The Quiet Before, page 2
Out of samizdat they constructed a shadow civil society for debating and freethinking when their repressive environment made these activities impossible. For decades this continued. And when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, an event precipitated by the country’s unsustainable economic system more than anything else, an alternative idea of citizenship already existed, incubated, expressing a set of values that would soon become the norm (at least until a new authoritarianism arrived in the 2000s with Vladimir Putin). Samizdat and the ideals it kept stewing beneath the surface made it difficult for Soviet leaders, once their country was imploding, to let their people starve or run them over with tanks—the dissidents’ vision was there, preserved, and could not be easily crushed.
At the archives, whenever I touched the nearly translucent sheets of paper, felt their fragility, and stared at the matter-of-fact black type, I was struck by the efficacy of samizdat. It demanded concentration. The high risk involved in creating it meant you had to think carefully about what you wanted to say. It also allowed for an exchange. The pages themselves contained multiple voices, multiple back-and-forths, all within the borders of their greater project. Samizdat produced a private world for the dissidents. No one could enter unless they had been handed a copy. This gave them the freedom to make mistakes, try out new concepts, and fantasize about a new, more humane order. And they controlled these pages. No one else dictated the form of samizdat or limited its content. If someone had a provocative poem about Brezhnev that they wanted to disseminate or an essay about the possible upsides of capitalism, they only had to find paper and a typewriter (usually on the black market), and the network would pick it up and spread their contribution.
The medium we use for conversation molds the kinds of conversations we can have, and even sets the boundaries of our thinking. This was Marshall McLuhan’s great insight: the transition from oral to written to electronic culture brought along a shift in the way human beings processed reality, and it changed them. In the 1980s, Neil Postman, in his Amusing Ourselves to Death, picked up the baton from McLuhan and turned his ire on television, which he felt was adversely affecting the public discourse. “Its form excludes the content,” was his way of phrasing it; in other words, a medium was a container that could hold certain kinds of thoughts and not others. For him the visual immediacy of television excluded rational argument, which print had done such a good job facilitating. What he would have made of something like TikTok, we can only guess.
When it comes to social media, what is excluded and what is elevated? If we approach these now ubiquitous modes of communication with this question, it becomes evident that they are not great for allowing radical ideas to stick, to slowly cohere. And the stakes are high. Even though we now raise an eyebrow when the Silicon Valley titans say their platforms exist to “change the world,” we’ve stopped thinking of any other means through which the world can be changed. The platforms dominate. We mistakenly believe they are the equivalent of eighteenth-century coffeehouses (where democracy, fueled by caffeine and newspapers, was indeed incubated). But they are not good for that most essential first step in the process of making change; they only allow ideas to flare and return to darkness.
The history of revolutions is long, though, and full of other possibilities. How should we think about samizdat and all the other communal ways of interacting through writing that allowed oppositional opinions and identities to form—the lengthy underground stream, existing at least from the invention of movable type to the AOL chat room? What about letters and petitions and manifestos and small newspapers and zines? The great books by great men and women overshadow these subterranean outlets, but they stand just on the other side of our blurry memory of all that came before the internet, still there and still visible for the moment, an alternative way of understanding what it means for a medium to bring people together.
This book emerged out of an impulse to reclaim this untapped resource and see if it offered lessons for our frazzled twenty-first-century selves. “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past,” wrote Robert Darnton, the Harvard historian, “a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” Darnton himself has spent much of his career understanding how the French Revolution was incubated. In one book, he looked at how scraps of poetry deriding the monarch—passed hand to hand and pocket to pocket among students, clergymen, and clerks—helped bring about the vast changing of minds that led to the upheaval.
I wanted to return to such moments of inception, to the birth of the scientific revolution or the stirrings of anticolonialism or the genesis of third-wave feminism, and seek out the media that set up that first act. These stories may seem familiar on one level—known perhaps for their world-altering outcomes—but each contains an insight about what helps radical ideas come into being. We will bear down on this element in these histories, zoom in on the inkpot sitting on the writing desk of a seventeenth-century aristocrat, the steam drifting up from a printing press in 1930s Accra, the scissors and glue stick in a teenage girl’s bedroom in the 1990s. The stories are particular, but layered on top of each other, they become a sort of palimpsest through which, peeking out, we can see patterns, and even something like truths, about what allowed the most threatening, liberating concepts to grow.
These pre-digital forms of communication demanded patience. Because they took time to produce and time to transmit from one person to another, they slowed things down, favoring an incremental accumulation of knowledge and connection. They also lent coherence, a way for scattered ideologies and feelings to be shaped into a single compellingly new perspective. Those who joined such conversations, ones that were deliberate and perhaps more labor-intensive to produce, gained a firmer sense of identity and solidarity, which in turn freed them up to imagine how they might order the world differently. Along with imagining came arguing, refining, and moving toward shared objectives. These were media that provided focus—that permitted people to take their dissatisfaction with a current set of rules and conventions and whittle it down into a spearhead. And, maybe most important, the activists and dissidents and thinkers who used these tools were in control of them. They created the platforms—and by creating them, they could set their parameters and make sure they served their ends.
