on, one after another, in a way that seems to want to elicit a “Yea! Yea!” response. Unfortunately (?) my response was more of a “yes, but” — and rarely, if ever, was the “but” part fully explored: indeed, it appears to me that consideration of the “but”s was actively discouraged — this through many references to the opinions of many experts covering many disciplinary fields, including linguistic, philosophical, psychological, biological, religious, pedagogical, and literary sources.
The more academic of these references (and they are often simply specific excerpts from more extensive studies and reports) use what for the ordinary reader would be obscure jargon and neologisms (“abjads” anyone?). I doubt whether I have ever had the need to look up the meaning of so many unusual, difficult words in the same book before — and when I did find out their definitions, they did not always clarify their application in the text of the book… it only served to re-emphasise my “yes, but” response.
In the end, everything in this book seems to argue for an acceptance of the slippage of meaning and application, which in my opinion serves to obscure rather than elucidate. Words are not biologically “alive”; but while this term might be used to “explain” their “birth”, “development”, “growth”, “decline” and even “death”, we very quickly also find ourselves in a kind of anthropomorphic world, where “words” have desires and feelings, “wanting”, “teaching”, “controlling”, etc. Thus words can be written of as in some way “wanting” to perpetuate their “desire” for replication, and that this in somehow incorporated biologically in words themselves — perhaps by the use of the metaphoric palimpsest, for example. Before one knows it, everything becomes a metaphor, even the slightest mark (or even the absence of marks); and metaphors become metaphors of something else again, for ever and ever — and “therefore” the written word will “live” forever…
There are many examples of this type of thinking throughout the book, and for me this became an increasingly irritating and frustrating aspect of it — to the point of anger. Cf. for example, the use of the word “magisterium” used repeatedly to suggest this is a special quality of “written words”. It isn’t. And neither are “power, “control”, etc. Written words can be used for this purpose, but that doe not mean that those purposes are an inherent quality of the written word.
If there is one thing that is evident to me about why this book is a fantasy rather than a real history it is that there is very little attention given to the use of the written word to lie, deceive, be wrong (whether deliberately or not). I mention this specifically because I happened to notice an error (aberration? misreading? typo?) smack in the middle of this book (and, ironically, in the chapter on “Holy Writ”): on page 128 we read: “A striking pattern emerged: throughout these doublets, God was almost invariably called JWHW in one and Elohim in the other.” Quite apart from the theological implications of the two types of names for God (indicative of what, precisely?) the concern is with the letters JWHW (aka. the Tetragrammaton). This Tetragrammaton is repeated on the following page, and again in the Index. JWHW is wrong: it should be JHWH. The only possible other combinations are: JHVH, YHVH and YHWH (all possible renditions of the original Hebrew and “translated” as either Yahweh or Jehovah). JWHW is not an option. But since this is now printed thrice in this book, does this mean it will “reproduce” itself in future and become a “metaphor” or a “palimpsest” that will never go away?
Written words are tools we have invented to help guide us as best as we know possible in our dealings with the world. How they are used is another question. We also know that written words have changed their spelling, pronunciation, and even often have more than one “meaning” (depending on their context), and that these changes were adopted and made by the writers in order to clarify, to minimise misunderstandings, to accommodate adoption of new written words which might alter or confuse a reader or speaker (and that these are not always absolute, but can vary, either deliberately, or accidentally through error or misunderstanding or misreading, and even through mis-hearing).
We do the changing, not the words. And how we change them should be based on whether we can adequately identify their applicability or not to our current needs in our world. I would suggest that how we change written words should be a scientific endeavour, not a poetic or literary one, and best developed by the application of Karl Popper’s falsification theory. In the context of this book, perhaps a good place to start might be to question Thomas de Quincey’s suggestion that the human brain is a palimpsest.
His main arguments seem to be (a) that the written word is “alive” and that it reproduces and replicates itself through varying historical periods, based on a kind of biological evolutionary process which accommodates the changing technological environments it encounters throughout history, and (b) that all writing is but a palimpsest (used only in its “extended” metaphorical meaning/definition) not only of its origins and developments but also, metaphorically, as a palimpsest of itself.
Both these propositions allow Battles to progress quickly throughout the “history”, its origins, its development in “making sense” of the world, the “changes” of the mode of writing: from markings in clay, through the observations of “signs” in the natural world; then through various types of styluses and writing materials, quills, pens, the presses, typewriters; then on via electronic typewriters to computers and eventually into the “machine writing” computer-code algorithms we now have in our global electronic communication systems of the internet.
All of these developments are, in a sense, “true”. Battles presents them all with his mixture of poetic and academic flourishes that are, each in their own way, indisputable, and they are piled on, one after another, in a way that seems to want to elicit a “Yea! Yea!” response. Unfortunately (?) my response was more of a “yes, but” — and rarely, if ever, was the “but” part fully explored: indeed, it appears to me that consideration of the “but”s was actively discouraged — this through many references to the opinions of many experts covering many disciplinary fields, including linguistic, philosophical, psychological, biological, religious, pedagogical, and literary sources.
