As the Map Is Not the World, So Neither Is the Text the Idea

As the map is not the world, so neither is the text of a work the idea which created it. And saying it is does not make it so. None could refute this. Text is no more the idea of a work than the limestone shaped as prehistoric trilobites under the Washington avenue bridge are the creatures themselves. Text is, then, the fossil of an idea, a sort of map of the world of ideas which resided the living mind of its creator.

If our purpose in study of literature is to reassemble the original living ideas of those esteemed men and women who fashioned western civilization from the rude tribalism of Europe, then we must not satisfy ourselves with the mere possession and transmission of fossils, but we must rather view them as clues, indicators, notes on a page from which living music may be reassembled.

How to do this? How can a modern observer reassemble the living idea of a dead mind? How can a student today make their mind the mind of Shakespeare or Aquinas?

We can do this by placing ourselves into a situation where we understand the forces that brought these ideas to urgent and hurried life. We can do this by understanding the context that drove the necessity of these ideas, the seeds and needs of the mind who made the thing. Whom did Shakespeare read? What were the ongoing relationships between England and Venice during the time he wrote Merchant of Venice? What contemporary elements colored his literary palate?

Certainly the Greek classics. Certainly the Latin and old English classics. Dream of the Rood, Beowulf, Spencer. But also certainly Petrarch, and who knows whom else? There are elements of these and more scattered throughout his corpus. Piecing together these contextual references would surely help reawaken the mind of the author.

So, context. But context is given such short shrift on the Internet today, it isn't provided for in the structure of HTML and HTTP, which focus solely on presentation, internal structure and transmission. Work moving forward must establish context in a more thorough manner than a simple binary "linked-or-not-linked" sense.

This is the origin of my work in building a hypercontext system for textual analysis. More on that soon.