Zibaldone

Giacomo Leopardi

John Stuart Mill was a prodigy who had learned Greek by the time he was three. Another less known prodigy was the l9th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Leopardi was the author of Zibaldone, which Tim Parks in his review essay  (“The Greatest Intellectual Diary of Italian Literature,"The New York Review of Books, 10/10/13) describes as being “considered the greatest intellectual diary of Italian literature, its breadth and depth of thought often compared to the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.” As Park relates, Leopardi was the son of “a minor aristocrat" who compensated for his reverse midas touch by collecting "25,000 books (in a part of the world where books were hard to come by) and set his firstborn son to reading them.” Talk about parental baggage! Young Giacomo was literally forced to become a polyglot. However the library for all its breadth also comprised enough finitude to be mastered. Rather than courting oblivion like say Borges’ "The Library of Babel", Leopardi grew up in the shadow of another metaphoric tower, a proto-Palazzo Enciclopedico, made up in that day of the accumulated classics of mankind. Now the project of collecting all the great books and making them into the core curriculum for a prodigy, would be an impossibility. There’s just too much information. However, even if Leopardi’s project were doable at that moment in the timeline of western culture, Parks waxes eloquently on the limitations—of knowledge itself—that Leopardi was forced to succumb to when he says: “Studying was the one thing he knew how to do, but the knowledge so gained only revealed to him that knowledge does not help us to live; on the contrary it corrodes those happy errors, or illusions as he came to call them, that give life meaning, shifting energy to the mental and rational and away from the physical and instinctive, where in complicity with illusion, happiness lies.” The question then is, is knowledge inversely proportional to happiness? Further does the increased information which even average men are forced to absorb today, place them that much further from the prospect of finding unselfconscious joy?

Datafication Redux I

Construction of the Tower of Babel by Peter Bruegel the Elder

A void has been created by the plenitude of information. “Datafication" is what Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger termed this phenomenon in an article in Foreign Affairs (“The Rise of Big Data,” May/June, 2012). It’s a flood, an inundation reminiscent of the horrible stampedes at international soccer matches or at discount stores on Black Friday. The crush of humanity stomps you to death. Brilliant locutions are packed like sardines and sent into oblivion in the juggernaut of social networking. It’s Borges’s The Library of Babel in an even more nightmarish form, if that’s possible. This may account for a new kind of anorexia, in which the desire to communicate which had previously taken the form of a poem, short story or casual essay is slowly dying. The dialogue between literature and readers is like a stream or lake whose waters become fetid if they’re not fed by new sources. The analogy is apt since flooding can wash out lakes, streams and rivers. It’s either feast or famine, a total addictive indulgence with so much noise being created that individual voices are drowned out or a drought in which a human ability, like cursive writing, dies through attrition. Literature however is just the tip of the iceberg. The faces on Facebook have become faceless. A true picture of humanity can only be metaphoric and symbolic since any crowd quickly, by definition, loses its identity, as it swells out of control and turns into a lynch mob.

The Digital Faust

Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough to Last"

In an article in Foreign Affairs (“The Rise of Big Data, May/June 2013), Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger make the following comment, “In the third century B.C. the Library of Alexandria was believed to house the sum of human knowledge. Today, there is enough information in the world to give every person alive 320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria’s entire collection—an estimated 1200 exabytes’ worth, If this information were placed on CD’s and they were stacked up, the CD’s would form five separate piles that would all reach to the moon.” There is a famous Twilight Zone, “Time Enough to Last," where Burgess Meredith plays the role of a man who just wants to be left alone with all his books. He gets his wish. The problem is that he is nearly blind and as he is about to sate his desire, his glasses crack. Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger describe the advent of a condition which is a little like the effect global warming has had on weather and the environment. Shrinkage of polar ice caps have unleashed huge amounts of water which affect sea levels and inevitably in a kind of domino effect air and water currents (like El Nino), ultimately resulting in many of the explosive, tornadoes, tsunamis and severe tropical storms from Katrina to the recent debacle created by Sandy. In a short period of time the information explosion created primarily by digitalization, the internet and most importantly by what Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger term “datafication,” (in their words “a far broader activity: taking all aspects of life and turning them into data. Google’s augmented reality-glasses datafy the gaze. Twitter datafies stray thoughts. LinkedIn datafies professional networks.”) has reached tsunami levels. It’s as if we are drowning in information, with only soothsayers aka search engines like Google, who themselves are driven by mysterious algorithmic forces that few really understand, providing a beam of light. It’s Faust all over again. Mankind has sold its soul in his quest for ultimate knowledge. Will the price for the striving be a form of ignorance in which the brain, like old car radiators, boils over and finally quits? It’s a theme that Jorge Luis Borges developed in his famous story "The Library of Babel." You can know a lot about a little or a little about a lot. But it’s virtually impossible to know a lot about a lot.