Hello, my friend.
It's good to have you back.
Over the last few episodes, we've been walking together through Al-Andalus---through the golden streets of Córdoba, through the translation houses of Toledo. We watched as scholars like Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot worked to bring Greek philosophy back into Latin Europe through Arabic. We saw how knowledge flowed across borders, across languages, across the divides that so often keep people apart.
But I want to show you something else today. Because while that river of knowledge was flowing northward from Spain, there were people already waiting to receive it. Monasteries scattered across Europe, quiet scriptoriums where monks had been copying manuscripts for centuries, preserving what little remained after Rome's libraries burned.
One of those places still stands today, in Switzerland. And it all began with a single Irish monk who never intended to build a library at all.
His name was Gall.
And his story reminds us that the great movements of history---the renaissances, the revivals, the moments when civilization rediscovers itself---they don't happen by accident. They happen because someone, somewhere, long before, decided to preserve something. To teach something. To pass something on.
Even when the future looked uncertain.
Especially then.
I have to tell you about something that made me smile.
Just a few weeks ago, a BBC travel reporter walked into the Abbey library at St Gallen, Switzerland, and I watched her face change.
She'd been sent to write a piece about medieval architecture---you know, one of those "hidden gems of Europe" articles. The baroque hall is stunning, I'll give her that. Built in 1758, all rococo swirls and gilded columns reaching toward a painted ceiling. But that's not what stopped her in her tracks.
It was the felt overshoes.
Before she could enter, the librarian handed her a pair of oversized slippers to pull over her boots. "To protect the floor," he explained. She looked down. Wooden parquet, polished by centuries of careful feet. Twelve hundred years old, those boards. Older than most nations.
She shuffled forward in her ridiculous slippers, trying to maintain some journalistic dignity, and that's when the silence hit her. Not empty silence---full silence. The kind that hums with presence. One hundred seventy thousand volumes breathing together in the cool air. Manuscripts on those shelves dating back to the eighth century. The smell of vellum and oak and time itself.
The librarian pulled out a manuscript for her to see. An illuminated gospel from 820 AD. Gold leaf still catching the light. Latin still perfectly legible. Still teaching, still speaking, after twelve centuries.
"This survived," he said quietly, "because of one Irish monk who came here with nothing but faith and a book."
And I watched her blink, her reporter's mind suddenly scrambling. She'd come for architecture. She'd found something else entirely.
Listen---you can go there yourself. Right now, today. The library at St Gallen is open to visitors. You pull on those absurd felt slippers, you walk across those ancient boards, and you stand in the presence of thirteen centuries of unbroken preservation. If you ever plan a trip to Europe, put this on your list. Not just to see it, but to feel what it means when knowledge refuses to die.
Because that reporter---she thought she was writing about a library.
She was writing about a seed.
To understand how that seed was planted, we need to go back to the seventh century. And we need to go to Ireland.
This was Europe after the fall of Rome. The libraries had burned. The roads had crumbled. Literacy was collapsing everywhere except in one unlikely place: the monasteries of Ireland. Places like Bangor, like Clonmacnoise, where monks were copying Latin manuscripts, preserving Greek learning, keeping the written word alive in a world that was forgetting how to read.
And some of those Irish monks didn't stay put.
They called themselves peregrini---wanderers for Christ. They saw exile as a spiritual discipline, a way of surrendering everything familiar for the sake of something larger. So they packed up their precious books, left their green island, and walked into a fragmenting continent carrying the only light they had: learning itself.
One of those wanderers was a young monk named Gall.
He was born around 550 AD, somewhere in Ireland---we don't know exactly where. What we know is that he was educated at the great monastery of Bangor, and that he could read Latin and Greek, and that when his teacher Columbanus decided to bring the Irish monastic tradition to mainland Europe around 590, Gall went with him.
It wasn't an easy journey. They walked through Gaul---what we'd call France today---establishing monasteries as they went. Luxeuil. Fontaine. Teaching, copying texts, training local monks in the Irish way of rigorous scholarship and ascetic discipline. Columbanus was fierce, uncompromising, and he made enemies among the Frankish clergy who didn't appreciate being told how to run their churches by wandering Irishmen.
By 612 AD, they'd been pushed further east into Alemannic territory---the region around Lake Constance, in what's now Switzerland and southern Germany. The Alemanni were a Germanic tribe, recently converted to Christianity, still suspicious of outsiders, still half-wild in the eyes of the missionaries.