The more academic of these references (and they are often simply specific excerpts from more extensive studies and reports) use what for the ordinary reader would be obscure jargon and neologisms (“abjads” anyone?). I doubt whether I have ever had the need to look up the meaning of so many unusual, difficult words in the same book before — and when I did find out their definitions, they did not always clarify their application in the text of the book… it only served to re-emphasise my “yes, but” response.
In the end, everything in this book seems to argue for an acceptance of the slippage of meaning and application, which in my opinion serves to obscure rather than elucidate. Words are not biologically “alive”; but while this term might be used to “explain” their “birth”, “development”, “growth”, “decline” and even “death”, we very quickly also find ourselves in a kind of anthropomorphic world, where “words” have desires and feelings, “wanting”, “teaching”, “controlling”, etc. Thus words can be written of as in some way “wanting” to perpetuate their “desire” for replication, and that this in somehow incorporated biologically in words themselves — perhaps by the use of the metaphoric palimpsest, for example. Before one knows it, everything becomes a metaphor, even the slightest mark (or even the absence of marks); and metaphors become metaphors of something else again, for ever and ever — and “therefore” the written word will “live” forever…
There are many examples of this type of thinking throughout the book, and for me this became an increasingly irritating and frustrating aspect of it — to the point of anger. Cf. for example, the use of the word “magisterium” used repeatedly to suggest this is a special quality of “written words”. It isn’t. And neither are “power, “control”, etc. Written words can be used for this purpose, but that doe not mean that those purposes are an inherent quality of the written word.
If there is one thing that is evident to me about why this book is a fantasy rather than a real history it is that there is very little attention given to the use of the written word to lie, deceive, be wrong (whether deliberately or not). I mention this specifically because I happened to notice an error (aberration? misreading? typo?) smack in the middle of this book (and, ironically, in the chapter on “Holy Writ”): on page 128 we read: “A striking pattern emerged: throughout these doublets, God was almost invariably called JWHW in one and Elohim in the other.” Quite apart from the theological implications of the two types of names for God (indicative of what, precisely?) the concern is with the letters JWHW (aka. the Tetragrammaton). This Tetragrammaton is repeated on the following page, and again in the Index. JWHW is wrong: it should be JHWH. The only possible other combinations are: JHVH, YHVH and YHWH (all possible renditions of the original Hebrew and “translated” as either Yahweh or Jehovah). JWHW is not an option. But since this is now printed thrice in this book, does this mean it will “reproduce” itself in future and become a “metaphor” or a “palimpsest” that will never go away?
Written words are tools we have invented to help guide us as best as we know possible in our dealings with the world. How they are used is another question. We also know that written words have changed their spelling, pronunciation, and even often have more than one “meaning” (depending on their context), and that these changes were adopted and made by the writers in order to clarify, to minimise misunderstandings, to accommodate adoption of new written words which might alter or confuse a reader or speaker (and that these are not always absolute, but can vary, either deliberately, or accidentally through error or misunderstanding or misreading, and even through mis-hearing).
We do the changing, not the words. And how we change them should be based on whether we can adequately identify their applicability or not to our current needs in our world. I would suggest that how we change written words should be a scientific endeavour, not a poetic or literary one, and best developed by the application of Karl Popper’s falsification theory. In the context of this book, perhaps a good place to start might be to question Thomas de Quincey’s suggestion that the human brain is a palimpsest.
September 17, 2025
A long prose poem on the written word and ancient things. The central question of the book, or what I assumed the book to be: How did humans develop writing?, isn't answered. We don't bloody know. Various people figured it out and it caught on. Good. Battles brings up all the cuneiform and whatnot, but what predated cuneiform? Was it clay tokens representing shipments? Who thought this up? What languages? What level does a civilization have to achieve before writing makes sense? Battles doesn't bother answering these questions because they're pretty much unanswerable. I was skimming the meandering first chapter but then he started talking about human symbology predating writing and my homeslice R. Dale Guthrie, the "cave paintings were probably made by teenagers because big animals are cool" man. Even without the Abbe Breuil inventing religious meaning, cave paintings are symbols of useful, cool things that were present in the lives of the people who made them. I started reading closer and stopped regretting talking myself into buying this book just because I like buying things at G. David. Writing is a process, a tool, a group project, something that is overlayed on wax tablets because an erasable notepad is easier than a stone tablet when you're the average Sumerian, something people do while you dictate when you're the Apostle Paul, something that serves purposes and causes problems and can be taught, that can be mechanized, ruined by Ezra Pound, that can change when you need it to, and all the other rambling things about something that is both constant and more unknowable than electricity or other useful things that benefit us every day. Hell of a book. It did dry up in parts, but the long, learned poetry of it was fun to read and made me feel smarter even though I retained very little.
January 21, 2016
What to say about Palimpsest?
I was deeply interested in this book when I saw it was on order at the local library. A book on the history of writing? That sounds grand. I thought it would be along the lines of an actual.... history of writing. Something that delved into why our minds are organized the way they are, and why they express themselves so well through writing. Maybe a bit on how Socrates, Jesus, and so many other ancient peoples distrusted the practice outright. Maybe something on the various myths of how writing came to be, why some cultures still have yet to develop it... you know - a history of writing. Instead, I got Palimpsest. Yes, it covers the above topics lightly - very lightly, in fact - but now I've come away from it knowing a decent amount about hanzi and less about Chinese writing systems than how very wrong and direspectful the Victorian view of Chinese writing systems was.
