(no subject)

[rymenhild]

We who are medievalists learn that knowledge is impermanent. Manuscripts get lost or misplaced or torn apart to make binding for later manuscripts. Parchment smears and ink fades. Politically dangerous documents get hidden or destroyed. Books are flammable. Libraries can burn. MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv (the Beowulf manuscript) was damaged in the 1731 Cotton library fire, and we are lucky that it survives at all. The Rupertsberg manuscript of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias, priceless because of its spectacular, unconventional illuminations and its possible connection to Hildegard herself, survived for about 750 years before it vanished in 1945 Dresden. (Fortunately, two copies, one a black-and-white photographic version and one a hand-drawn color copy, were made in the twentieth century.)

There is no way even to guess how much literary evidence has disappeared over the centuries. As scholars, we become accustomed to the fact that some of the documents we would most have liked to study are gone. We get used to the holes in our knowledge. We train ourselves to ask questions that dodge the unpleasant gaps in the historical record. We try not to care.

A summer's worth of photographs of mine only exist now because I gave a copy away to a friend. I deleted the pictures from my camera after I copied them on to my hard drive. My hard drive is no more. Digitized data is more fragile than paper or parchment; it can vanish in months or years rather than centuries. Librarians today are still learning how to preserve computerized documents. Huge quantities of knowledge will cease to exist in the world before the librarians know how to make their information last.

I expect this essay will disappear. In a day you will only be able to find it by setting your friendspage to ?skip=40. In a month it will be available in the memories of my journal and nowhere else. In a year, or five, or ten, LiveJournal will be gone altogether. These things happen.

A professor said today that she had been studying in a research library in New Orleans a few months ago. It's quite possible that my professor's notes are all that remain of the documents she was reading. She doesn't know yet.

Knowledge is impermanent. I know that very well.

It still hurts me to be reminded.

Comments

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

*reading back through entries as well*

Given how fragile our paper is- at least that we use for the most part, and also electronics-

There must be some way of making hardcopies of things (books, plays, documents, so on) that would survive for longer. Somehow. ....

which is what I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of the night, as it is Too Late o'clock again.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The paper we use regularly today, and have used for the last... hundred or hundred fifty years, I think? ... is high in acid and likely to decompose severely over time. I have a friend, a librarian, who thinks that part of the solution is putting acid-free, archival-quality paper in regular use. I agree with her to a certain extent. I've looked at six-hundred-year-old paper books which are still legible. They would have been little more than mushy wood pulp if they had been made from high-acid paper.

That said, any kind of paper is vulnerable to decomposition, bookworms, mildew, grease, fingerprints, water and fire, and any kind of book could just be lost. The only thing that seems to help is making more copies. A certain number of paper copies of anything will naturally get lost or destroyed. The higher the number of extant copies of a text, the higher the chances that some variant or variants of that text will survive.

Yes, we do have to make hardcopies, though. Paper is a much, much more reliable storage system than the electronic systems we have now.

(Why can I write this much, this clearly, on a vaguely intellectual topic, when I can barely assemble ten sentences for the research paper due Thursday?)