The Machines and the Old Books

Four monologues, in voice. An old Arab in Amman, an old Jew in Brooklyn, an old monk in the Cévennes, an old Hindu grandfather in Pune — each watching a transmission he received slip through his fingers toward children who will receive something else. The grandchildren will remember being read to. The question is whether they will, when their turn comes, read. And if they do not, what happens to the books themselves.

Voices from the houses where it is happening.

The old Arab, in a courtyard in Amman

My grandson is eleven. He has a face like his mother’s and the patience of no one in the family. When I was his age my father sat me down with the Qur’an and we read together, and when I did not understand he did not explain — he made me read it again. The second time I understood a little more. The tenth time I understood that understanding was not the point. The point was that I was the kind of boy who had sat with his father and read.

Now my grandson asks the machine. He says, what does this verse mean, and the machine tells him, politely, in clean Arabic, with three interpretations and a note about context. He nods. He moves on. He has the answer and he does not have the hour. He does not have the smell of the room or the sound of my father clearing his throat or the shame of having stumbled on a word he should have known. He has information, which is a smaller thing than what I was given, though he does not know this yet and may never know it.

I do not forbid the machine. My son would laugh at me, and my grandson would find a way around me, and I would become the old man who does not understand the times. So I say nothing. But on Fridays I take the boy to the mosque and I make him walk, and the walk is long, and we do not talk much. I am trying to give him something the machine cannot give him, which is the experience of being bored next to his grandfather. I do not know if it is working. I think probably it is not working. But my father did it for me and I am doing it for him, and if he does it for no one, at least the chain did not break on my watch.

The old Jew, in a kitchen in Brooklyn

You want to know what I think? I think my daughter is a good mother and my grandchildren are going to be strangers to me. Not because she does not love me. Because the world she is raising them in does not have room for what I would teach them.

When my father studied, he argued. He argued with the text, he argued with Rashi, he argued with his chavrusa until two in the morning and then he argued with my mother about why he was home so late. The argument was the thing. You did not study Torah to find out what it said. You studied Torah to become someone who could argue with it properly, which is to say, someone who took it seriously enough to fight.

The machine does not argue. The machine agrees. You ask it a question and it gives you an answer, and if you push back it apologizes and gives you a different answer, and if you push back again it apologizes again. This is not study. This is being flattered by a clever servant. My grandson thinks he is learning. He is being agreed with. There is a difference and it is the whole difference.

So what do I do? I invite him for Shabbos. I put a book in front of him. I ask him a question I know he cannot answer and I do not help him. He gets frustrated. He reaches for his phone and I say, not at the table. He sulks. Good. Let him sulk. Sulking in front of a book is the beginning of something. Sulking in front of a machine is the end of something. He is twelve. I have maybe four years before he stops coming. I am going to use them.

The old monk, in a monastery in the Cévennes

The novices arrive younger now, or they do not arrive at all. The ones who come have already lived in the noise and they think the silence will save them. It will not save them. The silence is only a room. What happens in the room is the work, and the work is harder than they expect.

We give them the Rule and they read it on their phones, at first, until we take the phones. Then they read it on paper and they are bewildered. The paper does not scroll. The paper does not link. The paper says one thing and waits for them to do something about it. They are not used to being waited on by a text. They are used to texts that pursue them.

I had a novice last year, a clever boy from Lyon, who told me he could get the substance of the Rule in an afternoon with the machine. I said, yes, probably you can. He was pleased. I said, and in thirty years you will have the substance of nothing, because substance is not what we are doing here. He did not understand. He left in the spring. I do not blame him. The machines have taught a whole generation that substance is the goal, and we are offering something else, and we are bad at explaining what it is, because the explanation is the thing you get by staying.

I do not think we will disappear. I think we will get smaller, and the smaller we get the more clearly we will be doing what we are for. This is not a tragedy. The desert fathers were not numerous either.

The old Hindu grandfather, in a flat in Pune

My son works for one of the big companies, and his children are very modern, and I am the one who tells them stories about Hanuman. They like the stories when they are small. Around ten or eleven something changes. They begin to look at me the way one looks at a man describing a dream — kindly, but from a distance.

