What things remember?
Sweet Sappho, lady of fragments, there’s so little left. A few lines saved by early plagiarists. A few scraps of papyrus balled up to bulk the scraped hearts of lesser mummies. Your breath pulled from the mouths of crocodiles. It’s a mistake to think of digital technology as lasting. There is the complication of reading digits: they are by nature in code, and codes are easily lost. You need a special machine, running a special protocol to extract meaning from the code. For books and papers, the only code we must know is the unavoidable one: the language and the alphabet itself. Listen: Palamedes made the alphabet from lines of cranes against the sky at evening. It’s that fragile. Scraps of papyrus and bits of clay tablets are more readable fragments of computer tape, written in an obsolete language, to be read on an outdated computer, with an unknown operating system. We have technical working notes — ink on paper — from Galileo and Newton, but not Sanger and Feynman, who worked on c
