Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

was invented by sheep.]…hopes to help frustrated writers realize their potential…. Members can help one another overcome writer’s block” (if you have writer’s block you should heed it as you would heed a cobra), and the company has an employee who (Tolstoy would have appreciated this) “makes the final call in disagreements between writers or helps moderate brainstorming sessions.”103

Such stunning mental dependency was often evident in the voluminous reaction to my single editorial piece, and may have been inspired there from the top down, by the leader of the movement, Lawrence Lessig, who is also and not coincidentally a passionate advocate of “remix,” or, in my terminology, Legos.™ Taking a work that someone else has made, chopping it up, and rearranging it, perhaps adding or subtracting elements according to whim, is a favored “art” form of a generation weaned on push-button alternate endings and Microsoft’s “cut and paste.” Lessig writes, “Helprin barely cites anyone…. Helprin doesn’t bother with what others have written…. Now between…pure remix…and Helprin’s…pure Helprin…which is more respectful of authorship?”104 It’s one thing to learn from others, but another to copy them. In another context, he is what old-fashioned people might call careless about aesthetic standards and the integrity of a work, when he writes: “How better to revive a 30-year-old series than by enlisting armies of kids to make content interesting again?”105 That might be an interesting project for Star Wars, the thirty-year-old series to which he refers, but not for War and Peace, Dubliners, or A River Runs Through It. One is allowed to do it, in fact, with War and Peace but not with A River Runs Through It, because the latter is protected by copyright. When its copyright expires, A River Runs Through It could be “remixed” into a transvestite musical with dolphins. That might be a lot of fun, but perhaps it wouldn’t have been so much fun for Norman Maclean and those, strangers and otherwise, who hold him dear. Which is, of course, one of the many arguments for extending copyright.

If I am to understand it correctly, part of the view of, and common to, the movement I oppose is the idea that one can respect and/or actually achieve authorship by rearranging the works of others. And how do the others achieve authorship? By melding and rearranging the works of other others. But authorship is something entirely different. It is an adventure of sorts, a dangerous and risky thing that in its essence must depart from authority and is based not upon a compilation of previous works but on observation and what follows ineffably in the mind and heart of the observer. Since the beginnings of civilization this has distinguished almost everything worthwhile that has ever been written. It is not following the “remixing” mole into his suffocating tunnel, but, rather, standing on the cliff ’s edge above the sea, in the sun and the open air, on your own. There is no machine that can change this.

CHAPTER 5

PROPERTY AS A COEFFICIENT OF LIBERTY

Property Is Not Antithetical to Virtue

At age fourteen, on a cheap three-speed Robin Hood bicycle that my father inexplicably (to me) provided as a replacement for a magnificent English touring cycle, the color of a Weimaraner, that I had left to rust in the rain, I set out on a trip across most of the country. A great deal happened in those months: I was not many miles away from Ernest Hemingway on a sunny July morning in Idaho at the instant of his death; in the lobby of an office building in Arizona, Barry Goldwater informed me that I was not permitted to carry the hunting knife that hung from my belt; and with what now seems like a remarkably small number of other visitors to Zion National Park, I listened to a park ranger’s radio as the Berlin Wall crisis unfolded. In regard to copyright, property, and decency, the pertinent incident occurred in a field in Iowa.

As a child roaming sparsely inhabited land along the Hudson in a paradise that is now carpeted with condominia and conference centers, I had gotten into the habit of eating the fruit, berries, or other crops that in various seasons would easily come to hand, whether in the wild or at the edge of fields or gardens. Never did it occur to me that these apples, peaches, pears, corn, tomatoes, berries, watercress, and grapes were anything but a gift of nature and the common property of mankind.

No longer exactly a child, I halted my bike by the side of a cornfield on a hot day in Iowa to drink from my canteen. I was at the edge of thousands of acres. You couldn’t see the end of it, and the stalks, as dense as a Vietnamese bamboo forest, were heavy with young corn, probably animal corn. I helped myself to an ear, and, after shucking it, began to eat. Then appeared the farmer, as if from nowhere, as irate as Al Sharpton. Still eating, I wondered why he was agitated. Forty-eight years ago, it went roughly like this:

“Where’d you get that corn?” he asked, throat tight.

I didn’t lie, and say that I had bought it at Gristedes on Lexington Avenue, but instead made a kind of hitchhiker’s gesture, pointing backward with my thumb at the thick green front of corn stalks. I wasn’t able to say anything anyway, as my mouth was full.

“That’s my corn. You have no right to take it. You stole it from me.”

“What?” I said. “One ear of corn?” After all, he knew and I knew that there were thousands of acres of corn, and probably tens or scores or hundreds of millions of ears of corn, and that neither he nor anyone else could possibly have missed just one. Had he not seen me, he would not have known of my expropriation or been affected by it. All this was said by the simple phrase I