The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm Read online

  Both Ezekiel and John’s images gave rise to an extensive library of biblical commentaries that, throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see in this double book an image of God’s double creation, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature, both of which we are meant to read and in which we are written. Talmudic commentators associated the double book with the double tablets of the Torah. According to Midrash, the Torah that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai was both a written text and an oral commentary. During the day, when it was light, Moses read the text God had written on the tablets; in the darkness of the night he studied the commentary God had spoken when he created the world.¹² For the Talmudists, the Book of Nature is understood as God’s oral gloss on his own written text. Perhaps for this reason Philo de Biblos, in the second century, declared that the Egyptian god Thoth had invented simultaneously the art of writing and that of composing commentaries or glosses.¹³

  For Saint Bonaventure, in the thirteenth century, Ezekiel’s book is both the word and the world. God, says Bonaventure, “created this perceptible world as a means of self-revelation so that, like a mirror of God or a divine footprint, it might lead man to love and praise his Creator. Accordingly, there are two books, one written within, and that is [inscribed by] God’s eternal Art and Wisdom; the other written without, and that is the perceptible world.”¹⁴ Faced with God’s double creation, we are entrusted with the role of readers, to follow God’s text and to interpret it to the best of our abilities. For Bonaventure, the constant temptation, the true demonic temptation, is expressed in the words of the serpent to Eve in the Garden: “Ye shall be as gods.”¹⁵ That is to say, instead of wishing to serve the Word of God as readers, we want to be like God himself, the author of our own book.¹⁶

  Saint Augustine made this explicit in his Confessions, using his own childhood experience as example. How is it, he asks, that reading “the fancies dreamed up by poets” may entice us with what is untrue and steer us away from the truth of God? The craft of reading and writing “are by far the better study,” but they may lead us to believe in these “hollow fancies.”¹⁷ Human beings, according to Augustine, strictly “obey the rules of grammar which have been handed down to them, and yet ignore the eternal rules of everlasting salvation which they have received” from God himself. Our task therefore consists in balancing the experience of the pleasurable illusions created by the poets’ words, with the knowledge that they are illusions; to enjoy the translation into words of that which can be felt and known on this earth, and, at the same time, to distance ourselves from that knowledge and that feeling in order to read more clearly the contents of God’s word as written in his books. Augustine distinguishes between reading what is false and reading what is true. For Augustine, the experience of reading Virgil, for example, carries all the material problems that the reading of the sacred texts does, and one of the questions to be resolved is the degree of importance a reader is permitted to attach to either. “I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas,” writes Augustine, “while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways. I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while all the time, in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for my own plight.”¹⁸ The physical literary road taken by Aeneas becomes Augustine’s own mistaken metaphorical road of life, while the book in which he reads of it can be (but fails to be) a mirror of his own called-for regret.

  Reading the Bible has the same metaphorical function. “Between the paths of the Bible and those of its readers,” wrote the twentieth-century Israeli novelist Yehuda Amichai, “the words of Scripture are the space that must first be crossed: the first pilgrimage is that of reading.”¹⁹ The Bible is a book of roads and pilgrimages: the departure from Eden, Exodus, the travels of Abraham and of Jacob. In the penultimate chapter of the Pentateuch the last word is “to ascend,” that is to say, to travel on, toward the earthly Jerusalem or toward that other, celestial city. To walk, to wander, to saunter (from the Old French “Sainct’Terre,” the Holy Land)²⁰ is to make active use of the Bible’s words, just as to read is to travel. This analogy is made explicit in depictions of readers who turn the words on the page into worldly action, from Saint Anthony (who took the words in Matthew 19 literally and went out into the desert with nothing but the Gospel’s words)²¹ and the prophet Amos (who “reads” his own visions to the people of Israel)²² to Bunyan’s Pilgrim dreaming of a man “turned away from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden on his back.”²³ We advance through a text as we advance through the world, passing from the first page to the last through the unfolding landscape, sometimes starting in mid- chapter, sometimes not reaching the end. The intellectual experience of crossing the pages as we read becomes a physical experience, calling into action the entire body: hands turning the pages or fingers scrolling the text, legs lending support to the receptive body, eyes scanning for meaning, ears tuned to the sound of the words in our head. The pages to come promise a point of arrival, a glimmer on the horizon; the pages already read allow for the possibility of recollection. And in the present of the text we exist suspended in a constantly changing moment, an island of time shimmering between what we know of the text and what yet lies ahead. Every reader is an armchair Crusoe.

  This becomes apparent in Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between the act of reading and the all- too-swift passing through life. “Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm I know,” he suggests in the Confessions.

  Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of my expectation and relegated to the past, now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished my recitation and it has passed into the province of memory.

  William Blake, “Christian Reading in His Book.”

  From Blake’s illustrations for John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (c. 1824).

  For Augustine, the act of reading is a journey through the text being read, claiming for the province of memory the territory explored, while, in the process, the uncharted landscape ahead gradually diminishes and becomes familiar territory. “What is true of the whole psalm,” Augustine continues, “is also true of all its parts and of each syllable. It is true of any longer action in which I may be engaged and of which the recitation of the psalm may only be a small part. It is true of a man’s whole life, of which all his actions are parts. It is true of the whole history of humankind, of which each life is a part.”²⁴ The experience of reading and the experience of journeying through life mirror one another.

  Traveling Through the Text

  In time he recognized the story of this loss

  As the end of his journey.

  — The Epic of Gilgamesh

  By the time Augustine was writing his Confessions, the idea of the reader as traveler was already ancient. Though Augustine could not have known it, the traveling reader appears in one of our oldest narratives, the Epic of Gilgamesh, first written around 1750 B.C.E. and refined and reassembled some two centuries later. The revised composition, known as the “Ninevite version,” was found inscribed on eleven clay tablets.²⁵ In the first verses of the first tablet, the poet presents his hero, the great king Gilgamesh, and the marvel he built, the fortified city of Uruk. And then the poet addresses the reader:

  Look at these walls, tight as a net for birds!

  Consider their base, how inc
omparable!

  Feel this slab of the threshold, brought from far away!

  Advance toward the Temple, the House of Ishtar,

  That no other king, no one else, was able to imitate!

  Climb up and stroll on Uruk’s ramparts,

  Inspect the foundations, observe the lines of bricks:

  Are they not indeed hand-baked?

  And did not the Seven Sages themselves lay the base?

  Three hundred hectares of city, and as many of gardens,

  And as many of virgin soil belong to the Temple.

  Behold! In these thousand hectares you see all of Uruk!

  Jadeite cylinder seal showing Gilgamesh fighting a lion (Akkadian period, c. 2350–2150 B.C.E.).

  Object 30–12-25, from a joint British Museum/University Museum Expedition to Ur, Iraq.

  Courtesy the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

  Go now and seek the copper casket,

  Turn the bronze ring,

  Open the secret compartment,

  And pull out the lapis-lazuli tablets in order to read

  How Gilgamesh went through his many trials.²⁶

  The poet apostrophizes the reader, urging him or her to look, consider, feel, advance, climb, stroll, inspect, seek, open, pull out, and read. In a vertiginous, self-perpetuating circle, the reader is told to travel through the city of which he is reading, in order to discover a text (the one he now holds in his hands) that will tell him how to accomplish a series of tasks so as to learn about King Gilgamesh’s adventures. As we begin to read, we are already obeying the poet’s injunction; we are already part of the poem. From the first words of the first tablet, we, the readers, become Gilgamesh’s fellow travelers.

  Obviously, a distinction must be made between the poem’s first readers and ourselves, reading in the twenty-first century. The Gilgamesh epic, written in an Akkadian dialect from the second millennium B.C.E., is probably a recasting of a series of earlier Akkadian poems, based in turn on ancient Sumerian texts. The epic as we know it can therefore be said to have been composed over several centuries, revised and shaped in the end by a scholar-priest whose name has come down to us as Sin-leqi-unninni. Its first readers would have been familiar with the story and would have followed the wanderings of King Gilgamesh and his friend much as if the poem had been a strict historical or documentary chronicle. Over the centuries, however, this familiarity acquired a kaleidoscopic mythical reading. It must be remembered that Mesopotamia was a multilingual society, or several multilingual societies, so that, for instance, at the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium B.C.E., Sumerian judges would record in Akkadian (and not in their own tongue) the testimonies given in court, and legal documents would often carry their translations. This sharing and overlapping of at least two languages and cultures changed and enriched over the centuries parallel interpretations of the ancient stories. For example, the god Enlil, a divinity often present in Mesopotamian narratives (he is associated with Ninurta, the war god, in the Epic of Gilgamesh), was for the Sumerians of the second millennium not the protector of any specific city but rather an all-inspiring, ecumenical god. In contrast, for the Akkadians he was a destructive force, responsible for monstrous flooding. Thus the god’s hallowed breath was read as life-giving by the former and life-taking by the latter. In the first millennium and with the preeminence of the Amorite kings, new layers of meaning were attached to the old vocabularies, and under the influence of Vedic culture from India and Aramean culture from Syria, figures such as Enlil acquired newer and unexpected features.²⁷ In the eyes of successive generations, the stories grew and changed, not as much through rewriting as through rereading, through the adding of contextual layers that gradually overlapped, enriched, or eliminated previous ones.

