Spaces between words, spaces between souls

The ori­gin of mod­ern indi­vid­ual con­scious­ness: not per­haps Shake­speare (sorry Harold Bloom) but rather the hum­ble space:

In the course of research­ing mod­ern camel case, I stum­bled across the medieval phe­nom­e­non of run-together text, for­mally known as scrip­tura con­tinua, and could not resist chas­ing it down the rab­bit hole. The pio­neer and dean of this pale­o­graphic sub­field is Paul Saenger. As I explain in my arti­cle, Saenger believes that the intro­duc­tion of space between words in the sev­enth and eighth cen­turies laid the psy­chic ground­work for mod­ern indi­vid­ual consciousness—that most of the intel­lec­tual break­throughs that Mar­shall McLuhan cred­ited to Guten­berg are more prop­erly to be attrib­uted to monks in Ire­land and England […]

!!!

That’s from Caleb Crain’s blog post adden­dum to his NYT Mag post about camel case. (Ha! I just called it an “NYT Mag post,” totally on instinct. I shall let it stand.)

I like this twist. There’s a whole huge sec­tion on Irish monks in Alex Wright’s book Glut, and of course you know The Irish Saved Civ­i­liza­tion. (Note the one-star com­ments.) What I like about this new angle is that we’re not rely­ing on the Irish monks to save civilization—just trans­form it.

It’s not just spaces between words, either; it’s also silent read­ing. More to say about this at some point.

4 Responses

Tim Carmody says:
November 28, 2009 at 7:16 am
I was going to post about this! But I wanted to read some Saenger in the orig­i­nal first. 
I should note, though:
1) Silent read­ing def­i­nitely pre­dates spaces between words; the most famous account of silent read­ing in late antiq­uity is St Augustine’s of St Ambrose, and there are pre­cur­sors. Spaces between words may make silent read­ing eas­ier, but they’re not nec­es­sary for it;
2) Print does a whole lot of other things besides the recon­struc­tion of opti­cal space, and print arranges space still dif­fer­ently from Irish manuscripts;
3) I think the big­ger issue might not be the typo­graphic inno­va­tion, but the fact that the Irish monks were able to manip­u­late, under­stand, and edit text in a lan­guage they couldn’t under­stand (or nec­es­sar­ily mis­un­der­stood) as a spo­ken tongue. It’s an extra metas­ta­sis in the pro­duc­tion of the writ­ten word as an entity inde­pen­dent from speech in the mind;
4) I’m gen­er­ally sym­pa­thetic to the idea that there are a LOT of rev­o­lu­tion­ary moments — lit­tle mini-revolutions, which aren’t really moments, so much as evo­lu­tion­ary spurs — in the devel­op­ment of writ­ing and mod­ern con­scious­ness. It’s futile to say “ah, aha, X is the REAL rev­o­lu­tion” — once we reach a cer­tain thresh­old, they’re all inno­va­tions, and they’re all impor­tant, and psychological/social trans­for­ma­tions can be local­ized in each of them with a greater or lesser degree of plau­si­bil­ity when con­sid­ered over a long durée.
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Matthew Battles says:
November 28, 2009 at 8:07 am
Let’s start a print mag­a­zine that con­ceives of arti­cles as posts, and see what a dif­fer­ence it makes. The post, like the space, alters consciousness.
Tim, I like every­thing you say here—especially the bit about being pre­dis­posed to the model of lots of lit­tle revolutions—some tex­tual, some peri– or paratextual—*and* the sense that there’s a thresh­old at which inno­va­tion *becomes* the longue durée.
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Saheli says:
November 29, 2009 at 9:31 pm
That’s funny I encoun­tered this phe­nom­ena in 4 dif­fer­ent ways this vaca­tion, and was pon­der­ing despite hav­ing a snarkmarket-free Thanks­giv­ing. (For lack of a com­puter, not love.)
1) A young guest at Thanks­giv­ing din­ner was read­ing Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incred­i­bly Close for school, and showed me the pages of text where this effect is appar­ently employed for some par­tic­u­larly dark pas­sages, the words and then let­ters get­ting closer and closer together, until the page is black. She told me quit she was far more inter­ested in the typog­ra­phy, lay­out, and use of pic­tures, than with the text itself.
2) The book I myself had packedto read on the trip, a cheap mass mar­ket paper­back, had encoun­terd some mishap at the printer, and many of the pages in the first 3rd had word drop shad­ows, so there was effec­tively no space, and I found myself read­ing much, much more slowly.
3) Fri­day was the advent of the Gita and in qui­etly observ­ing it too myself I once again remarked on how much more com­pact Dev Nagari is than roman let­ters, the words and even the let­ters scrunched up into them­selves. I can report that my par­ents, at least, seem to read silently just fine from this scrunched up alphabet.
4) This oddly neolithic comic was on the break­fast table today.
Typo­graphic effect, print­ing mis­take, cul­tural habit, visual joke. All in the space between the words.
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Mythical Creatures in Haiku, Billy Collins Gets Animated, How to Become the Most Famous Author in the World | Lit Drift: Storytelling in the 21st Century says:
December 2, 2009 at 4:37 am
[…] The ori­gin of mod­ern indi­vid­ual con­scious­ness comes not from great lit­er­a­ture, but rather from the hum­ble spaces between words. […]
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