Don't me wrong. Matthew Battles has a lovely, poetic style of writing. My trouble is that such a style is better suited to fiction than it is to a historical study. His writing is a labyrinth of ideas and connections, spinning together like a spider's web in a way that is beautiful to behold... but utterly maddening when you're looking for a particularly linear and informative study of language. So, yes,while I did learn some things from this it wasn't quite what I wanted to learn nor in the way I had wanted to learn it.
I didn't hate this book, but I did ultimately want to be reading something other than what I ended up reading. Others may have better luck with it than myself in the end. Still, it was overall a rather interesting subject. I'd like to read other books focused upon it sometime.
I was deeply interested in this book when I saw it was on order at the local library. A book on the history of writing? That sounds grand. I thought it would be along the lines of an actual.... history of writing. Something that delved into why our minds are organized the way they are, and why they express themselves so well through writing. Maybe a bit on how Socrates, Jesus, and so many other ancient peoples distrusted the practice outright. Maybe something on the various myths of how writing came to be, why some cultures still have yet to develop it... you know - a history of writing. Instead, I got Palimpsest. Yes, it covers the above topics lightly - very lightly, in fact - but now I've come away from it knowing a decent amount about hanzi and less about Chinese writing systems than how very wrong and direspectful the Victorian view of Chinese writing systems was.
Don't me wrong. Matthew Battles has a lovely, poetic style of writing. My trouble is that such a style is better suited to fiction than it is to a historical study. His writing is a labyrinth of ideas and connections, spinning together like a spider's web in a way that is beautiful to behold... but utterly maddening when you're looking for a particularly linear and informative study of language. So, yes,while I did learn some things from this it wasn't quite what I wanted to learn nor in the way I had wanted to learn it.
I didn't hate this book, but I did ultimately want to be reading something other than what I ended up reading. Others may have better luck with it than myself in the end. Still, it was overall a rather interesting subject. I'd like to read other books focused upon it sometime.
October 25, 2015
Let’s get this out of the way first: Palimpsest is NOT a history of the written word. Not in the traditional sense, not by a long shot. If nothing else gives that away, the relative brevity of the bibliography should.
What it is, however, is a lovely and erudite contemplation of the evolution of writing in all its different forms, from the first impressions in clay to the abstract machine coding of today. Along the way Battles dabbles in Ezra Pound’s fascination with Chinese characters as a metaphor for poetry, the progressive development of fonts, and St. Paul’s habits as a letter-writer. It’s gorgeous stuff and definitely thought-provoking, even if the author does lean a little hard on the use of the word “ineluctable” sometimes or seems to be relying on a somewhat thin understanding of textual conflicts in Early Christianity. (Disclaimer: Not a religious studies major, but I’ve listened to several talk about their field extensively, and any mention of Q tends to send them raving and slavering. Plus Battles’ citations in his chapter on Holy Writ are not extensive, and seem dated.)
Norton did their author a disservice here by allowing this book to go to press with the subtitle it carries; they could easily and more accurately called Palimpsest “a rumination on the history of the written word” and avoided the disappointed and accusing stares of people who came to the book hoping for an extended academic review of the topic. Frankly, that’s what I was hoping for, but once I was able to let go of that and allowed myself to settle in and enjoy Battles’ work for what it is I found it thoroughly delightful.
What it is, however, is a lovely and erudite contemplation of the evolution of writing in all its different forms, from the first impressions in clay to the abstract machine coding of today. Along the way Battles dabbles in Ezra Pound’s fascination with Chinese characters as a metaphor for poetry, the progressive development of fonts, and St. Paul’s habits as a letter-writer. It’s gorgeous stuff and definitely thought-provoking, even if the author does lean a little hard on the use of the word “ineluctable” sometimes or seems to be relying on a somewhat thin understanding of textual conflicts in Early Christianity. (Disclaimer: Not a religious studies major, but I’ve listened to several talk about their field extensively, and any mention of Q tends to send them raving and slavering. Plus Battles’ citations in his chapter on Holy Writ are not extensive, and seem dated.)
Norton did their author a disservice here by allowing this book to go to press with the subtitle it carries; they could easily and more accurately called Palimpsest “a rumination on the history of the written word” and avoided the disappointed and accusing stares of people who came to the book hoping for an extended academic review of the topic. Frankly, that’s what I was hoping for, but once I was able to let go of that and allowed myself to settle in and enjoy Battles’ work for what it is I found it thoroughly delightful.
October 5, 2015
I won this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway.
I was really excited to read this and even took it with me on my 3-week trip to China. I had no idea what I was in for...I do not want to sugarcoat my review--here goes:
This is the dullest book I have ever read. I have to admit that I valiantly read most of it but the last few chapters were skimmed on account of how many times I kept falling asleep. I have enjoyed or at least learned something from other non-fiction books I chose to read. The entire tone of this book sounded like verbose musings of an author who liked to hear himself talk too much. The way information was presented was also difficult for the reader to take in. The whole chapter about Eastern languages had so much potential to be informative but he just kept jumping to the next fact without fully explaining any of the ones he presented before.
