SNP’s word of the day: Palimpsest

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Word: Palimpsest

Usage: “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Definition: A piece of paper, parchment, canvas or other manuscript that has been erased and overwritten, often still bearing traces of the original. From Ancient Greek for “scraped again.”

You should know it because: For a time it seemed that computers had made it all too easy to erase our histories, to revert to a tabula rasa whenever we chose, to deny the too-recent past. Truth is, the Internet never forgets. Sometimes when I am very anxious I think I will delete my Facebook; I can’t retrieve five or six years of life decisions from their databases, though. On Twitter, you can only see up to 3,200 tweets of yours at a time, but under that layer are 3,200 previous tweets, and you’re kidding if you think they’ve disappeared. And Google Cache, which stores earlier versions of web pages, is exactly a virtual palimpsest.

The ancient palimpsests of Egypt and Greece were overwritten so that you could only read the top layer, the way Twitter goes now. But in the 19th century, writers who wanted to conserve paper began recycling and writing in two layers, in opposite directions, so you could read both if you really strained. This was called “cross-writing,” and as C.S. Lewis once said, it made for cross reading. Probably so, but I love this idea. It makes me think of my late favourite artist Cy Twombly’s scratched-out and re-scribbled paintings, or of the tattoos I’ve seen recently, in which old mistakes are only loosely and partially covered up, creating intelligible layers of history and ink.

And all of this only mirrors our own minds, which constantly delete the old information to make room for the new. It’s like some guy named Thomas de Quincey wrote in 1845: “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” As this is the last last last word in my word-of-the-day thing here (tear), you’ve likely forgotten some of the earliest ones so you can remember this. Or so you think. But if you get a fancy archaeologist to shine an ultraviolet light on your brain, I bet the traces are still there, forever.

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