|
Criterion (a book that Augustine may have known) that sometimes people read silently when they are
concentrating hard, because voicing the words is a distraction to thought. And Julius Caesar, standing
next to his opponent Cato in the Senate in 63 BC, silently read a little billet-doux sent to him by Cato’s
own sister. Almost four centuries later, Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, in a catechetical lecture probably
delivered at Lent of the year 349, entreated the women in church to read, while waiting during the
ceremonies, “quietly, however, so that, while their lips speak, no other ears may hear what they say” — a
whispered reading, perhaps, in which the lips fluttered with muffled sounds.
If reading out loud was the norm from the beginnings of the written word, what was it like to read in the
great ancient libraries? The Assyrian scholar consulting one of the thirty thousand tablets in the library of
King Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BC, the unfurlers of scrolls at the libraries of Alexandria and
Pergamum, Augustine himself looking for a certain text in the libraries of Carthage and Rome, must have
worked in the midst of a rumbling din. However, even today not all libraries preserve the proverbial
silence. In the seventies, in Milan’s beautiful Biblioteca Ambrosiana, there was nothing like the stately
silence I had noticed in the British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The readers
at the Ambrosiana spoke to one another from desk to desk; from time to time someone would call out a
question or a name, a heavy tome would slam shut, a cartful of books would rattle by. These days, neither
the British Library nor the Bibliothèque Nationale is utterly quiet; the silent reading is punctuated by the
clicking and tapping of portable word-processors, as if flocks of woodpeckers lived inside the book-lined
halls. Was it different then, in the days of Athens or Pergamum, trying to concentrate with dozens of
readers laying out tablets or unfurling scrolls, mumbling away to themselves an infinity of different
stories? Perhaps they didn’t hear the din; perhaps they didn’t know that it was possible to read in any
other way. In any case, we have no recorded instances of readers complaining of the noise in Greek or
Roman libraries — as Seneca, writing in the first century, complained of having to study in his noisy
private lodgings.
Augustine himself, in a key passage of the Confessions, describes a moment in which the two readings —
voiced and silent — take place almost simultaneously. Anguished by indecision, angry at his past sins,
frightened that at last the time of his reckoning has come, Augustine walks away from his friend Alypius,
with whom he has been reading (out loud) in Augustine’s summer garden, and flings himself down under
a fig-tree to weep. Suddenly, from a nearby house, he hears the voice of a child — boy or girl, he can’t say
— singing a song whose refrain is tolle, lege, “take up and read”. Believing that the voice is speaking to
him, Augustine runs back to where Alypius is still sitting and picks up the book he has left unfinished, a
volume of Paul’s Epistles. Augustine says, “I took hold of it and opened it, and in silence I read the first
section on which my eyes fell.” The passage he reads in silence is from Romans 13 — an exhortation to
“make not provision for the flesh” but to “put ye on [i.e., ‘like an armour’] the Lord Jesus Christ”.
Thunderstruck, he comes to the end of the sentence. The “light of trust” floods his heart and “the
darkness of doubt” is dispelled.
Alypius, startled, asks Augustine what has affected him so. Augustine (who, in a gesture so familiar to us
across those alien centuries, has marked the place he was reading with a finger and closed the book)
shows his friend the text. “I pointed it out to him and he read [aloud, presumably] beyond the passage
which I had read. I had no idea what followed, which was this: Him that is weak in the faith receive ye.”
This admonition, Augustine tells us, is enough to give Alypius the longed-for spiritual strength. There in
that garden in Milan, one day in August of the year 386, Augustine and his friend read Paul’s Epistles
much as we would read the book today: the one silently, for private learning; the other out loud, to share
with his companion the revelation of a text. Curiously, while Ambrose’s prolonged wordless perusal of a
book had seemed to Augustine unexplainable, he did not consider his own silent reading surprising,
perhaps because he had merely looked at a few essential words.
Augustine, a professor of rhetoric who was well versed in poetics and the rhythms of prose, a scholar who
hated Greek but loved Latin, was in the habit — common to most readers — of reading anything he found
written for sheer delight in the sounds. Following the teachings of Aristotle, he knew that letters,
“invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent”, were “signs of sounds” and these
in turn were “signs of things we think”. The written text was a conversation, put on paper so that the
absent partner would be able to pronounce the words intended for him. For Augustine the spoken word
was an intricate part of the text itself — bearing in mind Martial’s warning, uttered three centuries
earlier:
The verse is mine; but friend, when you declaim it,
It seems like yours, so grievously you maim it.
Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since
the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manent,
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