I still rate it 2 stars because the subject is still an interesting one and Battles probably did a lot of research. The cover is the most interesting thing about this book and I walk away still not fully understanding what palimpsest really is...
I was really excited to read this and even took it with me on my 3-week trip to China. I had no idea what I was in for...I do not want to sugarcoat my review--here goes:
This is the dullest book I have ever read. I have to admit that I valiantly read most of it but the last few chapters were skimmed on account of how many times I kept falling asleep. I have enjoyed or at least learned something from other non-fiction books I chose to read. The entire tone of this book sounded like verbose musings of an author who liked to hear himself talk too much. The way information was presented was also difficult for the reader to take in. The whole chapter about Eastern languages had so much potential to be informative but he just kept jumping to the next fact without fully explaining any of the ones he presented before.
I still rate it 2 stars because the subject is still an interesting one and Battles probably did a lot of research. The cover is the most interesting thing about this book and I walk away still not fully understanding what palimpsest really is...
March 11, 2022
A fun meditation on the written word and what it does, set down in prose that’s engaging so long as you give writers a lot of leash to stylize as they see fit. The Goodreads reviews are savage, but this is to be expected - Goodreads reviewers hate flowery prose, and the subtitle does indeed overpromise. But if you look past the subtitle (which is always, always marketing and not to be trusted) and enjoy a less minimalistic prose style, which you should, there’s a lot of gold to be mined here. Don't mind the Philistines in the Goodreads reviews; dare to enjoy prose that doesn't conform to Strunk and White.
September 14, 2015
Palimpsest is a savory bouillabaisse that finally overwhelms you with an excessive number of ingredients and overly rich sauces. Afterwards, you may feel full, even satisfied, but it becomes hard to identify just what, exactly, you have eaten.
The recipe seems quite deliberate on the part of the author, who is less interested in a factual history of writing than in exploring writing as metaphor. For Battles, writing is an ever-changing transformative activity that has remained at the center of human civilization from the first incised pottery sherds to today’s advanced computer code.
Some of the passages are as dense as anything I’ve encountered for the general reader, replete with such terms as “polysemy,” and “graphlexia,” a few of which are defined, others not. (Polysemy is the quality of different meanings in a word or phrase; graphlexia is difficulty in writing. Either could have served as an appropriate alternative title for the book.)
The book’s central metaphor is taken from a Thomas De Quincey quote: “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” The palimpsest image of writing, erasing, and over-writing is ubiquitous, since writing materials such as animal hides, papyrus, parchment, and paper were so difficult to acquire. Battles also stresses the mental and physical exertions required for writing, whether incising pictographs into wet clay, drawing on wax tablets, preparing animal hides and inks, copying manuscripts in silent monasteries, racking up moveable type, scribbling in notebooks, or learning the arcane machine languages of computers.
Battles covers a great deal of territory with his discursive approach, punctuated by quotes, exotica, and stories. Among my favorites: Jacques Lacan’s enigmatic saying: “A letter always arrives at its destination.” And Socrates’s suspicion of writing in general, as related by Plato: “The elixir you have discovered is an aid not to memory but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth.”
But he also celebrates the great myths of writing’s power through the ages, temporal and spiritual: the Norse god Odin’s agonies in gathering runes, the Gilgamesh epic, Chinese oracle bones, the epistles of Saint Paul, and the early years of Gutenberg’s printing revolution.
In describing writing’s evolution, Battles demonstrates how the strokes and glyphs of centuries of scribes have evolved into modern typefaces. The letters that appear on a modern computer screen bear the DNA of past carvers of cuneiform tablets and composers of illuminated manuscripts.
But whatever the medium, Battles stresses, writing is never immutable or immortal: just as memory fades, so do words, whether carved into triumphal columns or written by pious scribes in holy scriptures. Yet the vestiges remain: the faded almost indecipherable markings of antique languages – palimpsests all.
The recipe seems quite deliberate on the part of the author, who is less interested in a factual history of writing than in exploring writing as metaphor. For Battles, writing is an ever-changing transformative activity that has remained at the center of human civilization from the first incised pottery sherds to today’s advanced computer code.
Some of the passages are as dense as anything I’ve encountered for the general reader, replete with such terms as “polysemy,” and “graphlexia,” a few of which are defined, others not. (Polysemy is the quality of different meanings in a word or phrase; graphlexia is difficulty in writing. Either could have served as an appropriate alternative title for the book.)
The book’s central metaphor is taken from a Thomas De Quincey quote: “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” The palimpsest image of writing, erasing, and over-writing is ubiquitous, since writing materials such as animal hides, papyrus, parchment, and paper were so difficult to acquire. Battles also stresses the mental and physical exertions required for writing, whether incising pictographs into wet clay, drawing on wax tablets, preparing animal hides and inks, copying manuscripts in silent monasteries, racking up moveable type, scribbling in notebooks, or learning the arcane machine languages of computers.
