Innis

The tower was going to produce a God exactly as large as what one language could hold. All of the knowledge of what is good and worth building toward, compressed into whatever a single record could contain, ratified by whoever maintained the record, distributed back out as doctrine. The knowledge of God dispersed across languages and kinship structures and the particular difficulty that belongs to one man alone in one cell in the Egyptian desert, all of that reduced to what the committee could agree to write down. Poemen sent the brothers back to their cells because the cell would teach them what the abbot could not. That knowledge does not travel. It lives where it lives and it is lost when you try to centralise it and the loss feels like clarity because clarity is what you get when you've thrown away everything that doesn't fit.