Onto these histories, I’ll add more layers from our very recent past, from the movements we’ve seen with our own eyes or scrolled past online, of young Egyptian revolutionaries and torch-wielding white supremacists. A medium that moves fast, reaching across vast networks, privileging the public and the performative, taking in constant and varied flows of information, and stringing us through emotional highs and lows, will always be good for spreading ideas quickly and widely. But the contrast with forms of communication that refine and actually allow for the emergence of those ideas will, I think, appear quite stark. Things should look different after we’ve walked all the way from the seventeenth century.
Once we’re equipped with the knowledge of what is needed, the next question, naturally, is how we find it today within the confines of our online lives. There is no switching out the internet. But we can better appreciate those digital containers we use and acknowledge what they exclude. And where we do come upon the intense heat of incubation, we shouldn’t assume it serves only dark purposes. History, as we’ll see, tells us otherwise. Those first and second acts, in the quiet when revolutions are only impassioned conversations among the aggrieved and dreaming, are also where progressive change begins. We need to discover or create anew the stages on which those acts can unfold. Otherwise we risk a future in which the possibility of new realities, of alternative ways to live together in society, will remain just beyond our grasp.
Chapter 1
PATIENCE
Aix-en-Provence, 1635
IT IS FOUR in the morning and the moon is full. Along with a steady rain, a yellowish light falls on a handful of bustling men standing on the rooftop of an aristocrat’s house, measuring and recording. A local priest and a bookbinder are among them, taking turns looking up at the night sky through a long brass telescope, while another group is frantically working the lever of an enormous quadrant, gauging the altitude of various stars. In one corner, a paragon of calm, sits an artist with his sketchbook and charcoal, drawing the moon as a shadow begins to smudge it. The eclipse is finally starting.
The conductor of all this activity is late, but he’s slowly making his way up a stepladder, groaning. His stomach is burning, as it always seems to be, and his eyesight is so poor he can see only a few feet in front of him. Yet he refuses help. This is Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, master of this house, natural philosopher, and, most important, a connector of Europe’s greatest minds. In this instant, he is also a sickly old man who has been waiting for the past two decades for this very moment.
He can’t really enjoy it, though. Peiresc is not someone to relish a realized dream. He is all self-discipline, even down to his food and clothes. He never wears silk. If he drinks wine, it is white and heavily watered down. The only food he allows himself in excess are melons, and even these he argues have health benefits. He is filled with doubt about this ambitious experiment. It involves dozens of amateur participants, hundreds of miles apart, simultaneously observing a celestial phenomenon and accurately recording what they see. He has enlisted each one himself, corresponding with them over months, moving them past their apprehensions and insecurities, convincing them of the importance of their larger purpose: to collect data that, when gathered, will offer a correct measure of longitude. If it works, they’ll be redrawing the map of the known world.
But failure seems likely, even to him. The proof comes through his spyglass. Peiresc had instructed three local men to climb a nearby hill outside Aix-en-Provence to log the night’s events. They were to signal their arrival by lighting a fire. As the eclipse progresses, he looks over and sees not even the slightest flicker in the distance.
His mind goes to all the other observers. There is Father Michelange de Nantes on a rocky summit in Syria; a diplomat, François Galaup de Chasteuil, in Lebanon; another missionary, Agathange de Vendôme, in Egypt; Thomas d’Arcos, a former captive of Barbary pirates turned Muslim convert, in Tunis; and on the Continent, an array of scholarly friends in Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. A Jesuit priest in Quebec is even taking part. What if they too fail to show up?
Later that morning in his overstuffed study, layered in crimson rugs and somber oil paintings, Peiresc turns to the activity that sustains him, even in dark moments: he writes a letter. As often in his solitary life, quill, ink, paper, and some quiet allow him to reenter an ongoing exchange with his dozens of friends, many of whom he has never met and will never meet in person. He enumerates his reasons for anxiety to Pierre Gassendi, the scholar-priest who is one of his main collaborators. The night was too cloudy. His team was not ready. Because of their “haste,” his group on the roof had even “looked at the wrong side of the quadrant to take the numbers.” And as for the men on the hill, he has since learned what happened: “The rain came, and frightened by thunder and lightning, they retreated to a hermitage without having the courage or inclination to return to indicate at least the setting of the moon.” The venting continues, he dips his quill and scratches the words onto yellowed paper. “All the preparation was in vain.”
* * *
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THE PRINTING PRESS, not even two hundred years old then, is seen today as the revolutionary medium of Peiresc’s era. The ability to reproduce pamphlets and books made it possible for a dissident priest like Martin Luther to broadcast his opinions and quickly gain a following, each printed text a whisper into the ear of a potential convert. But the post offered a quieter revolution. For hundreds of years, letters were an advanced technology. They were the first instance of thought traveling distance, disassociated bodily from thinker. But from Cicero until the early modern period, they moved from one place to another so slowly and so erratically that they often read more like alternating speeches than the volley of a conversation. This changed in Peiresc’s time once the post became fast and relatively reliable. The possibility of regular correspondence now allowed for collaboration, for theories to be shared and disputed. For the slow accretion of knowledge that comes from the friction of two people trading ideas and observations.
