The Book That Keeps Its Counsel

There is a book in a library at Yale that no one can read. Two hundred and forty pages of looping, confident script, flowing left to right in a hand that never hesitates, illustrated with plants that grow nowhere, star-charts of no sky, women bathing in green channels that run like veins through the margins. It has a name, the Voynich manuscript, after the dealer who bought it a century ago. It has a carbon date, the early fifteenth century. It has everything a book has except the one thing a book is for. It cannot be read.

Not for want of trying. The finest codebreakers of the last hundred years have gone at it — the men who broke the German ciphers, the people who built the machines that broke everything after, professional cryptographers and gifted amateurs and, lately, the computers that chew through every language that ever was. It has beaten all of them. The letters behave like a real language in some ways and like nothing in others. There are words that repeat where words should repeat and never quite where they shouldn't. It is either the most patient hoax ever committed or a message in a code that died with the single hand that wrote it, and after six hundred years no one can say which.

I find I love it for exactly this. We live now inside a promise that everything can be looked up — that no string of characters exists which the right query won't crack open, that meaning is a thing retrievable on demand, always, from somewhere. And here, sitting in a climate-controlled room, catalogued and photographed and free to view online, is a book that simply refuses. You can zoom in on every stroke of every letter. It gives you nothing. All that access, and it keeps its own counsel.

The discomfort this produces in us is worth sitting with. We do not like a locked thing. We are affronted by it, a little, the way we are affronted by any silence that won't be filled. There is a whole industry of people who cannot rest until the Voynich is solved, who publish, every year or two, the announcement that they have done it at last — it is proto-Romance, it is Hebrew anagrams, it is a lost dialect of Nahuatl, it is medieval women's medicine written in shorthand — and each solution dissolves under examination, and the book closes its covers again, unbothered. It has outlived every person who has been certain about it.

And there is the possibility, never to be excluded, that it says nothing at all. That some clever soul in the fifteenth century filled two hundred and forty vellum pages with beautiful meaningless script, for money or for mischief or for reasons that were their own, and that we have spent six centuries and untold thousands of hours of the best minds available interrogating an elaborate blank. This ought to be the most deflating thought, and somehow it is the opposite. Even if it means nothing, it has done something: it has held its silence so perfectly that we cannot tell the silence from speech.

Most things give themselves up. That is what things are trained to do now — resolve, load, return a result. The Voynich just sits there in its case, patient as a stone, offering its flowering plants that never grew and its confident sentences that no living mouth will ever say aloud. Somewhere in it there may be a secret. Somewhere in it there may be nothing. Either way it will keep the difference to itself, and go on keeping it, long after the last person now wondering has stopped.