The Reading Chamber

Preamble

The Reading Chamber centers on a chimeric room whose paginated construction has stimulated generations of transcriptions and mistranslations. Originally exhibited in the bend of a copper pipe and later acquired by a permanent collection, the text has been freshly transcribed and illustrated in formats that may be held in your hands and perambulated by your fingertips.

Long ago I overheard, or was told—it is no longer exactly clear to me—of a cylindrical room containing the sum of human knowledge. This document reconstructs a profile of this remarkable chamber from the tangle of hearsay and credible research.

At the center of the room is a column—more precisely, a hinge—said to extend beyond the confines of the azure ceiling and into the heavens, although I am skeptical of such hyperbole. It is conceivable, however, that numerous pages are appended to the central hinge like curtains, or velæ, extending from floor to ceiling and completing the radius to within a hair’s breadth of an outlying concentric ring of columns. Although details are scarce, it appears that one is to read while walking, by pushing the page in front of oneself.

Curiously, the central hinge rotates in either direction, leading to heated confrontations whenever multiple readers occupy the room, simultaneously pushing the pages in opposing directions. These uprisings have precipitated vastly learned and acutely obtuse debates about the protocols of page walking. Rarely has the more disconcerting question about the chamber’s original purpose been raised.

These debates carried on for centuries, until it was no longer clear which argument was being defended, or to what end. In the manner that temporary solutions become unquestioned truths, a provisional rule of thumb was adopted: upon entering the chamber, readers proceed to their right, establishing recto and verso. To read beyond the text of a given page, one must exit and reenter the chamber at its circumference.

For ages, this unabashedly random solution elicited criticism and conspiracies, although many readers find solace in upholding an established code of etiquette, no matter how dubious. Acceptance, in this view, is more pragmatic and productive than confronting the underlying, abysmal questions concerning the chamber itself. Strangely, no one seems to have considered altering the physical characteristics of the chamber, and to this day, reputedly, the hinge remains free to pivot in either direction, ambivalent.

Some argue that each page has been inscribed with one single narrative, refracted through an array of languages and colloquialisms—a pinwheel rosetta stone. Others speculate that by deciphering all of the texts amassed in the chamber, the key to divining humankind’s role in the universe lies close at hand.

I am apprehensive about such grandiloquence. If we have merely repeated the same canon since the kindling consciousness of our ancestors, disputes over the shape of time would favor the eternal return. The chamber would thus embody a truism, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and notions of evolution or enlightenment would be dismissed since one could never emerge from the hermetic cycle of divine recapitulation.

On the other hand, if it is as some have implied (or I have inferred), and each page has been translated in chronological succession, then the notion of evolution and chance is resuscitated. In brief: a translator is a frontiersman who negotiates boundaries, stimulating the commerce of ideas. Exchanges are imperfect: techniques of transcription are notoriously unstable and flawed. As liberty—some might say libertinage, or vagabondry—is the hallmark of a pioneer, so it must be acknowledged that each page bears the indelible stamp of a translator’s interpretation of another’s world. If this assertion is valid, then the exact number of pages within this supposedly small chamber is infinite: even as the ink dries on one page, somewhere else the transcription of another has already begun.

Another plausible interpretation centers on the arts of speaking and listening, as distinguished from the arts of writing and reading, and offers an explanation of the chamber’s puzzling peripatetic nature.

Some believe there are closely related linguistic groups, while others share features but fall beyond the family tree. Close inspection of etymologies and oral traditions suggests deeper connections: languages presumed long dead are alive and well, embedded in (if somewhat obscured by) contemporary vocabulary and syntax, following millennia of subtle transmutation.

Across the Roman Empire, for example, Latin became as enmeshed with its expanding territories as its network of laws and highways, enjoying and suffering regional manipulations of the tongue ages before the advent of moveable type. And yet even Latin is a relatively recent skein: traces of the Phoenicians and Celts endure, stretching back beyond written memory along the chthonic sinews of protolanguages.

The world is a loom from which words are spun. Language is a textile, woven across the land, and each person introduces a thread by speaking. Villages separated by the slightest walking distance evolved subtle inflections perceptible only to the ear of a traveler who knots the threads together with every step taken, conversation engaged, village and city visited.

In a pedestrian world, barbarian describes a person who travels too quickly to assimilate dialectical variations between two given locations, a phenomenon that explains the horrifying force of the horse-borne war machines of the Goths and Tartars, as well as the sweeping transformations during that effervescent yet nebulous age of aerial transport and hyper communication.

