The Quiet Before, page 32
Abrams’s approach rhymes with O’Connor’s because it embodies certain mechanics of how we’ve seen new ideas, like enfranchisement for all, make their way into actuality. Radical change—change that strips off the stucco and gets to the girders, that offers a chance to see ourselves and our relationship to nature or to others in new ways—doesn’t start with yelling. It starts with deliberation, a tempo that increases, a volume set first at a whisper. How else can you begin to picture what doesn’t yet exist?
Whatever new ways we find to carve a path beyond our current cacophony will have to take this into account—and it’s safe to assume that we haven’t even begun to imagine what uncharted territories of social media are still out there, existing now only in a programmer’s mind. We can rage against it, dream as I do occasionally of pens and typewriters, but the internet, this network of networks, is where we live our lives in the twenty-first century. It has almost completely annihilated all those other modes of communication. So we need to ensure the possibility of those spaces apart, especially in a flattened, too-loud world that perceives dark corners only as dangerous. They are where the first inflections of progress can—and almost always do—occur.
Change seems hard to conceive of otherwise. Because it is the act of entering into those closed or semi-closed circles that alters identity in a fundamental way. Facing that gray unending slab of reality seems less lonely, and chipping away at it less foolish. You become something else: a person at a table.
To Debbie—
if not for you…
Acknowledgments
I’M SO GRATEFUL to be writing books. Don’t get me wrong: there is anguish along the way, endless frustration—at one point, my wife said she felt this book was a third person in our marriage, which is not something you ever want to hear. It’s a bruising marathon, day in and day out, through self-doubt and distraction. And yet, living in a moment in which time itself feels scarce, what greater luxury and privilege could there be than working on a creative endeavor that requires years? As often as I’d wished it were done already, I have also surrendered myself to the idea that the intense commitment books demand is their strength. With apologies to my wife, you need to marry a book in order to grow with it, to improve it. And I’m thankful beyond words that I get to do this, that a childhood dream of total immersion in a project of the mind is a part of my adult reality.
This book was built out of research and interviews. It stands supported by other books and other thinkers. The historical chapters benefited enormously from secondary sources. Some of these experts generously gave me their time—like Malcolm Chase on Chartism and Sara Marcus on the Riot Grrrls. In the case of other scholars, after months of being in the company of their research, I felt I knew them—Peter Miller on Peiresc, Carolyn Burke on Mina Loy, and Stephanie Newell on newspapers in colonial West Africa. For the more contemporary chapters, I spoke with a great deal of helpful people who talked to me for hours, even knowing they might not see the finished book for years. Many, though not all, are in the notes, but I wanted to call out in particular John Coate, Wael Ghonim, Eva Lee, and Rachel Gilmer.
My editor, Amanda Cook, has believed in this project from when it was just airy thoughts over coffee, and she has never stopped pushing for it and dreaming about it with me—even when I most doubted, she could still see it. I owe so much to her. She is an editor like no other—meticulous, thoughtful, and unfailingly honest. I count it as the luckiest event in my life as a writer that I landed with her. There is no way this book would exist or be what it is without her guidance, and there is no one I would have rather been on this journey with than Amanda.
At Crown, I also profited from the incredible eye of Katie Berry, who read multiple versions of the manuscript and saved me from myself many times over. I’m thankful as well for two excellent fact-checkers, Gabe Levine-Drizin and Jordan Reed, who meticulously and expeditiously combed through the book.
Andrew Blauner, my agent, has been a steadfast friend over many years now, always available for a morale boost.
In order to write this book, I completed a PhD, crazy as that might sound, and I’ve had enormous support over the years from the faculty and my fellow students at Columbia University, who were quite patient and understanding that a father of two who was working a day job was rushing in and out of classes. From the early years of this project until it took on more shape, Todd Gitlin and Michael Schudson have been my rabbis, always pushing me toward greater rigor and offering me their intelligence and incisiveness. Richard John and Andie Tucher also helped me make my way through the program. I appreciate in particular my cohort—Burcu Baykurt, Max Foxman, and Joscelyn Jurich—who had to listen to many iterations of this idea as I inched toward a clearer understanding.
