Some Quotes

Here are some good passages from what I've been reading lately. Hope they're of some interest.

"Out of writing soon came the need for an ancillary object, the book. Borges says:

'Of all man's instruments, the most astonishing is, without any doubt, the book. The others are extensions of the body. The microscope, the the telescope, are extensions of his eyes; the telephone an extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of his arm. But the book is something else: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.'

The book gives substance to human memory. The book, despite being portable, objectifies memory: it is a rational unity that uses audiovisual, printed, or electronic means to represent mnemonic and linguistic will. In the revolutionary stop from orality to writing and, above all, in that significant process where the book triumphs as a cult object, what really takes center stage is a more certain model of permanence that codifies sensibility and translates it into uniform, legitimate states. The book is, then, a proposition that seeks to configure everything in terms of reason and not in terms of chaos. The idea that the book is something more than a physical structure that supports collective or individual memory has generated powerful metaphors.

The book as talisman: Saint John Chrysostome recounts that in fourth-century Antioch, people hung codices around their necks to ward off the powers of evil.
The book of life: Belief in a divine book that contains the names of those who will be saved in the Last Judgement, as Saint John testifies.
The book as nature: Plotinus speaks of the stars as if they were letters eternally written in the heavens.
The book of the world. It makes of the universe a bibliographic cosmos.
The world exists only to become a book: This was the belief of the poet Stephane Mallarme.
The book as person: As Walt Whitman proposes in his "Songs of Farewell."
The book as shared dream."

-Fernando Baez, "A Universal History of the Destruction of Books"

“…for to express is to use symbols, and symbols limit, abstract, cut reality into arbitrary slices, destroy it for the sake of trying to communicate the incommunicable.”

(describing the anti-systematic aesthetic of Johann Georg Hamann)

“Hamann’s new aesthetics—here too he showed originality of a higher order—is founded on the proposition that the language and the form of art and indissolubly one with the art itself, as against the dominant aesthetic theorists—Boileau or Batteux or Gottsched and their disciples—who maintained that rules existed for the purpose of rendering an identical “content” into the best or most appropriate “vehicle” or medium, and so distinguished content, form, style, language, as independent and manipulable constituens of a compound substance—something for Hamann was one indissoluble “organic” entity."

(more about Hamann-- doesn't this sound like a close precursor to McLuhan's "the medium is the message?")

-Isaiah Berlin, "The Magus of the North"