Historically speaking, a pilgrim did not require a dictionary of foreign languages but absorbed subtleties of cadence and idiom at the pace of walking, encouraging the thought that there once may have existed as many tongues in the world as pages contained in the Chamber. If nothing else, the hinged pages recall the traces of a language borne by the feet and tongue as much as by the hand and pen. The Reading Chamber embodies the difference between a barbarian-soldier and a peregrine-vagabond.

Yet the chamber is also an imperfectly constructed metaphor. Although readers must travel through other languages in order to circumnavigate the text, they are free to leave and reenter the chamber at any point, potentially bypassing entire landmasses and peoples. The room’s configuration contradicts the traditional seamless weave of land and language.

It has been suggested, uberoptimistically, that this fundamental rift between form and substance is the fertile source of all scholarship. Skeptics countered that the construction of the room was itself the first scholarly wedge driven between our experience of the world and its representation. Detractors have gone as far as denouncing the chamber as humankind’s first great vanity, calling it a revolving door to nowhere. Others have painted the Chamber as an apparatus of calibrated gears that have rusted to a halt, more akin to a scrap yard than clockwork. Cynics simply refuse to entertain its existence altogether.

Supposedly, there are sizable gaps among the pages, prompting the rumor that many have been furtively torn out or surgically removed. In any case, they are irretrievably lost. There is a sect of scholars—bitingly referred to as the Optimists—who argue that these lacunae are simply benign gaps, awaiting the insertion of new transcriptions. They also believe that gaps in human expression, including differences in language, are not to be lamented as evidence of the loss of an original state of understanding. Rather, they are the wellsprings of human imagination, plumbed by such devices as metonymy and metaphor.

Attempts to maintain order and discourage theft of or mischievous wrongdoing (some speak of lewd drawings in the margins) have led to the invention of complex and abstruse systems for codifying, cross-referencing, indexing, and inserting glosses. These techniques are under constant debate and revision, and transcriptions that fail to comply with the most recent, authorized annotational habits are subjected to zealous scrutiny. Many have acknowledged that these systems often overlap and contradict one another, leading to impossible entanglements for readers and transcribers alike.

Although earnest and well intentioned, this passion for clarity has spawned an industry of hollow tasks. If each page is self-contained and indivisible, an a-tomic encapsulation of the universe, it would not need the slightest reference to any other page, each page being itself the authorized edition.

Whether fact or fiction this elusive structure has endured generations of boundless enthusiasm and meticulous derision. Akin to such epic projects as the Tower of Babel and the Ark of Noah, The Reading Chamber ultimately presents a confounding mirror. One translator has scribbled in a margin, whether in a flash of hope or fit of anguish:

 


Addendum

Toward the conclusion of The Reading Chamber, a sidelong reference is made to the Tower of Babel and the Ark of Noah. The following elaborates on this notorious remark:

There is an irresolvable tension between oblivion and our tactics of preservation. Without fear of oblivion we would have no need for containment, neither language nor libraries, and without containment there would be no means of apprehending oblivion. Put another way, without forgetting there would be no memory, and without memory, we would have no fear of forgetting.

The Tower of Babel has not yet fallen in the same way that the Ark of Noah still has not found land. The Ark is the world itself. We are its self-appointed navigators—that is the evidence of our being, embedded in myth and matter. Our task of naming has not yet exhausted the contents of this world, an unfinished project.

Similarly, we are in the midst of the Tower. From day to day we contribute to the ebb and flow of its construction and destruction. We build on the foundations laid before us, providing footing for others to follow. And, in the way that the extinction of beings in the world accompanies our discovery of those unanticipated, the foundations crumble as we build anew.

We expend our lives spanning, stitching, and shoring up cracks that open behind even as we cast lines forward. It is difficult to discern the boundary of renewal and progress, for all of the scaffolding. Ancient navigators mended their sailing vessels when and where necessary—a piece at a time—in untiring repair.

The Tower manifests a multiplicity of language and fluent expression. It is not carved from a single, monolithic language lost long ago with an illusory paradise, nor is it an idyllic model where all minds and hearts act as one. We are compelled by our differences to speak and act, expressing our ambits and identities through an Ark, a Tower, a Reading Chamber—by language itself. These vehicles of transformation transport us between certainty and uncertainty, clamor and silence, memory and forgetting.