Sunday August 14, 2022; 4:52 PM EDT
- In Fahrenheit 451, Montag eventually learns of a group of people on the fringe of society that have committed themselves to preserving works of great literature by memorizing them and helping others memorize them. It is an image of responsibility for knowledge and for cultural heritage, and it assumes that these things do not preserve themselves. #
- I read recently that the great library of Alexandria, by the time it burned, had probably already declined from its height as a repository of the books of the ancient world. Even in a place meant for preservation, books are vulnerable. #
- I remember wandering the stacks of the library at the University of Iowa. I found, for example, a bound copy of a pre-Civil War American magazine, where I could read an article entitled "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?" What a clue to the past such things are! And the books of certain past decades were brittle due to the recipe for paper in use at the time of their printing. The edges of pages sometimes cracked and fell away when you turned them. A librarian told me that they knew the vintage of these books but could not afford to carry out time-consuming preservation processes for such a large number of books.#
- If memory serves me, when people consult experts, such as their personal doctor, they are known to remember fully and accurately only some of what they are told, even when the advice is very important to chances for health going forward. People need to hear things more than once, need to be able to read them again later, need to be able to ask questions and reflect, before information sticks with them.#
- And so the genius of the Breitbart--Bannon method of flooding the zone, the information sphere, with nonsense and garbage, is all the more effective. Not only do they reduce the chances of anyone finding good information, but they also reduce the chances for people working repeatedly with good information, and therefore of that information sticking with them.#
- So many ways in which knowledge and cultural heritage are threatened, sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally. All the more reason to ponder the example from Fahrenheit 451 of groups of people, sometimes even at the margins of society, committing themselves to finding, preserving, disseminating worthwhile information. #
- All the more reason to learn how to establish credibility for doing this kind of work.#