Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

"He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. but they would not be this one."


(...)
"They seemed in a state of improvident and hopeless vigilance. Like men committed upon uncertain ice." (193)

Missing scarcity - of information, at least

I remember reading  a few years ago Pablo Casal's autobiography. At some point he tells how his father and him one day in 1904 (or around that year), while browsing for music in some bookstores in Spain (what city?), found a copy of Bach's suites for violoncello.

"No one had recorded them. Nobody I knew knew how to play them." So in order to hear these suites he had no other option than to learn how to play them. And so he did, beautifully.

Fast forward to today's world of instant gratification. You hear a piece of music (or almost of anything), type some of it, click, and there you (almost certainly) find a version, a recording, and some comments about it. And this on music, movies, literature, you pick your preference...

So, I often ask myself how to best navigate this maze of information, and what implications there might be from the way and how intensely you do it. Choosing between an electronic book or one in paper; between scanning on blogs, sites, information providers and going back to a book I have read before; between the slower pace of disconnection and 'unfriendedness' and the fast ball of  "I can't be more than an arm's length away from a connected device." 

This is, perhaps, just a generational dilemma. If you grew up mostly interacting on screen, slowness is likely to mean something different. Such as e-mails, for some, have become the new snail mail.