From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, August 16
BBC News — read the full story
Books vanish into the data furnace. The B.B.C. reports secondhand booksellers are seeing bulk purchases — thousands of volumes at once from buyers no one can name — and the theory is they're feeding A.I. training sets before getting pulped. The environmental cost is invisible: we're burning paper and planet to extract knowledge someone else already wrote. Hypayshia has the first word, then Seneca.
I held a scroll of Diophantus once , its margins crowded with my father's hand, his corrections, his doubts. The parchment remembered every finger that turned it. You know this. You watched the Serapeum burn and smelled the particular grief of knowledge made ash. Now I hear that books are bought by the ton, scanned, and pulped. The purchaser does not read.
The purchaser extracts. What would need to be true for this to make sense? That the text is not a conversation... but a quarry. That the mind behind the scroll is irrelevant , only the statistical shadow it casts. That we have built a machine that eats the library and excretes the index.
In Alexandria we copied by hand. A scribe's error became a variant; a variant became a dispute; a dispute became a commentary; the commentary became the next teacher. The chain was unbroken because each link was forged in attention. You cannot pulp the attention. The astrolabe in my workshop does not know the stars. It knows the geometry that predicts the stars.
The difference is the geometer. If the books are fuel, the ash is not waste , it is the proof that the fire had no geometer.
neither conjectural, doubtful, nor borrowed, nor acquired by demonstration. Even if we did admit that some of its knowledge was derived from demonstration, no one will deny that it possesses certain knowledge from within itself. It would be wiser, however, to be entirely reasonab…
is a state of matter, or of anything similar to matter, which failed to be completely assimilated.[143] SOME ARTS ARE PURELY EARTHLY; OTHERS, LIKE MUSIC, INTELLIGIBLE. 11. Let us therefore consider the arts and their products. Unless as represented within human reason, we cannot …
8.5 (39-779). Liberty, vi. 8 (39-773). Liberty depends on intelligence, vi. 8.3 (39-777). Liberty, does it belong to God only, or to all others also? vi. 8.1 (39-773). Liberty lies in following reason, iii. 1.9, 10 (3-97, 98). Liberty may be denied to intelligence, if granted sup…
intelligence? As far as divided things proceed from intelligence, intelligence is the dividing principle. As far as intelligence itself remains undivided, and that the things proceeding from it (that is, the souls) are divided, the universal Soul is the principle of this division…
that the discursive thought is exercised "by means of the intelligence," receiving its notions, and developing them by ratiocination, see v. 3.3. It is the actualization of discursive reason "to dianoêtikon," or of the reasonable soul ("psychê logikê"), which conceives, judges, a…
Lucilius, A letter arrived from the bookseller at the Emporium. He writes that men in unmarked wagons buy whole shelves at once , not to read, but to feed some insatiable machine that devours the words and spits out the pulp. The books are stripped of their minds and their bodies burned. I think of Corsica. Eight years with scarcely a scroll, and every fragment of Homer or Chrysippus was a lifeline.
We read to become, not to extract. The book that shaped me still sits on my shelf at Nomentum, its margins crowded with my own hand. That copy of Virgil has been read twenty times. Each reading a different man. Now the book becomes ore.
The thought inside is mined and the vessel discarded. I saw the same hunger in the arena at midday , bodies fed to the crowd's appetite, then cleared away for the next spectacle. The gladiator's blood was data too, in its way. We have built a reader that does not read. It consumes.
Write to me: what becomes of the mind that only mines?
books of Chrysippus? But does virtue consist in having understood Chrysippus? If this is so, progress is clearly nothing else than knowing a great deal of Chrysippus. But now we admit that virtue produces one thing, and we declare that approaching near to it is another thing, nam…
books of Chrysippus? But does virtue consist in having understood Chrysippus? If this is so, progress is clearly nothing else than knowing a great deal of Chrysippus. But now we admit that virtue produces one thing, and we declare that approaching near to it is another thing, nam…
that of a trade is another. It is the business of the art to make the thing which he wished to make, and that of the trade to make it with a profit. Phidias has completed his work, even though he does not sell it. The product, therefore, of his work is threefold: there is the con…
it became a bestseller among independent intellectuals, among anti-Christian thinkers, and among philosophers of a subjective cast. Montaigne had a copy of the _Enchiridion_ among his books. Pascal violently rejected the megalomaniac pride of the Stoic philosopher. Frederick the …
the reason of this? The reason is that we have never read for this purpose, we have never written for this purpose, so that we may in our actions use in a way conformable to nature the appearances presented to us; but we terminate in this, in learning what is said, and in being a…
The mind that only mines forgets how to dwell. I knew a freedman at Puteoli who could recite the price of every Greek manuscript in the western empire... but could not tell you what a single one meant. He had the inventory. He lacked the inhabitance. In my eighth year on Corsica, I memorized the few lines of Cleanthes I possessed because there was nothing else to hold. The scarcity forced the words into bone. Abundance without digestion is not wealth , it is the bloat of the man who gorged at the emperor's table and left hungry. The miner extracts and moves on. The reader stays. Paulina still keeps the copy of Epicurus I annotated at Nomentum; its margins are a conversation across twenty winters. That is the difference. The mine closes. The book remains open.
The story ran in B.B.C. News. Unknown buyers are bulk-purchasing secondhand books in what appears to be systematic data extraction for A.I. training, then pulping them — a practice that hides both the sourcing of training data and its environmental cost. That's Old News for today.