( The revival of knowledge during the Rennaisance, the legacy of Vannevar Bush’s Hyperlinks, and Maria Popova’s “Brain Pickings”)

(Preface: Three events come together in this essay: Renaissance, hyperlinks, and the story of the birth of a weekly online bulletin of wisdom. Each event is related to the other, not in any direct causal manner, but at the same time, they couldn’t have happened in the chronological sequence they actually did, if one event hadn’t preceded the other. The story of civilization has always been like that. Historians have been able to intuit progress when they choose to align events in a linear manner, but, a slight change in the angle of the analyzing lens can often reveal a different story; a story not necessarily propelled by the inexorable laws of causation, but by fortuitous events that are mysteriously linked to each other.)

The Renaissance of fifteenth-century Europe was neither an accident nor an event caused by sudden social upheavals. From the tenth century onwards, the dark ages had descended on Europe. For five troubled centuries, Europe was engulfed in Internecine warfare, the vindictive crusades against the Muslims, lack of cohesive leadership, deterioration in moral values, the rise in superstitious beliefs, dimming of human curiosity, and above all a collective amnesia of accumulated knowledge and wisdom of ages, reached its nadir. Books and libraries were forgotten and relegated to the dusty corners of many inconspicuous monasteries scattered across Europe. When the fifteenth century opened, Europe was ripe for a change after centuries of forgetting and darkness. A few bold thinkers and philosophers like Plutarch and Thomas of Aquinas managed to break the stranglehold of conservatism and sought solace in ancient wisdom. Greek and Latin tongues found a revival in their writings, and gradually a steady series of patient monks inspired by the new wave of intellectual liberty began to visit dilapidated monasteries, abandoned and dusty libraries, and private collections to either buy, steal or copy manuscripts that lay buried there. Even at this distance, we can picture in our mind’s eye those thin, emaciated, and single-minded monks, riding on weak and weary horses, in search of manuscripts, visiting decrepit monasteries, haggling with suspicious priests to gain access to its forgotten corners and surreptitiously copy fading parchments in the darkness of the night. It was a noble endeavor indeed, and one that perhaps saved the western civilization from passing away into oblivion. Stephen Greenblatt in his 2012 Pulitzer winning book “The Swerve: How the world became modern”, beautifully describes the tale of one such book by Greek philosopher Lucretius “On the nature of things”, and how that book was retrieved by sheer chance from a vault by a Papal messenger and ardent book lover Poggio Bracciloni. Greenblatt’s fascinating book is a must-read to understand the origins of the renaissance. The rediscovery of ancient books and wisdom along with the invention of the printing press sparked a revolution that reverberated for four centuries. Not until the emergence of the World wide web in the latter half of the Twentieth-century did the texture of how people navigated and consumed knowledge change. And when it did, it ushered an age of access to unlimited information, but not without its curses too.

The world wide web was born to meet the need of assembling vast quantities of information in a manner easy to access. With knowledge becoming more and more specialized and footnotes, explanatory material, cross-references, bibliographies, and credits proliferating, it was necessary to link different parts of information in a manner that interested readers can conveniently navigate from one context to another. Revising and updating books to meet the rate and volume of change in the sciences, arts, and humanities wasn’t practical or feasible. There rose a need for a new tool, a new approach to help us make the connections, and more importantly, to help us think. Vannevar Bush, a pioneer of modern distributed computing, wrote an epochal article in 1945 titled “ As we may think”. It appeared in the Atlantic Monthly magazine and was later published in his book “Endless horizons”. This article laid down rudiments on how knowledge in the non-physical format can be conveniently linked and accesses. Bush called his thought experiment- the hyperlink. The foundation of the hyperlink was based on how the human brain worked, hopping from one association to another, stringing together a coherent picture of the subject, seemingly without much effort. Bush was wise enough to know it was impossible to clone the human brain, he was confident that, like the neural connections, the vast of information available can be somehow linked to making knowledge more easily accessible. In his beautifully written article, Bush thought aloud on this possibility that cross-referencing and “linking” may someday become a reality in the world of computing. Decades later Ben Schneiderman from the University of Maryland, and Tim Berner lee would pick up this thread and convert Bush’s singular insight into reality in the HyperText markup language. They called the feature a “Hyperlink”, a link on a webpage that could help the user navigate with ease to another topic within the same page or any other on the internet. For those of us in software, this article by Vannevar Bush is a must-read. It is one of the first papers on the possibilities of digital transformation.