Battles covers a great deal of territory with his discursive approach, punctuated by quotes, exotica, and stories. Among my favorites: Jacques Lacan’s enigmatic saying: “A letter always arrives at its destination.” And Socrates’s suspicion of writing in general, as related by Plato: “The elixir you have discovered is an aid not to memory but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth.”
But he also celebrates the great myths of writing’s power through the ages, temporal and spiritual: the Norse god Odin’s agonies in gathering runes, the Gilgamesh epic, Chinese oracle bones, the epistles of Saint Paul, and the early years of Gutenberg’s printing revolution.
In describing writing’s evolution, Battles demonstrates how the strokes and glyphs of centuries of scribes have evolved into modern typefaces. The letters that appear on a modern computer screen bear the DNA of past carvers of cuneiform tablets and composers of illuminated manuscripts.
But whatever the medium, Battles stresses, writing is never immutable or immortal: just as memory fades, so do words, whether carved into triumphal columns or written by pious scribes in holy scriptures. Yet the vestiges remain: the faded almost indecipherable markings of antique languages – palimpsests all.
August 16, 2019
Audiobook reader okay.
This was not quite what I was expecting, always an aspect of audiobooks where you can't browse and back blurbs are often not real useful.
I thought this was going to be a straight forward history of the development of writing. This seemed kind of a scattered set of essays, the parts did not unify into a whole for me.
Some segments such as the long section on Chinese characters would have definitely benefited with some visual accompaniment.
I think I would recommend this is better reading than listening. I'm not sure I could speak to the development of writing any better than before I listened.
This was not quite what I was expecting, always an aspect of audiobooks where you can't browse and back blurbs are often not real useful.
I thought this was going to be a straight forward history of the development of writing. This seemed kind of a scattered set of essays, the parts did not unify into a whole for me.
Some segments such as the long section on Chinese characters would have definitely benefited with some visual accompaniment.
I think I would recommend this is better reading than listening. I'm not sure I could speak to the development of writing any better than before I listened.
September 24, 2015
It felt a bit too much like sitting through an 8 AM lecture. A great read for when you want to feel cultured.
February 6, 2020
A brilliant homage to the act of writing, and to the ways of thinking nurtured by that act.
July 28, 2020
A history of the written word, yes, but in an unnecessarily literary style that hides the content rather than enhances it.
September 4, 2015
Matthew Battles’ Palimpsest: A History of the Written word has evoked, in certain circles, a few seemingly unjust criticisms. At least one saw it as a ‘jumble’ and another suggests there are ‘too many unsupported assumptions and presumptions’. Both of these might be justified excepting for one issue and this has much to do with the marketing of the book. Nowhere is Palimpsest, on the exterior of the book, marketed as an academic or literary memoir, which, in point of fact, Palimpsest is. As such, the reader should read this as a very personal exploration of the history of writing, and this must, perforce, include computer code as the latest manifestation of writing.
Mr. Battles, who is a researcher [as of writing] in metaLAB at Harvard, has produced a piece of work, Palimpsest, which has very little sympathy for those with a middling vocabulary. One of the great joys of books such as this is the opportunity to spruce up one’s vocabulary and enjoy the way sentences may combine, with an unforgiving love of language, to create a transformative, almost mystical, separation of self and other. Don’t fight the experience, allow it to sweep you away. Once finished your first, hallucinatory, reading you may, perhaps should, return for a more critical experience. Critical not in its negative sense but in the sense of a self-aware dialogue with this marvelous little book. At under three hundred pages it isn’t long…which may be why some thought it a bit of a jumble. To cover a history of the written in such a short period of time requires a fair amount of jumping about.
As far as this reviewer is concerned, Palimpsest is an unqualified success and worth more than one reading.
Recommended for cultural anthropology and linguistic wonks who are not afraid of uncommon words and academic memoirs.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Mr. Battles, who is a researcher [as of writing] in metaLAB at Harvard, has produced a piece of work, Palimpsest, which has very little sympathy for those with a middling vocabulary. One of the great joys of books such as this is the opportunity to spruce up one’s vocabulary and enjoy the way sentences may combine, with an unforgiving love of language, to create a transformative, almost mystical, separation of self and other. Don’t fight the experience, allow it to sweep you away. Once finished your first, hallucinatory, reading you may, perhaps should, return for a more critical experience. Critical not in its negative sense but in the sense of a self-aware dialogue with this marvelous little book. At under three hundred pages it isn’t long…which may be why some thought it a bit of a jumble. To cover a history of the written in such a short period of time requires a fair amount of jumping about.
As far as this reviewer is concerned, Palimpsest is an unqualified success and worth more than one reading.
Recommended for cultural anthropology and linguistic wonks who are not afraid of uncommon words and academic memoirs.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
January 2, 2016
It is difficult to know how to describe or rate this book. More of an ode to the love affair between the human race and writing of all kinds (up to modern computer code and motion-capture, if you will!), this is not a particularly rigorous history or textbook, and more of a meandering pleasure-cruise through the various engagements of the human mind with writing and symbolic representations of human thought (yes, music and art are in there, too, to a limited degree). I loved this book and virtually everything about it, but I suspect it will disappoint many people who are hoping for something a little more like a linguistic anthropology textbook . . . Anyway, I'll go with 4 stars and say I think people should read it, whether or not it is exactly what they were looking for . . .