And that's where everything changed for Gall.
He fell ill. Some sources say it was malaria, others just call it fever. Whatever it was, it knocked him down hard. And when Columbanus announced they were moving on---heading south over the Alps into Italy to establish yet another monastery---Gall couldn't go.
The parting must have been painful. Columbanus was his teacher, his spiritual father. But Columbanus was also relentless, driven by a vision that wouldn't wait for one sick monk to recover. So Columbanus blessed him and left, and Gall stayed behind in the forests near the Steinach River, in the shadow of those mountains he couldn't cross.
He built himself a hermitage. Just a simple cell, really. Wattle and daub, a thatched roof, a small clearing in the wilderness. The local Alemanni must have thought he was mad---another strange foreigner muttering prayers in Latin. But Gall learned their language. He taught them to read. He shared the books he'd carried all the way from Ireland.
And slowly, quietly, that little cell became something more.
Students came. Other monks joined him. They built a chapel, then a scriptorium. They started copying manuscripts---not just for themselves, but to send to other monasteries, to share what they were preserving.
Gall never left that valley. He lived there for more than thirty years, teaching the Alemanni, copying texts, praying in his small chapel. He died around 646 AD, an old man by the standards of his time, buried in the place where his fever had stranded him.
He could never have imagined what he'd started.
For Gall, there was no separation between prayer and teaching, between worship and the work of copying texts.
Every manuscript was an act of faith.
Not faith that he would live to see it finished---he was already old, already worn down by decades of ascetic life. But faith that someone, someday, would need what he was preserving. Faith that knowledge given freely would multiply rather than diminish. Faith that God had given human beings minds, and that honoring those minds with learning was itself a form of praise.
This wasn't some abstract philosophy for him. It was daily, physical work. You made your own vellum---scraping and stretching animal skins until they were thin enough to take ink. You mixed your own ink from oak galls and iron salts. You sat in a cold scriptorium with aching fingers and copied, line by line, word by word, a text that might have been copied a dozen times already, that might get copied a dozen times more.
And you did it because the alternative was worse.
The alternative was letting knowledge die.
I think Gall understood something that's easy to forget: knowledge that stays locked away isn't really knowledge at all. It's just marks on a page. Knowledge only lives when it moves, when it's shared, when it passes from one mind to another and changes both in the process.
So he taught the Alemanni. These were people who'd never seen a written word before he arrived. Farmers, hunters, recent converts who barely understood what this strange Irish monk was doing in their forest. But Gall learned their language, and he taught them Latin, and suddenly they were connected to something vast---to the prayers of Christians across Europe, to the wisdom of the Church Fathers, to a world of ideas that stretched back centuries.
They started copying manuscripts themselves. Slowly, uncertainly at first. But copying.
And here's what mattered: Gall wasn't hoarding this knowledge for some spiritual elite. He wasn't building a fortress library where only the learned could enter. He was building a school. A place where teaching happened, where the act of preservation was also the act of sharing.
The local people saw this. They saw a man who'd been left behind by his teacher, stranded by illness in a foreign land, and instead of withering in bitterness or isolation, he'd opened his hands. Here, look at this text. Here, let me show you how to read it. Here, copy this for yourself.
It was revolutionary, in its quiet way.
Because the principle underneath it all was this: if what you know can help someone else live better, live more fully, live more wisely---then you have a sacred obligation to share it. Not to guard it jealously. Not to use it as power over others. But to give it away freely, trusting that the giving itself will multiply what you have.
Gall's illness, the thing that had seemed like disaster when Columbanus left him behind---the local people interpreted it as divine purpose. God wanted this particular monk in this particular valley, teaching these particular people. The fever that had kept him from crossing the Alps had planted him exactly where a seed needed planting.
He was being faithful with what he had. A few books, a gift for languages, a belief that minds were worth cultivating.
That was all.
That was enough.
When Gall died in 646, his students didn't let the work die with him.
They kept teaching. They kept copying. They kept that little scriptorium running in the shadow of the Alps, and the manuscripts kept accumulating, kept spreading to other monasteries, kept the knowledge flowing.
In 719 AD---seventy-three years after Gall's death---a monk named Othmar formalized what had begun as a hermitage. He established a proper Benedictine monastery on the site, with rules, with structure, with a commitment to the work Gall had started. The Abbey of St Gallen was born.
And it grew.
