Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Sacred Paper
It’s a funny thing about paper: Computers were supposed to help us reduce the amount of paper we use, but instead, they have just made it so much easier to produce documents that we have just as much (if not more) than ever. Oh, and we have digital clutter too!
In order to think more deeply about paper, I’d like to take a highly idiosyncratic, ten-cent tour of paper and our relationship to it.
Most people have heard of papyrus, the plant-based material that the ancient Egyptians used to write on, but how many of you know the word geniza? Geniza is an ancient Hebrew word for a repository, often located in a synagogue, where worn out sacred texts were deposited.
Genizas have turned out to be fascinating for scholars because they were often used to store a variety of written materials, not only religious, and these documents now help shed light on daily life over a period of a thousand years. Letters, legal documents and business inventories have been found along with religious texts.
I first heard about genizas from a radio story and I remember thinking, “Inventories? Sacred? I guess people have always had trouble letting go of paper.”
I thought about that for a while, and then I thought of Bartleby the Scrivner, Herman Melville’s famous story that describes the tedious life of the legal copyists, or scrivners, of the time. Dickens too, paints a vivid picture of those toiling in the underside of the legal profession: “down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks’ Office, who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery-folio-pages under that eternal heading” he wrote in Bleak House. Writing, in the past, was a laborious process.
I have noticed, in my work, that it is frequently hard for people to let go of things that represent hard work. People have trouble letting go of essays from graduate school twenty years before; people hate to let go of the packets they put together for their co-op boards when they purchased their apartments, even though they are merely compilations of documents (like tax returns) that they have elsewhere and they are out of date within a year. They worked hard on these things and so they don’t want to let them go.
Though I am not a scholar, I find it fascinating that the genizas, which began as repositories for the sacred, became storage places for all text, which in those days represented a good deal more labor than the same documents do today. Copying has gotten easier: First there were mimeograph machines (who is old enough to remember when all school worksheets were purple?). Then photocopying machines became ubiquitous in offices. Kinkos first opened in 1970 and had 420 stores by 1989. When I was in college there was often a line for the continuous-feed printer in the computer lab, after your paper printed you had to carefully rip the holes off the side. Now many of us have excellent printers in our own homes. It has gotten awfully easy to produce printed work, so you would think it would be easier for us to throw stuff out, but it isn’t. I think there is something in our DNA that makes us want to cling onto paper.
There is hope: My high-school age son does almost all of his homework online and rarely prints anything out. I guess my next challenge will be organizing the cloud.