October 2, 2019
I think I have fallen in love with Matthew Battles brain!
A life changing essay on the history of the written word. From ancient cultures to ascending modern society he fills in the blanks of knowledge that only few civilians are taught. A cycle of conquering communication on this living library called Earth 🌍
The author leaves us with life altering questions like:
Can writing help us undo what we have done with it?
And “for the sake of writing we have razed forests and burned trainloads of coal” Have we really questioned our relationship of writing to nature?
Thank you Sir Matthew Battles!
A life changing essay on the history of the written word. From ancient cultures to ascending modern society he fills in the blanks of knowledge that only few civilians are taught. A cycle of conquering communication on this living library called Earth 🌍
The author leaves us with life altering questions like:
Can writing help us undo what we have done with it?
And “for the sake of writing we have razed forests and burned trainloads of coal” Have we really questioned our relationship of writing to nature?
Thank you Sir Matthew Battles!
Read
August 4, 2016"Palimpsest shows again and again that the culture of writing is more like a group of nested Russian dolls, with each new form incorporating its predecessors. Innovators, it turns out, always plunder the past."
–Clive Thompson on Matthew Battles' Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word in the Summer 2015 issue of Bookforum
To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/022_02
–Clive Thompson on Matthew Battles' Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word in the Summer 2015 issue of Bookforum
To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/022_02
May 12, 2016
Occasionally interesting and provocative but mostly rambling and irritatingly ponderous.
January 27, 2022
Well, that was a flop.
A strangely dense little book that often seemed more concerned with putting out pretty words than providing a clear history of writing. It was also oddly preoccupied with the symbolism of Christianity as it relates to writing, which was.... unexpected, and not exactly welcome.
I know Christianity in particular has so much to do with the wide spread nature of writing in Western culture, but being of the base religion for Christianity, it can be terribly difficult to read about another religion's interpretation of theism projected onto your culture. Because Battles also framed so much of this story through his own opinions rather than clearly demarcating strict fact from personal takes, I couldn't tell how much of the Biblical interpretation was just references to old thoughts or Battles actually personally misunderstanding elements of Torah. And I'm not talking about the authorship debate necessarily, but the whole thing was framed was just kind of yeuch for me to read about.
A strangely dense little book that often seemed more concerned with putting out pretty words than providing a clear history of writing. It was also oddly preoccupied with the symbolism of Christianity as it relates to writing, which was.... unexpected, and not exactly welcome.
I know Christianity in particular has so much to do with the wide spread nature of writing in Western culture, but being of the base religion for Christianity, it can be terribly difficult to read about another religion's interpretation of theism projected onto your culture. Because Battles also framed so much of this story through his own opinions rather than clearly demarcating strict fact from personal takes, I couldn't tell how much of the Biblical interpretation was just references to old thoughts or Battles actually personally misunderstanding elements of Torah. And I'm not talking about the authorship debate necessarily, but the whole thing was framed was just kind of yeuch for me to read about.
September 30, 2015
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mysti...
At each seat in my first grade classroom, directly below the student’s name, rested a set of perfectly printed letters of the alphabet. I can still see the tiny arrows straddling the edges of the letters. These arrows were accompanied by a number, which denoted the order in which the lines were to be drawn to form each A, B and C. Dutifully, we moved our hands as the arrows instructed, carefully writing the letters in our ruled composition books.
In time, as I learned all the letters and more and more words, writing became a craft rather than a mere physical action. To this day, when I carefully print words in a thank-you note or a letter, rather than in my typical hasty scrawl, the muscle memory from those arrows guides my hand.
It’s no wonder. Writing, as Matthew Battles points out, is a “craft of the body,” and over time, as the physical discomforts of the training fade, the “gestures and postures are internalized, and writing becomes a habit, a reflex, an impulse.”
Mr. Battles’s “Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word” is in part an explanation of how it was possible for “a craft so sophisticated and cognitively demanding to knit itself securely into our quotidian ways.” To tell the story of the history of writing, the author, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, draws on evolutionary psychology, anthropology, linguistics and old-fashioned story telling. This fascinating exploration of the evolution of writing shows how, despite radical technological changes, the practice maintains its atavistic mystery.
Before the advent of writing, what were humans doing with their brains? Evolutionary psychologists argue that the brain did not evolve for reading and writing. Thus the brain’s adaptation to writing is somehow accidental.
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Ancient Europe’s cave paintings are sometimes thought of as the main stop on the way to the writing of today. In fact, as Mr. Battles explains, writing emerged over the centuries by “slow, imperceptible degrees” rather than by a single disruptive event. Five millennia passed between the last cave painters and the emergence of writing on the other side of the Mediterranean, when the Epic of Gilgamesh—the story of the mythical scion of the line of despots who ruled ancient Mesopotamia—appeared in the Sumerian language on clay tablets circa 2100 B.C. Around the same time, writing in China—known as oracle bone script—materialized. Which written language began first is contested, but in both cases, writing appeared in full as a language, not as crude markings but as a sophisticated vocabulary.