By the ninth century, during what historians call the Carolingian Renaissance, St Gallen had become one of the great centers of learning in northern Europe. The scriptorium was producing manuscripts at an astonishing rate---not just copying old texts, but creating new ones. Illuminated gospels with gold leaf and intricate designs. Commentaries on scripture. Medical texts. Musical notation. The Plan of St Gall, drawn around 820, is the most detailed architectural drawing we have from the early Middle Ages---a complete blueprint showing how knowledge preservation had become systematized, integrated into every aspect of monastic life.
The library, the scriptorium, the school---they weren't separate from the spiritual life of the monastery. They were the spiritual life.
And here's where the story connects back to everything we've been exploring together.
While St Gallen was growing in the north, Islamic scholars in Baghdad were preserving and expanding Greek philosophy. While St Gallen's monks were copying Latin texts in Switzerland, scholars in Córdoba were translating Aristotle into Arabic. Two preservation traditions, working in parallel, not knowing they were building the infrastructure for something larger.
By the twelfth century, when Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot were bringing those Arabic translations of Aristotle back into Latin in Toledo, monasteries like St Gallen were ready. They had the scribes, the vellum, the systems. They had five hundred years of unbroken practice in copying, preserving, and disseminating knowledge.
The texts that flowed north from Toledo---the "new" Aristotle, the works on mathematics and astronomy and medicine---they didn't just sit in Spain. They spread across Europe, copied in scriptoriums like St Gallen, absorbed into the curricula of the new universities, studied by scholars who were standing on foundations that monks like Gall had built centuries earlier.
Two streams meeting. The Islamic preservation of Greek learning from the south. The monastic preservation tradition from the north. And when they converged, they created the intellectual explosion we call the Renaissance.
Neither tradition knew they were building toward that moment.
St Gall never imagined Gerard of Cremona. Gerard of Cremona never thought about St Gall. But the work of one made the work of the other possible, because both understood the same fundamental truth: knowledge is a living thing. It has to be preserved, yes---but it also has to move, has to be shared, has to find new hands and new minds in every generation.
The Abbey of St Gallen survived Viking raids. It survived fires. It survived the wars that tore through Europe century after century. It survived the Reformation, when so many monasteries were dissolved and their libraries scattered. It kept copying, kept teaching, kept adding to its collection.
Thirteen hundred years later, it's still there.
Still functioning. Still preserving. Still teaching.
And that reporter shuffling across the floor in her felt slippers---she was walking on boards that have been walked on by seekers and scholars for twelve centuries. She was standing in a space that exists because one Irish monk, stranded by fever, decided to teach the locals how to read.
The small act. The long consequence.
That's the pattern civilization is built on.
Not the grand gestures, not the conquering armies, not the empires that rise and fall. But the teachers who plant seeds they'll never see flower. The preservers who do the quiet work in uncertain times, trusting that what they're protecting matters, even when they can't see the future it will help create.
St Gall taught a few Alemanni farmers to read Latin.
Five hundred years later, his library helped absorb the rediscovered wisdom of Aristotle.
A thousand years later, it was still teaching.
Today, you can visit it yourself.
The seed is still growing.
That vellum manuscript from 820 AD is still readable.
Let me say that again: twelve hundred years old, and you can still read every word.
Now let me ask you something. How long does a hard drive last? Five years? Ten, if you're lucky? How long before a cloud server gets migrated to new infrastructure, and some files don't make the jump? How long before a file format becomes obsolete, unreadable, a digital artifact that no software can open anymore?
If you saved a document in 1995, can you still open it today? Maybe. If you kept upgrading, if you kept converting formats, if you remembered it existed.
But probably not.
We live in an age of unprecedented information. More knowledge is created, recorded, and shared in a single day than St Gall encountered in his entire lifetime. We have access to libraries that would have seemed miraculous to those medieval monks---millions of books, billions of articles, all searchable in seconds from a device in our pocket.
And almost all of it is more fragile than vellum.
I'm not trying to romanticize the past. Manuscripts burned. Libraries were destroyed. Knowledge was lost. The monks knew this---that's why they copied everything multiple times, why they sent copies to other monasteries, why they taught the next generation how to continue the work.
But here's what strikes me: they built for permanence. Stone buildings. Vellum pages. Institutional practices that could survive the death of any individual monk. They assumed their work needed to last for generations they would never meet.
We build for upgrades.
We assume continuous technological maintenance. We assume there will always be electricity, always be internet, always be someone to migrate the data to the next system. We assume compatibility, backward and forward, stretching infinitely into a future that looks basically like now, only faster.