  The landscape over which Gilgamesh and his readers traveled—the desert around the city of Uruk, the mountains beyond, the woods and groves—would have changed as the travelers themselves changed, and with them the act of traveling through the story. The awe experienced by the first recipients of the text to whom it was read aloud by scribes, feeling that they had been invited to share the royal adventures, would have gradually become an exercise in collective memory, as well as an aesthetic pleasure, a capacity for evaluating the narrative technique honed by generations of readers and listeners. The audience was still required to accompany the heroes on their perilous journey, but after many readings the magic must have seemed tamer, the adventures tinged with religious allegory, the poem accompanied by philosophical glosses and learned commentaries. In the last days of the great Mesopotamian civilizations, whether at the time of the fall of Ur in around 2000 B.C.E. or that of the fall of Babylon in around 1600 B.C.E., the Epic of Gilgamesh remained, no doubt, a thing of wonder, but also a point of reference, a touchstone for those various overlapping cultures: what we today would call a classic.

  All those generations of readers, as well as our own, share at least one peculiar feature. King Gilgamesh, the audience is told from the start, has long completed his earthly journey, and the poet (as the last of the eleven tablets proves) has long composed the final words of his chronicle. The reader, however, has yet to set off, but with the advantage (or disadvantage) of knowing both the route and the final destination. The text created the landscape to be traveled, and did away with the real distance between places and the attendant labors of physical travel. By the eighteenth century B.C.E., the fact of reader and writer being brought together by the craft of words was explicitly stated, so that reading and writing consciously became a means of transport across space. “Bulattal brought me your news,” says a letter written in the early 1700s B.C.E. in the Zagros Mountains and sent to the settlement of Shemshara, “and I am much delighted: I had the impression that you and I had met and we had embraced.”²⁸ The words on the tablet brought the writer to the destination along the route that the text had charted: in this way, the reader became the text’s privileged traveler.

  And yet, from the early days of Gilgamesh onward, it can be said that if we readers are travelers, we are not, however, pioneers: the path we take has been trodden before, and the maps of the country have already been drawn (even if in the days of the hypertext, in certain cases, the maps can be modified by the reader). Conscious of overcoming the limitations of physical geography and historical time, readers allow for another geography and history as they advance through the text, a space and a time that belong to the textual narrative and are reenacted in the readers’ eye.

  This was true then and is true now. In spite of rhetorical rules of composition that attempt to limit or govern the construction of the narrated time and space, readers become increasingly aware that the game of “suspension of disbelief” into which they enter with the writer forces them to accept new physical laws for the world of each specific book. Readers must accept that vast territories of the imagination can be crossed in the space of one paragraph, and centuries can go by in a single sentence. They can be delayed in one place over dozens of pages, or they can spend a literate eternity in the course of just one volume. The reading experience mirrors the fluctuating impression of being in this dreamlike world, of distance and proximity, of past, present, and future. Like the Lilliputian king who is aware of the passing of the clock’s hand marking the seconds, or like the souls in Dante’s Heaven for whom all space is one single point, readers experience in their reading the inklings of unreality of everyday life, the elasticity of time or the changing forms of space. Whether wandering through unreal cities or entering undiscovered countries, whether trying to reach the shores of Ithaca or lighting out for the Territory, whether discovering ice for the first time or being promised an ever-postponed excursion to the lighthouse, our routes are signposted and a guide (reliable or not) is always at hand, reminding us of the moments that lasted for days or years, and of the landscapes too small or too vast for comprehension.

  After Gilgamesh’s beloved, Enkidu, has died, Gilgamesh d
ecides to travel to the Realm of the Dead to find him, and the reader goes with him. “Which is the way to the Realm of the Dead?” Gilgamesh asks. “I must know! Is it the sea? the mountains? I will go there!”²⁹ So will the reader, setting off on what is one of the first otherworldly narratives of our history, combining in one story the knowledge and pain of loss, the mad desire to reverse time and to bring back the dead, the unconvincing conviction that beyond the horizon lies a place where we will find what we are missing and where all will be well. Sea and mountains are the landscapes we know, and from high up in the mountains and down and across the sea Gilgamesh (and we, the readers) will travel, through the poem, from the first to the last clay tablet or page. Reading allows us to experience our intuitions as facts, and to transform the moving through experience into a recognizable passage through the text.

  The Road of Life

  Lest you should ponder the road of life.