"Joel Miller opens his new book, The Idea Machine, with this famous scene from The Confessions because it sparked his own epiphany. Not a spiritual conversion, mind. What struck Miller during his recent reread was how Augustine marked his place with his finger. This seemingly unremarkable detail - a move any reader has made countless times - forced Miller to reevaluate books as not simply a vessel for ideas, but as history's most successful "information technology.""
"Opening the book at random, his eyes fell upon Romans 13: "Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." "I had no wish to read further, nor was there need," Augustine wrote."
Augustine lived a youthful life of pride, lust, and petty sin before entering a period of searching about good and evil that moved him toward Christianity. While reflecting in a garden he heard a child sing "Take up and read; take up and read," which he treated as a sign and opened to Paul’s letters. A passage from Romans convinced him and he marked his place with "a finger between the leaves." The physical act of marking crystallized the book’s role as a persistent external memory. Books thus operate as an information technology that stores, transmits, and interfaces with human thought across time.
Read at Big Think
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