“Sheep May Safely Graze”: The Digital Common and the Universal Library

Afew years ago, the library director at a prestigious university announced, with an aplomb that would merit admiration in any number of other settings, that the “library” at her academic institution would soon be devoid of anything that resembled a book.

Well, now, take heart, humanists of all stripes, in whatever safe place you are hoping to lodge, against the fall of night. Despair not. In place of those books, there will soon appear, in what one can only imagine as some vast emporium of tomorrow, a “digital common”! (Her very words).

Beside that particular view of “things to come,” I would like to place some comments from an article by Kevin Kelly, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2006. The author affirms the following: “Yet the common vision of the library’s future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library.”¹

Several dubious assumptions lie entangled in that blithe judgment. I will attempt to draw out just one of them. To begin, “books” are “isolated items,” “independent from one another”? Space alone limits my fond wish to lecture that writer on one of the most basic and patent realities of literary history: the influence of all genuinely great works of the imagination on countless others, for all time to come.

For proof of that overwhelming reality, one need only look to the way in which the most richly endowed and ardently inspired authors, throughout the entire course of literary history, imbibed characters, plots, and forms of expression from those who had preceded them.

Can devotees of the most enduring books claim to possess even a modicum of understanding of, let us say, the poetry of Virgil, without first bringing Homer to mind? Or again, how is it at all possible to fathom the visions of William Blake, in the absence of any knowledge of his debt to John Milton? Furthermore, how may one manage to trace the roots of T. S. Eliot’s modern anxiety, without observing, in his work, the arching shade of Dante? And try to imagine, if you will, things more incredible: a Miguel de Unamuno who had never read Don Quixote; a Thomas Mann unvisited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s benign spirit; or a Charles Péguy who had never been moved to offer prayers at the altar of Saint Joan of Arc.

Such noble spirits, whose lives and works are so indelibly etched in the memory of our star-crossed race, tried to touch those who had walked the earth before them, in the books that had survived, and which they eagerly consumed.

At this point, I would like to digress, and call up a memory from a time more than five decades ago, when Marshall McLuhan signified the momentous changes that the ascent of the medium of the printed word brought to Western and, indeed, world civilization.

No longer would the “scholastic dialogue, oral and conversational … a simultaneous mosaic,” hold its place as the most vital channel of human communication.² And, what was even more important, neither could it continue to make credible its bold claim to be the surest path to the deepest wells of knowledge and wisdom.

McLuhan, of course, was affirming, by means of an antic style that belied his serious purpose, that the long, astonishingly productive age of “typographic man” was about to end. With uncanny prescience, he described, far in advance of the event, the creation of a worldwide electronic network that would leave no human endeavor unchanged, from medicine to art, from popular entertainment to philosophy, and from business investments to the most intimate relationships.

As a result, that swiftly occurring obsolescence, which McLuhan envisioned as the essential driving force in decades to come, has so accelerated, in whatever direction we look, that there is scarcely time to take note of it.

And yet, there does seem to persist, in the view of many thoughtful observers, a residue of unquiet thoughts about certain elements of...