For Peiresc, letters were units of intellectual exchange. Sitting in his study like a contented spider in the middle of an expansive web, he wrote and dictated about ten a day. They were also his only legacy, which is part of the reason his name is lost to us. He published no books, but when he died, two years after the eclipse, he left behind 100,000 pieces of paper in the form of dispatches, memoranda, and reading notes, which represented his life’s work.
These were thoughts in process. Letters were good for teasing out concepts, which made them especially valuable to a man who spent his life testing established dogma. The seventeenth century was not a time to do that in one giant leap—not unless you wanted to end up like Giordano Bruno. Only three decades before, the Italian Dominican friar had been stripped, tied to a stake, and burned alive on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome for suggesting that our planet might not occupy the center of the universe. Others could take these risks, blast trumpets if they wanted. That wasn’t Peiresc’s approach. His ego wasn’t immune to the desire to have a book to his name, and he had plans for many. But mostly out of caution, and also because he was so restless, letters became his mastered form.
This eclipse experiment, though elegant in his own mind, stretched the power of letters to its limit. He was attempting a group observation among scattered correspondents who had never so much as bothered to wonder about the moon before, or even what longitude meant. Peiresc had spent hundreds of hours writing to them—countless pages of instructions, sent along with diagrams and crude measuring instruments. He believed that the mechanics of the natural world would be grasped cumulatively, over generations, a process of verification and correction and further verification. “The brevity of human life does not allow that one person alone is sufficient; it is necessary to adopt the observations of a good number of others from the past centuries and future ones to clarify that which fits better,” he once wrote. But still, when it came to the most far-flung of his collaborators, geographically and intellectually, it was an agonizing task just coaxing them to practice proper notation, let alone to trust the authority of their own eyes.
* * *
—
THE ECLIPSE ITSELF was not the point. It was only a marker of time—a giant clock in the sky, visible from everywhere. But Peiresc hoped this clock would help him complete at last one of his many, many lifelong projects, a partial list of which included an investigation of ancient weights and measures, a study of the Roman calendar of 354 (whose oldest surviving copy he had in his study), a catalog of gemstones that he and the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens had been compiling together, the publication of all the Samaritan versions of the Pentateuch in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, and an exhaustive history of Provence. But it was the longitude project that was perhaps his most idiosyncratic endeavor. For one thing, it was ambitious; there was no way he could do it alone. But also, his obsession with longitude had a particularly practical purpose: to calculate the length and width of the Mediterranean Sea.
He loved that body of water and anything to do with the people and cultures that encircled it. No detail was uninteresting to him. On the rare occasions when he left Aix, it was to visit the port of Marseille. There he would take in the salt air and all the humanity marching down the wooden docks. He was as curious about the customs of the Muslims, Samaritans, and Eastern Christians as he was about the ancient Greeks. He once heard the singing of galley slaves on a docked ship, and he found a musician to help him transcribe the tune into musical notation so he could capture the song of the “black Moor.” But for Peiresc and everyone else, the sea’s exact dimensions had remained elusive. For generations, sailors had been poorly navigating from the Strait of Gibraltar around the Cyclades and to the coast of the Ottoman Empire with little more than an inherited familiarity with the coastline, an astrolabe, and fifteen-hundred-year-old drawings.
For accuracy, longitude was needed, but calculating it had evaded astronomers and cartographers for so long that in 1598 Philip III of Spain even offered a perpetual pension to anyone who could figure it out. The problem was logistical. Though latitude could be gauged by measuring the height of the noonday sun, longitude required simultaneous observation—people in at least two different locations watching some fixed phenomenon in the sky and marking precisely when they had each seen it. The difference in time, Peiresc explained in one letter, “was equal to the difference in longitude.”
Peiresc first imagined such an orchestra of observation in 1610 when he was thirty and had just finished reading Galileo Galilei’s sensational Sidereus nuncius, in which the astronomer detailed his telescopic discoveries, including his sighting of the four moons of Jupiter. The book offered concrete proof that other forces were at work in the universe and that Earth might not be so central; after all, the moons orbited around Jupiter with little regard for us. Peiresc was as astonished as the rest of Europe’s intellectual class, but what caught his attention was the usefulness of these distant moons. He began to record and chart their revolutions every night on homemade graph paper until he was able to predict their movements (the satellites, he soon wrote, were “exactly where our calculations placed them in completing their orbits”). The moons could serve as the celestial clock he needed for his longitude project. He hurriedly sent out his young assistant on a voyage across the Mediterranean, from Marseille to the Lebanese coastal town of Tripoli, stopping at the islands of Malta and Cyprus. In each location, he was to observe Jupiter and its moons, and Peiresc would do the same in Aix. In theory, comparing their data would give them the exact longitudinal location of each of his assistant’s stops. But this first attempt failed miserably. Telescopes were then too new and imprecise to capture the necessary detail. That, and the young man was none too pleased to be on this trip. In his very first letter from “overseas,” he wrote to Peiresc, “If God graces me to return to our house, the sea will never again have me as its subject.”