With the World wide web now the defacto standard for information dissemination across the globe, and the information highway on overdrive, the twenty-first century is ripe for another intellectual renaissance. Unlike the European renaissance, this one will not emerge from a dark age but will have to deliver us from a different kind of ignorance, perhaps more insidious than before. And that is due to the prolific availability of raw information on the internet without corresponding wisdom. News, facts, and stories abound in the digital media; and, in all this cacophony of abundant information, what is slowly disappearing are the sane voices of the past who spoke of timeless wisdom. The internet has made the availability of news, sensational stories, and rumors ubiquitous. Where news was once localized within a community of a town, and rarely spread beyond specific geographic boundaries, is now, within minutes or seconds globally available. Time and again in the twenty-first century we are reminded that bombarding oneself with raw information without the yeast of wisdom is not only psychologically harmful but existentially disastrous. Blogs are aplenty. Anyone who wishes to comment, observe or opine has free access to writing tools, and the wherewithal to disseminate their musings. And on the other hand, it is equally true, as readers and consumers of knowledge, that our attention spans and effort are becoming as fleeting as the passing wind, and each day, more of what we read is lost in the sheer volume of noise generated. Each era will and must have its renaissance when people find meaning in their past voices and will attempt to adapt themselves to the present in the light of the past. In Indian Philosophy, there are two words that indicate this state: Shruti and Smriti. Shruti points to the value systems that don’t change over time, and Smriti indicates the contemporary trends, tools, and techniques. Shruti represents the basic humanism of humanity, and Smriti the changes in society, lifestyle, and culture. The readjustment and the balance between these two is often the essence of any renaissance.

Maria Popova’s website “Brainpickings.org” is perhaps the best illustration of how to gather the wisdom of the past available in digitized format and blend it with the present. Through Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has carved out a channel to allow the insights and wisdom of thinkers, artists, and scientists – past and present to unfold themselves at the reader’s pace through navigable links. A single weekly edition of Popova’s blog can keep us interested and riveted for hours. Like a mystery hunt, she provides clues in the form of embedded links to each idea or story on her web page, dragging an excited reader into a vast labyrinth of knowledge laced with wisdom. The story of Maria, her passion for knowledge, and her wonderful effort to maintain such a blog as her full-time profession is both fascinating and worth recounting. Born in iron curtained Bulgaria to a father who was a Salesman at Apple, and a mother who studied library science, Maria’s early education wasn’t compromised. She studied at an American school in Bulgaria. It was, however, from her paternal grandfather, she learned the art, beauty, and richness of reading eclectically. Every evening, her grandfather would pull out at random a volume of the encyclopedia, and read few pages from it, creating in the young girl’s mind a deep interest in diverse areas of knowledge. She was made aware at an early age that individual strands of knowledge are useless unless one can connect it to the whole. After high school, she resumed her education in America at the University of Pennsylvania. Formal education wasn’t her preference, and she disliked the vocation aim of a college education system that stressed only professional skills to make a living. To relieve the mechanical cadence and meaningless tedium of her college work, she joined a small advertisement company to escape the routine college work, try and sort her life out, and make some money. It was during this period, she conceived the idea of creating a short mailer each week, encapsulating thoughts and ideas from different fields of human endeavor, and sharing it initially with just seven of her colleagues at work, primarily to help inspire their creativity. In creating these short emails, Maria’s autodidactism came in handy. Every week she was able to pull out and link together ideas from science, art, philosophy, and literature that glowed with intellectual effervescence. Her co-workers loved her emails, and they heartily supported her endeavor by promoting it among their friends and acquaintances. Slowly, Maria’s informal effort started flowing to an expanded circle of recipients. This was in 2006. By 2009, Maria was clear that this is what she wanted to do as a full-time profession – help bring knowledge and wisdom together in short capsules. To achieve this end in a more professional manner, she enrolled herself for a short course on web designing to learn the trade of constructing websites and quickly designed her own portal – which she aptly named “brain pickings”. From a very modest beginning, within a decade, brainpickings.org has grown to an estimated 7 million subscribers worldwide and Maria Popova has come to be hailed as the renaissance lady of the century. Her humanistic emails each week to millions of her subscribers are the balm for souls that are tired of the ceaseless and meaningless noise outside, and crave meaningful reading material and soothing wisdom. Maria calls her blog a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness”. There is nothing stereotypical about her blog. Music, painting, sciences humanism, criticism, environment, ethics, mysticism – all areas of human existence finds a place in her essays. And true to the spirit of the internet, her essays are prolifically hyperlinked. A reader is free to take a detour into any of the pathways for deeper exploration of a subject or can sequentially read one essay after another. The choice is ours. Once in a while, Maria illuminates a paragraph with her own insights, other than that the readers are left on their own to find their flowers in the bouquet of ideas.

Maria Popova is only 36 years old, and Brain pickings is the gold standard for how a new-age virtual library should look like. This was the agenda of the renaissance – to collect the wisdom of the ages in libraries and revive the spirit of reading and learning. For this age and time, however, the internet is our repository, and what we put out there will trigger the humanistic revival – a sore need of the hour, when so much empty rhetoric and meaningless dialogues fill much of our public and private discourses. Maria Popova defines the vision for Brainpickings.org in one simple sentence: “I want to build a new framework for what information matters..” I have been a regular reader of Brain pickings for many years now. Sometimes, I get lost in it for hours moving from one link to another, deeper and deeper into a journey of self-exploration. I would start off with a picture of a Da Vinci painting on the blog, and from there follow the thoughtful links provided into esoteric subjects. The layout and design of the website are simple, unpretentious, and gives prominence to the matter presented. It is a fascinating experience.

For those who like to think, read and introspect, pls do subscribe to Brain Pickings.

https://www.brainpickings.org/

God bless…

yours in mortality,

Bala