Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

of the centennial was Lee Iacocca, who began to construct a cult of personality that would have given Stalin hives. Thus, to Time’s annoyance and disbelief, I titled my piece, “The Statue of Iacocca.”

“You can’t write this,” they said. But they had engaged the sacred principle, and my answer could only have been, as it was, “Yes, I can.”

No story, no money. I was quite fired. Later, when it became the fashion for Hollywood studios to acquire the copyright of a work and then grant back the publishing rights, my insistence upon retaining the copyright allowed me to watch lucrative film deals collapse. Whereas one cannot control the end product of thousands of people making a movie, one can control every word on the page, something that, beyond saving one’s soul, as it does, steadies civilization.

In the fact of copyright the power of law is enlisted in this most important principle that otherwise would be subject to violation at will. No corporation or combine, no matter how great, can breach this wall with impunity. Nor hostile individuals or organized groups. One can write parodies at will, and make fair use, but even the president of the United States cannot legitimately change so much as an apostrophe in a work under copyright. This is far more important and consequential than money, and the shield behind which it finds protection is the copyright that some might abolish for the sake of an ill-defined collectivist ideology that is not much more than a poorly wrought and self-indulgent excuse for downloading music and movies without charge.

Given that so many of these people are purposefully ignorant of any but a communal approach, and that they rank individual authorship below collaboration, it is not surprising that they view the rights of authorship, as these have been understood for most of our history, not as encouraging of civilization but as a discouragement, as in the case of a monopoly, a word they often use to describe copyright. My own experience with editors who have been educated to this point of view has taught me that they are at first uncomprehending, then surprised, then puzzled, and then repelled by the insistence of an author that, if something goes out under his name, he should have the final cut. I have been fighting over commas all my life. There are some people who cannot appreciate music in a minor key, who cannot fall in love, who cannot understand beauty, who cannot or dare not travel beyond the very limited realms of human reason. And there are some who cannot understand the almost insensible complexion of a phrase that is capable of transforming history. If we are in fact to sense those great and subtle signals, as individuals and as a people, we must remain always attentive to the particularities of language. Even in recipes. Even in signs scrawled on parking meters. And especially in literature and public discourse.

The use of one word as opposed to another; the truncation or elongation of a sentence; the placement of a comma; a sense of syllables, sound, and elision…these elements arranged ineffably are what make a text unique, inimitable, and great, and although they can be possessed by all the world, first privileges must go to the author as their creator and guardian.

In the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, John C. Briggs, professor of English at the University of California, supplies for comparison Seward’s proposal for and then Lincoln’s own closing of his first inaugural address.

Seward:

I close. We are not [,] we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves pass through all our hearts and all the hearts in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

And Lincoln:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will let swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.22

While Lincoln’s version is partly the result of a collaboration, and, as a public document, not subject to copyright, it shows the importance of authorial control, in this case accomplished not by copyright but by being the president of the United States while leading the nation through the greatest crisis in its history. Without such authority over one’s works, an ordinary mortal could not have confidence that the second paragraph, a work of genius, would not be transformed into the first.

The changes made by Lincoln, inconsequential to some, are those that can carry the weight of nations and comfort grieving souls. They can last lifelong, their retention in memory assured by their retention in the heart. They are worth more than great empires, enterprises, and temporal victories of every sort. That is the value added, even if some have no capacity to see it.

The principle applies equally to the great and to the prosaic. Much more prosaically, once, an editor half my age substituted the word pricey for expensive (or, perhaps, costly: I don’t really remember). I changed it back, and met resistance. I then explained that I don’t use the word pricey, that it’s the kind of word that may be suitable for Crocodile Dundee but sticks out of a sentence and stops a reader cold, that it sounds cutesy even if it isn’t, that it reminds me of the phrase palsy-walsy, which I also do not use, and that I