DORIS LESSING
15
Now I'm going
to
talk about a kind of revolution that we are living
through. It's the electronic revolution. We're in the middle of an absolute,
total change, but it is not the first one we have gone through. We went
through the print revolution, which we now take for granted. For a long
time there were books in monasteries, read by a few monks or privileged
people with libraries, but not everyone had books. Then came printing
presses. When you read about that time what is astounding is how quick–
ly Europe was flooded with books, from one end to the other. Suddenly,
within a few years, everybody had their own books and everybody was
reading.
It
is worthwhile remembering that when people first started to
read, they read aloud. It did not occur to them that they cou ld read silent–
ly. The monasteries were very noisy places. Everybody was reading aloud
at the top of their voices. Then it occurred to them that they didn't have
to read aloud. They cou ld mouth what they were reading and suddenly it
al l fell si lent. The next thing that occurred to them was that they didn't
have to do that ei ther. It cou ld all go on in their heads. According to a
book I just read, this process took two and a half to three centuries. We
don't know what happened
to
our brains when that happened. What did
happen to the human brain when print assaulted it? Have we ever asked
this? We probably have and I haven't read what these investigators have
said. There is one thing that we do know happened. We lost our memo–
ries. Before that, people wi thout address books or encyclopaedias kept it
al l in their heads. They had the addresses of all their friends, reams of poet–
ry , information of all kinds, they had it all here. I have met people from
Afi-ica, illi terate, who keep everything in their heads: pages and pages of
addresses and telephone numbers and the names of books and the names
of people. We cou ldn 't keep that much in our heads. We have lost a facul–
ty and we don't even know we have. This is one of the results of the print
revolution. We have lost a very valuable capacity. We are, these people
think, very defective people_ Well, we are defective compared to them.
Now, what are we losing that we don't know we're losing is my question_
At that time I very mu ch doubt whether everybody was sitting around say–
ing, "Well, now we're go in g to lose our memories _" It probably never
occurred to them. But roll on the centuries and we've forgotten what hap–
pened. What is happening to us at this very moment, [ wonder, that we
don't know about?
[ want to remind us all nostalgically about how things used
to
be.
Goethe, at the very end of his life, said, " [ have on ly just learned how to
read." He was a very old man and one of the great intellects of Europe, a
great poet, so it is unlikely that he meant he had only learned how to use
the ABC or put sentences together. He said he'd only just learned to read
and what did he mean) Here, in his diary , is a description of what [ think