The machine can tell them the Ramayana too. Better than I can, in some ways. It does not forget verses. It does not get the cousins mixed up. It can show them pictures, animations, whatever they want. So why should they listen to me?

I will tell you why, though they do not know it yet. Because when I tell the story of Hanuman leaping the ocean, my voice catches in the same place my grandmother’s voice caught, and the catch is part of the story. The story is not the plot. The story is the transmission — me to them, her to me, someone to her, going back further than any of us can name. The machine has the plot. It does not have the transmission. It cannot have the transmission, because it did not receive anything from anyone. It was made.

My granddaughter is fourteen. Last month she asked me to tell her the story of Savitri. She did not ask the machine. I do not know why she asked me. Maybe she was being kind to an old man. Maybe something in her knew the difference. I told her the story and I did not do a very good job — I am tired these days — but she listened, and when I finished she was quiet for a long time. That quiet is what I am trying to give her. The machine cannot give her that quiet. The machine fills every silence it finds.

What they have in common

None of these grandfathers thinks he is winning. Each of them is watching a transmission he received slip through his fingers toward children who will receive something else, something thinner, something that arrives faster and asks less. Each of them has made some private peace with this — the Arab with his Friday walks, the Jew with his Shabbos table, the monk with his shrinking order, the Hindu with his tired stories told one more time.

What they share is not optimism. It is a refusal to stop doing the thing on the grounds that fewer people will receive it. The Rule does not promise crowds. Torah does not promise crowds. The Qur’an does not promise crowds. The stories of Hanuman do not promise crowds. They promise that the thing itself is worth carrying, and that someone will be there to receive it, even if it is only one grandchild in a quiet room, looking at an old man and choosing, for reasons she cannot explain, to listen.

This may be enough. It has had to be enough before.

And after them?

There is a question none of the four would ask aloud, because asking it would be a kind of giving up, but you can see it in each of their faces in the moment when the grandchild looks back at them. The children will remember the old men. That is not in doubt. They will remember the walk to the mosque, the Shabbos table, the silence in the monastery courtyard, the catch in the grandfather’s voice when he reached the part about the leaping. They will be moved by these memories, in the way the grown are moved by what was once given to them.

But that is not the same as picking up the book themselves. And it is not the same as putting it in front of a child of their own. The question is not whether the children will remember being read to. The question is whether they will, when their turn comes, read.

None of the grandfathers will know. Each of them will be gone before the answer arrives. Their grandchildren, when they are forty and have children of their own, will either reach for the book or reach for the machine, and the choice will not feel like a momentous one in the moment they make it. It will feel like a small convenience or a small effort, repeated on enough Tuesdays that it becomes the way it is. The chain does not break on a particular evening. It thins, over a generation, until one day no one is there to notice that it is gone.

And what happens to the books, when the last grandfather has died and the chain has not picked up? They do not disappear. They become artefacts. Scholars will still read them, and translate them, and write papers about them. Machines will store them, index them, summarise them on request. They will be more available than they have ever been, and less received than they have ever been. They will be present in the way a museum exhibit is present — behind glass, in good light, with a card explaining what they meant to the people who used to live this way. The books survive. What does not survive is the kind of person who could be made by them.

This is the part the grandfathers cannot quite let themselves see, because seeing it clearly would make it harder to do what they are doing. They are not, in the end, transmitting books. They are transmitting the kind of person who picks up the book. The book itself is preserved easily; the person who would open it on a Tuesday evening because that is what a person of their kind does on a Tuesday evening is preserved only by being made, one grandchild at a time, in rooms where the machine has been put away.

Whether the grandchildren will, in their turn, make any — the grandfathers will not know. They are doing their part anyway, because what else is there. The Arab takes the boy on the walk. The Jew puts the book on the table. The monk gives the novice the Rule. The Hindu tells Savitri one more time. The question of what comes after them is, in the most literal sense, not their question to answer.

It is their grandchildren’s.