“The question is not why writing emerged, or how it managed to do so despite enormous odds against it,” Mr. Battles write. “Instead it’s this: what took it so long? For in a larger sense, writing is utterly natural to the plastic fantastic that is the human brain. We don’t need writing to be fully human, but full humanity means that the emergence of writing is always and everywhere possible, even likely.”
Mr. Battles argues that memory is critical to the development of writing. He’s not just talking about writing as a form of saving information in a functional sense. Rather, humans yearn to make a mark on the world and to be remembered. We have a longing to tell stories and to name and describe our surroundings. Writing’s true power emerged as our ancestors turned mere stimuli into something that represented life itself. “The empathetic encounter that takes place in a reader of a novel,” the author notes, “has its ancient antecedents in our meaning-pregnant engagement with the natural world.”
Once Mr. Battles establishes writing’s origins, he turns toward the cultural impact of the written word, taking readers on a journey from cuneiform to Greek, to the Bible and other religious texts, to the invention of movable type in the 15th century and so on. “In days of old, we wanted scribes and scriveners who would take orders, and order our worlds thereby. Now we want flexible creators, makers of meaning.”
“Palimpsest” has so many different cultural and historical threads that it can require patience from the reader at times. In one chapter, Mr. Battles toggles between the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the paleobiologist R. Dale Guthrie and the Romantic literary scholar William Taylor. But the effort helps us see connections across cultures and disciplines. Mr. Battles nimbly connects Lévi-Strauss’s assertion that language is solely about power—that it developed, in the Frenchman’s words, to facilitate the “integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system”—with Rousseau’s belief that the “arts and sciences gild the chains of civilizations,” along the way citing Robert Graves’s interpretation of the Welsh national epic, the Mabinogion, as a “fable of writing systems at war with one another.”
Refreshingly, the author doesn’t rue the rise of e-readers and smartphones, but rather sees the digital age as merely the next iteration of our constantly changing writing culture. Throughout the book, Mr. Battles uses the metaphor of the palimpsest—a “writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, then overwritten by another”—to illustrate writing’s evolution. And computer coding, Mr. Battles points out, is itself “a movable palimpsest, animated and articulate”—a digital scroll on which text can be scraped off and endlessly rewritten.
Mr. Battles begins and ends the book with a famous quote from the 19th-century essayist Thomas De Quincey: “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” What De Quincey meant was that layers of ideas, images, and feelings fall upon our brains and take on new meaning over time. The mind is a page. And the history of the written word, as this book makes clear, reveals the evolution of the human mind.
At each seat in my first grade classroom, directly below the student’s name, rested a set of perfectly printed letters of the alphabet. I can still see the tiny arrows straddling the edges of the letters. These arrows were accompanied by a number, which denoted the order in which the lines were to be drawn to form each A, B and C. Dutifully, we moved our hands as the arrows instructed, carefully writing the letters in our ruled composition books.
In time, as I learned all the letters and more and more words, writing became a craft rather than a mere physical action. To this day, when I carefully print words in a thank-you note or a letter, rather than in my typical hasty scrawl, the muscle memory from those arrows guides my hand.
It’s no wonder. Writing, as Matthew Battles points out, is a “craft of the body,” and over time, as the physical discomforts of the training fade, the “gestures and postures are internalized, and writing becomes a habit, a reflex, an impulse.”
Mr. Battles’s “Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word” is in part an explanation of how it was possible for “a craft so sophisticated and cognitively demanding to knit itself securely into our quotidian ways.” To tell the story of the history of writing, the author, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, draws on evolutionary psychology, anthropology, linguistics and old-fashioned story telling. This fascinating exploration of the evolution of writing shows how, despite radical technological changes, the practice maintains its atavistic mystery.
Before the advent of writing, what were humans doing with their brains? Evolutionary psychologists argue that the brain did not evolve for reading and writing. Thus the brain’s adaptation to writing is somehow accidental.
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Ancient Europe’s cave paintings are sometimes thought of as the main stop on the way to the writing of today. In fact, as Mr. Battles explains, writing emerged over the centuries by “slow, imperceptible degrees” rather than by a single disruptive event. Five millennia passed between the last cave painters and the emergence of writing on the other side of the Mediterranean, when the Epic of Gilgamesh—the story of the mythical scion of the line of despots who ruled ancient Mesopotamia—appeared in the Sumerian language on clay tablets circa 2100 B.C. Around the same time, writing in China—known as oracle bone script—materialized. Which written language began first is contested, but in both cases, writing appeared in full as a language, not as crude markings but as a sophisticated vocabulary.
“The question is not why writing emerged, or how it managed to do so despite enormous odds against it,” Mr. Battles write. “Instead it’s this: what took it so long? For in a larger sense, writing is utterly natural to the plastic fantastic that is the human brain. We don’t need writing to be fully human, but full humanity means that the emergence of writing is always and everywhere possible, even likely.”
Mr. Battles argues that memory is critical to the development of writing. He’s not just talking about writing as a form of saving information in a functional sense. Rather, humans yearn to make a mark on the world and to be remembered. We have a longing to tell stories and to name and describe our surroundings. Writing’s true power emerged as our ancestors turned mere stimuli into something that represented life itself. “The empathetic encounter that takes place in a reader of a novel,” the author notes, “has its ancient antecedents in our meaning-pregnant engagement with the natural world.”
