It was at the end of the 4th millennium, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, on the tablets.
It was on clay and on everything malleable, on everything that could receive an inscription – this is how writing began, dug out, engraved with cuneiform characters. Then from shape it became drawing, from drawing it became signs and symbols recorded on parchments, where the scribes copied contracts and commercial exchanges. He continued on papyrus, more flexible and finer, easier to transport. It extended in length on the volumen, parchment rolled up on itself, to form codes thanks to the invention of binding sheets in notebooks.
He began to leaf through, organize himself, copy himself. It was read, alone at home, leafing through the pages, or in groups, in assemblies and places of prayer to listen to stories or sing psalms. And with a gesture, head bowed, it was rounded, wrapped, refined and extended, from contracts to letters, from letters to stories, from stories to myths, from myths to epics.
It was passed on from city to city, by messengers, from season to season, and from generation to generation, parent to child, teacher to disciple. We have unrolled the parchments, we have consulted them, we have read them, we have placed them in large libraries, we have carried them by boat, on the back of camel, on the back of donkey or on horseback, in endless caravans across continents and eras.
Rome replaced Athens; Christianity prevailed over paganism and sacred words had to be recorded. Animal skin codes were expensive; and instead of making new ones, they preferred to rewrite on them, deleting the previous writings that had become obsolete or illicit: thus the palimpsests were born on which the copyist monks scratched and rubbed the nibs, sometimes several times, to engrave the psalms and sacred texts .
And one fine day, in a workshop in Mainz, a man perfected a new process, thanks to a press that made it possible to reproduce the shape of previously inked metal characters. The first book was printed and the Gutenberg Bible was born in the year of grace 1454.
It was then his hour of glory. All over the world people started writing. It was no longer the prerogative of monks, or of a caste in the Han dynasty, during which only a body of scholars had the right to copy highly learned ideograms to which the majority had no access.
Suddenly, we saw the birth of a new people, that of people who began to write and who called themselves: writers. These people have created books, sometimes out of history, sometimes out of their minds, sometimes out of their pure imagination. And these books have spread all over the world, from China to Russia to the borders of the Americas. And the whole world started reading.
Gradually, from century to century, writing has become popular, it has become more democratic, shared by all through newspapers, soap operas and popular novels, contracts and civil codes. And it spread so much that sometimes it was decided to burn the books and their authors because they spread unspoken truths, threatened power with their thoughts, defied order and widely spread their revolutionary ideas through their texts. And the time came for the hunt for writing, from the Inquisition to the book burnings of the last world war.
But one day in 1936, a strange man named Alan Turing developed a strange machine designed to calculate and encrypt. A few decades later, this car entered homes. And writing has become portable, it has turned into electronic language, into instant messages, into posts and statuses, into notifications. The act of writing itself has changed. Styli, pens and quills were abandoned; we came up with keys that we started banging on. We scrolled, we passed, we clicked from link to link, we clicked again and so on, in an endless flow of writing and reading, we scrolled, we leafed through the texts on the immensity of the Web, which has never stopped growing.
A dizzying freedom took possession of the whole Earth which began to write, always, at all hours of the day and night, to everyone. And one man decided that human beings should not just write, but write to each other, and he created social networks. And everyone doubled down on their writings, anywhere, anytime, about anything, to anyone. People wrote so much that they didn’t even have time to read, because they were interested in what they wrote more than anything else in the world, and soon books disappeared, or they became heirlooms, decorative items like old parchments, and writers too, who they could only be visited at the Grévin Museum.
It was on the internet and anything could be recorded; and digital kept track of it.
It was the beginning of the third millennium, and it was worldwide. Then writing became immortal.