A special thanks to my first readers, who are also some of my dearest friends. It’s my great fortune to know such brilliant people, but I was happy to take full advantage of their generosity and wisdom: Emily Eakin, Jennifer Szalai, and Brent Cunningham.
The same month that I signed on to write this book, I got a call offering me a job at The New York Times Book Review. I will forever be thankful to Pamela Paul for giving me that home. My colleagues there mean so much to me, and the mission we share, our unabashed geekiness about books, has made me feel like the awkward kid in the cafeteria who has finally found a table to sit at: these are my people.
Many friends have provided critical encouragement and support along the way, listening to me through my moments of excitement and dejection, and always telling me not to worry, that there will be an end: Jacob Levenson, Jason Zinoman, Kavitha Rajagopalan, Daniela Gerson, Lisa Goldman, Agata Lisiak, Adrian Tomine, Sarah Brennan, Alex Mindlin, Danielle Mindlin, Julian Kreimer, Allan Jalon, Nathaniel Popper, and Elissa Strauss. I was able to lean on some of my oldest friends, Helen Frazier and Deanna Kakassy, and some of my newest—Taffy Brodesser-Akner, master of the wonderfully endless text exchange.
Creating the conditions needed for writing a book when it’s not your full-time job—if only!—is always a matter of jerry-rigging. But nothing could compare or could allow me to anticipate 2020. The most intense phase of the writing happened over a year and a half when, on the heels of the pandemic, I left together with my wife and daughters from our home in Brooklyn to join a family bubble in Los Angeles. I soon found myself turning an RV parked in the driveway into a makeshift writing studio. We all grew very close in that year of isolation. And they saw me work every day and got to experience the joys of me finishing. My always warm and loving family were involved in my tortured creative life as never before, and I’m grateful it allowed them to see me more fully. The bubble deserves full recognition: my incredibly supportive parents, Ami and Batia, along with Natalie, Dave, Maya, Yareeve, Elle, Ben, and Aviv. Also always there for us were the Kolbens: Alex and Nancy, Kevin and Michal, Avigayil and Yotam.
My daughters, Mika and Romi, saw the writing process especially up close. It’s hard to talk about the advantages of the pandemic, which caused such suffering, but the chance to spend so much time with these girls, to eat every meal together, read together, and explore together every day, was an unexpected and treasured gift. They are growing up to be solid human beings who have in abundance that quality that counts most: kindness. I feel so lucky.
And finally, my wife, Deborah Kolben, who holds us all together. I’m not sure she knew exactly what was in store for her when she decided to make a life with me, but even when it felt impossible to balance everything, and I swallowed up so much time, she never stopped wanting me to pursue my own fulfillment. Her quickness and her sense of humor and her beauty sustain me. I’ve been dreaming since the day we met of dedicating a book to her, and it’s the most gratifying thing in the world to finally be able to do so.
Notes
Introduction
“The first act” Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971), xx.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“a full-blown moment” Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protests (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017), 75.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Marshall McLuhan’s great insight Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“Its form excludes the content” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985), 7.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“The marvels of communication” Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 1.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
Chapter 1: Patience—Aix-en-Provence, 1635
Peiresc is not someone Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 38. Biographical information on Peiresc throughout from Miller, Peiresc’s Europe; Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Orient: Antiquarianism as Cultural History in the Seventeenth Century (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2012); Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“looked at the wrong side” Peiresc to Gassendi, Aug. 29, 1635, in Lettres de Peiresc, ed. Philippe Tamizey de Larroque (Paris, 1893), 4:534–35. A large selection from Peiresc’s correspondence was published in seven volumes by Philippe Tamizey de Larroque as Lettres de Peiresc (Paris, 1888–98). Another series prepared by the same editor, Les correspondants de Peiresc: Lettres inédites, was issued in twenty-one parts (Paris, 1879–97; reprinted in 2 vols., Geneva, 1972).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“The rain came” Peiresc to Mersenne, Sept. 1, 1635, in Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, ed. Paul Tannery, Cornelis de Waard, and Armand Beaulieu (Paris, 1932), 5:374.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“All the preparation” Peiresc to Gassendi, Aug. 29, 1635, in Lettres de Peiresc, 4:535.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
100,000 pieces of paper Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 2.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
like Giordano Bruno David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 83.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“The brevity of human life” Peiresc to Campanella, July 3, 1635, in Fra Tommaso Campanella ne’castelli di Napoli, in Roma ed in Parigi, 2 vols. (Naples, 1887), 2:256.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
many lifelong projects Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World, 28.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
