A year or two ago I was asked to review a novel by José Saramago, and in looking up facts about him on Google I found over and over the same quotation from him —
God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.
It’s from his Lanzarote journals, which aren’t available in English. He quoted it himself last year in one of his own blogs (translated as The Notebook). I wanted it again just a couple of weeks ago for my introduction to the electronic edition of his novels being prepared (hurrah!) by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I wasn’t sure I remembered it exactly, and The Notebook was up in the attic with Charles, and so I went confidently to google it. I thought I knew how it started, so I tried “God is silence.” That got me some hits, but nothing from Saramago. I tried “God is the silence.” That got me the same page as before. So I tried “Saramago quotations” and variants on that. They all took me to a page with lots and lots of quotations from Saramago — singly, in sets of 20, in sets of 43 — but in hurriedly looking through them, I didn’t find the one I was looking for, certainly the most famous single thing Saramago ever wrote. At this point, paranoia raised its stupid little yellow-green head.
Saramago was an atheist, not of the professional Dawkinsian type, but a man to whom the whole God business made no sense, though it interested him. His antipathy was reserved for the profiteers and power-mongers of religion, such as the mufti who authorised marriage for girls of ten, the imam who approved stoning women accused of adultery, the pope who has found it so hard to condemn pederasty among his priests. His speaking out on such matters made him enemies, of course. I mean, the man was a godless commie foreigner. Really. He was.
So I sat there entertaining paranoid thoughts: Had some zealous crusader gone through Google’s material on Saramago and removed the offensive quotation? I knew this kind of thing happens on Wikipedia, but in a wiki people look out for censoring and tampering and can make it unhappen just as promptly. How Google works, I didn’t know, but I knew it’s not a wiki. I didn’t suspect Google of initiating censorship, but wondered if it was vulnerable to sneak-in censorship. A worrisome thought to think about an information service so many of us rely on. So, instead of going on looking for the quotation as I should have done, I wrote a little blog about the mysterious absence of the quotation.
My First Reader read it and said, “But you didn’t try ‘God is the silence of the universe.’”
Oh.
So I asked Google for “God is the silence of the universe“ (and put it in quotes) and there it was, about a ten thousand times, pages and pages of God is the silence of the universe.
So much for paranoia. No crusaders. Just my own (lazy) incompetence at googling.
But the mistake sometimes leads the mind to the place it really wanted to go...
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