Once Mr. Battles establishes writing’s origins, he turns toward the cultural impact of the written word, taking readers on a journey from cuneiform to Greek, to the Bible and other religious texts, to the invention of movable type in the 15th century and so on. “In days of old, we wanted scribes and scriveners who would take orders, and order our worlds thereby. Now we want flexible creators, makers of meaning.”
“Palimpsest” has so many different cultural and historical threads that it can require patience from the reader at times. In one chapter, Mr. Battles toggles between the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the paleobiologist R. Dale Guthrie and the Romantic literary scholar William Taylor. But the effort helps us see connections across cultures and disciplines. Mr. Battles nimbly connects Lévi-Strauss’s assertion that language is solely about power—that it developed, in the Frenchman’s words, to facilitate the “integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system”—with Rousseau’s belief that the “arts and sciences gild the chains of civilizations,” along the way citing Robert Graves’s interpretation of the Welsh national epic, the Mabinogion, as a “fable of writing systems at war with one another.”
Refreshingly, the author doesn’t rue the rise of e-readers and smartphones, but rather sees the digital age as merely the next iteration of our constantly changing writing culture. Throughout the book, Mr. Battles uses the metaphor of the palimpsest—a “writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, then overwritten by another”—to illustrate writing’s evolution. And computer coding, Mr. Battles points out, is itself “a movable palimpsest, animated and articulate”—a digital scroll on which text can be scraped off and endlessly rewritten.
Mr. Battles begins and ends the book with a famous quote from the 19th-century essayist Thomas De Quincey: “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” What De Quincey meant was that layers of ideas, images, and feelings fall upon our brains and take on new meaning over time. The mind is a page. And the history of the written word, as this book makes clear, reveals the evolution of the human mind.
May 11, 2025
DNF at 52 pages.
It is SO rare for me to not finish a book I've started, especially one I so desperately wanted to like. As one of my special interests is the origins of the written word, I was so excited to give this a spin! However, the writing is just inaccessible and frankly, makes a subject I love incredibly boring.
I've given it 2 stars instead of just 1 because, if I'm being completely honest, I probably could have persevered, but life is too short and there are just too many books I want to read - this will definitely make a good reference book, but not a book I'm going to read cover to cover.
It is SO rare for me to not finish a book I've started, especially one I so desperately wanted to like. As one of my special interests is the origins of the written word, I was so excited to give this a spin! However, the writing is just inaccessible and frankly, makes a subject I love incredibly boring.
I've given it 2 stars instead of just 1 because, if I'm being completely honest, I probably could have persevered, but life is too short and there are just too many books I want to read - this will definitely make a good reference book, but not a book I'm going to read cover to cover.
October 3, 2015
I'm not really sure how to classify this book. Battles writes with an excellent vocabulary and I found myself consulting a dictionary a number of times. I liked his description of how one learns to write, i.e. it is a habit of the body and remember making the "canes" for capital letters. But I couldn't finish it once I arrived at the chapter on Chinese. Not knowing Chinese characters I couldn't understand his extortion of them and how they were more artistic? multivalent? whatever than letters. I kept on thinking that his enthusiasm is another example of Orientalism, though I know that term is used more of the Middle East than the Far East nowadays
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August 28, 2018Celebrating the impulse to record, invent, and make one's mark, Matthew Battles reenchants the written word for all those susceptible to the power and beauty of writing in all of its forms. Or, aas said by Anne Fadiman "This is an extended essay that skips gracefully across the centuries, stopping wherever the most interesting stories lie." Still, the writing is pretentious, foggy, as a lovable old professor meeting his freshmen seminar to show off his tidbits of history, cultures, design insights, with a bit of pontificating. Out of 5 stars, it certainly deserves a TWO for fun and effort.
January 1, 2016
Disappointing: all too often when I was reading this I thought, "where's the photo/illustration?" and, well, it wasn't there. Battle's would have done us a great service by showing, not merely telling, how the written word developed. There were times when I wondered if this had originally been a series of lectures because the tone is pedantic and rambling, and it's clear that the author didn't do deep research (too few sources cited at the end).
January 30, 2016
Here's a wide, deep river with enough eddies, towheads, deadheads and flotsam to keep me busy or dizzy but not enough to quench my thirst. Battles' erudition floats more like a tanker than a yacht. Sorry.
As a meditation on the written word, yes. Maybe even as a resource, too; but I found the paragraphs and pages more as tattered flags than as pert emblems.
As a meditation on the written word, yes. Maybe even as a resource, too; but I found the paragraphs and pages more as tattered flags than as pert emblems.
June 13, 2016
A poetic, yet informative look at the history of writing and its attendant technologies. Battles may err on the romantic side of looking at things, but he's hardly trapped in the nostalgia of believing that older technologies of writing were better. Rather, he does a nice job of illuminating historical continuities and putting our contemporary moment in its proper perspective.
February 17, 2024
This book is a review of the written language on Earth. It begins in prehistory as humans first learn to communicate and soon learn to record it in different forms of recorded messages. It traces the history of written communication and hypothesizes how written language may continue to evolve for men.
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