In praise of scribes

Abstract In 1978, addressing some American students, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr talked about what he called ‘darking’ (sic). ‘Clarking, a wholly human enterprise’, he said, ‘is sacred ... Clarking is the most profound and effective form of meditation practiced on this planet ... Why? Because darks, by reading well, can think the thoughts of the wisest and most interesting human minds throughout all history. When darks meditate, even if they themselves have only mediocre intellects, they do it with the thoughts of angels. What could be more sacred than that?’1 By ‘darks’, I take it, Vonnegut means scribes-people, both clerics and laymen, who physically write or copy things for a living, at even the most humble, mechanical level. Though he stops short of saying that it is clerks rather than poets who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, Vonnegut sees these lowly artisans as the people who have channelled and supported literacy in society and effectively preserved the great ideas of mankind.