But what if it doesn't?
What if we're one electromagnetic pulse, one infrastructure collapse, one corporate bankruptcy away from losing vast portions of our collective memory? What if the servers go dark, and nobody remembers how to read the old formats, and the knowledge that seemed so permanent---because it was everywhere, because it was in the cloud---just... vanishes?
I think about that reporter, standing in the St Gallen library, touching twelve-hundred-year-old vellum. She was holding something that had outlasted empires, outlasted languages, outlasted entire civilizations. And she'd gotten there by booking a flight online, using GPS, checking her smartphone.
All of which will be obsolete within a decade.
I'm not saying we should go back to copying manuscripts by hand. But I am wondering: what are we actually preserving? And for whom?
Because here's the thing St Gall understood, that every monk in that tradition understood: preservation isn't just about storage. It's about commitment. It's about institutions and communities and practices that outlast any individual life. It's about building something durable enough to hand to people you'll never meet, trusting they'll need it, trusting they'll care for it, trusting they'll pass it on.
The library at St Gallen still exists because generation after generation of people decided it was worth maintaining. They repaired the roof. They copied the crumbling manuscripts onto fresh vellum. They made those felt slippers to protect the ancient floors. They didn't just preserve the books---they preserved the practice of preservation itself.
What are we preserving?
Not what are we storing, not what are we uploading---what are we preserving? What are we committing to maintain for the next hundred years, the next thousand? What knowledge do we believe matters enough to protect, to keep readable, to pass on in a form that doesn't require the next upgrade to someone's cell phone?
I don't have an easy answer to that.
But I know this: a thousand years from now, someone might still be able to walk into St Gallen and read that manuscript from 820 AD. Will they be able to read anything we wrote today?
Maybe the question isn't whether our technology can last a thousand years.
Maybe the question is whether we're building anything worth lasting that long.
Whether we're planting seeds, or just generating data.
Whether we're acting like librarians---or just like users.
So here's what I want to leave you with.
St Gall never saw the baroque hall. Never imagined one hundred seventy thousand volumes. Never knew his hermitage would outlast the Roman Empire, would help spark a Renaissance, would still be teaching people thirteen centuries after his death.
He just did the work that was in front of him.
He taught the farmers who showed up at his door. He copied the texts he had. He shared what he knew, freely, with people who had never seen a written word before. He was faithful with his small corner of the world, in his uncertain time, with no guarantee any of it would matter.
And it mattered.
It's still mattering.
I wonder what you're preserving. Not in some grand, world-historical sense---but in your daily life, in your small corner. What knowledge are you passing on? What are you teaching, formally or informally, to the people around you? What are you creating that might outlast you, even in some small way?
And I wonder what you're learning. What you're protecting in your own memory, your own practice. What skills or wisdom or stories you're keeping alive simply by continuing to care about them.
Because the thing about seeds is this: you don't always get to see what they become. St Gall didn't. The monks who copied manuscripts for five hundred years, preparing the ground for the Renaissance---most of them didn't either. They just did the work, faithfully, believing it mattered even when they couldn't see the harvest.
You might be doing that right now. Teaching someone something they'll carry for decades. Creating something that will touch lives you'll never know about. Preserving something---a practice, a skill, a memory, a truth---that the next generation will need, even if they don't know it yet.
The work doesn't have to be grand.
It just has to be faithful.
And maybe, every now and then, it helps to remember that the small act you're doing today---the thing that feels insignificant, the effort that seems like it's barely making a difference---might be the seed that grows for centuries.
St Gall taught a few people to read.
Look what grew from that.
Next time, I want to introduce you to a woman who understood preservation in a different way.
Her name was Christine de Pizan, and she lived from 1364 to 1430---right in the middle of the Hundred Years' War, in a century torn apart by plague and violence. She became the first professional female writer in Europe, supporting her family with her pen when she had every reason to give up.
But more than that, she built a library of her own. Not made of vellum and stone, but of words and arguments. She defended women's dignity, women's intellect, women's right to be heard, at a time when almost no one else would. She preserved something that was in danger of being forgotten: the truth that women's voices matter.
Another seed planted. Another library built, one page at a time.
I'll tell you her story next time.
Until then, my friend---think about what you're preserving. What you're teaching. What small act of faithfulness you're doing today that might grow into something you can't yet imagine.
The work matters. Even when you can't see the harvest.
Especially then.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.