For accuracy, longitude was needed Seymour L. Chapin, “The Astronomical Activities of Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc,” Isis 48, no. 1 (March 1957): 15.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“was equal to” Letter from Peiresc, Sept. 20, 1611, quoted in Pierre Humbert, “Le probleme des longitudes entre 1610 et 1666,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 2 (1948): 383–84.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“exactly where our calculations” Peiresc to Pace, Jan. 10, 1611, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Carpentras, MS 1875, fols. 105–6. Most of Peiresc’s surviving letters are housed at this library and have been digitized and made available online on the Early Modern Letters website: emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?catalogue=nicolas-claude-fabri-de-peiresc#partners.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“If God graces me” Lombard to Peiresc, Jan. 8, 1612, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 1803, fol. 254, quoted in Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World, 244.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
where he met Galileo John Lewis, Galileo in France: French Reactions to the Theories and Trial of Galileo (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 142.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“a laboratory in which ideas” Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 50.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“a substitute for gentlemanly” Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 129.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“With the later persons” From the peroration to Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), quoted in Marc Fumaroli, “The Republic of Letters,” Diogenes 143 (1988): 135–36.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“If it were useful” Quoted in Arnaldo Momigliano, Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 55.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
His interests extended Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 3.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
sightings of monstrous Ibid., 26.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“to neglect nothing” Peiresc to Mersenne, July 23, 1635, in Correspondance du Mersenne, 5:332.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“could not care for a wife” Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, trans. William Rand (London, 1657), 162–63.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“par le Parisien” Miller, Peiresc’s Europe, 82.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“I opened a letter” Peiresc to Gassendi, April 19, 1635, in Lettres de Peiresc, 4:477.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“the barbarism and uncouthness” Peiresc to P. Dupuy, March 4, 1628, in Lettres de Peiresc, 1:548.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
When two Portuguese traders Peter N. Miller, “Mapping Peiresc’s Mediterranean: Geography and Astronomy, 1610–1636,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters, 1500–1575: Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Dirk van Miert (Oxford: Warburg Institute Colloquia, 2012), 16.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“all the instructions” Peiresc to Hazard, July 10, 1635, in Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 1874, fol. 374r.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“If you would encounter” Peiresc to Celestin, Nov. 14, 1635, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 1874, fols. 396v–397r.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“It is not necessary to probe” From Saint Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, chap. 9, quoted in Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 3.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“suppress” the publication Descartes to Mersenne, Feb. 1634, in Correspondance du Mersenne, 4:27.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“Poor Galileo had to declare” Peiresc to P. Dupuy, Aug. 16, 1633, in Lettres de Peiresc, 2:582.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“carefully and over time” Peiresc to P. Dupuy, Feb. 6, 1634, in Lettres de Peiresc, 3:28.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
To strengthen their bond D’Arcos to Peiresc, June 30, 1634, in “Suite des lettres inédites de Peiresc, communique par M. Millen,” ed. Alexandre-Jules-Antoine Fauris de Saint-Vincens, Magasin Encyclopédique 5 (1806): 143–44, quoted in Jane T. Tolbert, “Ambiguity and Conversion in the Correspondence of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Thomas d’Arcos, 1630–1637,” Journal of Modern History 13 (2009): 19.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“Fragility is sometimes worthy” Peiresc to Barberini, Dec. 5, 1634, quoted in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 54.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“so much reproached” Peiresc to Barberini, Jan. 31, 1635, quoted in Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 55.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“undertaking where so many others” Galileo to Peiresc, Feb. 22, 1635, in Galileo, Dialogues, lettres choisies, ed. Paul-Henri Michel (Paris, 1966), 422.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“The book of nature” Peiresc to Celestin, April 29, 1635, in Lettres de Peiresc, 7:856–57.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT
“not be injurious” Peiresc to Michelange de Nantes, Aug. 1, 1634, in Correspondance de Peiresc avec plusieurs missionaires et religieux de l’ordre des Capucins, 1631–1637, ed. Apollinaire de Valence (Paris, 1891), 82.
