The Copyist

Brother Inacio had copied manuscripts for the better part of his life, and he had believed, until quite recently, that he was engaged in the most durable of human enterprises. Each letter he inscribed was an act of preservation, a small defiance of oblivion; the words of the ancients passed through his hand as through a narrow gate, and he was their humble guardian, ensuring their passage into a future he would not live to see.

Then the press had come to the city, and everything he understood about permanence had quietly inverted. A machine of screws and inked type could now produce in a single afternoon what had cost him months of aching devotion. The abbot, ever practical, spoke of the press with undisguised enthusiasm: so many books, so cheaply, so fast. Inacio nodded and said nothing, but in the privacy of the scriptorium he felt the ground of his vocation dissolving beneath him.

It was not envy, exactly, that troubled him, though he was honest enough to admit that envy played its part. It was something more disquieting: the suspicion that the very virtues he had cultivated over a lifetime, his patience, his precision, his willingness to spend a week on a single illuminated capital, had been rendered not merely obsolete but faintly absurd. The machine did not need to be patient. It did not need to love the text. It reproduced with perfect indifference, and its indifference was, apparently, a kind of freedom.

And yet, turning the matter over in the long silences of his labour, Inacio began to suspect that something would be lost that the press could neither measure nor mourn. When he copied a text, he read it slowly, with his whole body; the words entered him and were changed, minutely, by their passage. His errors, his hesitations, even the tremor of his aging hand were a record of a mind meeting a meaning. The printed page bore no such witness. It was flawless, and therefore, in a sense he could not quite articulate, empty.

He did not oppose the press. He was too old, and too devout in his obedience, to imagine that his misgivings weighed anything against the manifest good of books made plentiful. A thousand minds would now read what once only a fortunate few could hold. He knew this was a blessing, and he blessed it.

But on the evening he completed his final manuscript, laying down his pen with hands that would take up no other, he permitted himself a single, unmonastic pride. He had not merely reproduced these words. He had kept vigil over them. He had loved them one at a time, slowly, imperfectly, as the machine, for all its miraculous fecundity, would never learn to do.