Life as a palimpsest

Before printing on paper was invented, texts were written on parchment made from animal hides. Parchment was durable but expensive, and so it wasn’t wasted. If you had something to write, you took an existing parchment with writing on it, rubbed out a line of old text, and wrote in the space you had made. After this had happened several times, the piece of parchment contained multiple erasures and bits of text which, if read in sequence, made no sense at all. This type of parchment is called a 'palimpsest'.

The word ‘palimpsest’ has been used metaphorically to describe cities. Bits are knocked down and replaced by many different architects and builders, all with different aims in mind. This is particularly true of the sort of European cities in which the streets are not laid out in grids and where no king or emperor has been able to impose an overall plan. Palimpsest cities may make no sense (particularly to a visitor), but can be pleasant to discover: alleys and streets wind in mysterious directions; streets suddenly open out into hidden squares; churches and other imposing buildings occupy sites next to houses and office blocks.

‘Palimpsest’ can also be used to describe organisations. An example is the National Health Service in England, which has had numerous organisational changes and endless new initiatives, each with a new set of organisations to implement them. The resulting organisational structure makes the sort of sense familiar to readers of palimpsests. But the NHS keeps on functioning because the real work is done by doctors, nurses, paramedics and other people who know what they are doing. Chaos only intrudes when politicians, the Department of Health or some part of the senior management interfere. Living in an organisational palimpsest, they naturally speak a higher form of management gibberish (‘targeting the deliverables’ etc). In fact, the decay of language into this kind of gibberish is probably an indication that those who speak it live in a world of meaningless procedures and incomprehensible systems for evading responsibility.

Human life itself could be seen as a palimpsest. As you get older, your memory gets over-written by random experiences, different skills and knowledge. You make off-the-cuff decisions which have major implications for the rest of your life, and make sudden and unexpected changes to what you had intended to be an orderly and planned life. Of course, you don’t see it that way when you look back. Human beings have a marvellous ability to rationalise their actions and to see stories (and even conspiracies) where there are only random events.