There's a Bernard Cornwall book where an Arthurian warrior collaborates with the druid Merlin. It takes place in Britain during the Saxon invasion period. At o

There's a Bernard Cornwall book where an Arthurian warrior collaborates with the druid Merlin. It takes place in Britain during the Saxon invasion period. At one point Merlin's in a library. We learn that Druid's are not allowed to write. Once you write something down, it becomes fixed. Fixed on paper. Fixed in your mind. Rigid and unalterable... this is not conducive to magic, which cannot work under such rigidity. It reminded me of Socrates & Phaedrus' conversation on reading & memory. Words in a book don't work the way words in your head do. Reading about a conversation isn't like discussing a topic in Socrates' garden. When writing replaces memorisation as a method of learning, things are lost as well as gained. The ideas themselves change. It's particularly interesting as Socrates was famous for his conversational philosophical methods, where allegory and flexible style make the case. His student is famous for his writing, and the more precise, detail-oriented, reductive and uhm... platonic in his method. Anyway... the internet has made us all writers. We write whatever enters our head. Then it becomes fixed. Then we defend it... like cranky old academics defending pet theories they wrote in their youth.