Samuel Pepys did not have a laptop; but if he did, imagine the number of words.

I imagine also that the kinds of conversations between Sam and his digital ego. Cataloguing the mundane, the divine and the profane, the human attempts and the human failures, the hope that attends the former, and the regret which follows the latter. In the polaroid snap of an internet eye, it is all captured, clearly or blurred, and offered up like a neon flash on the downtown strip.

Recently, a blogger I have come to follow regularly for his insights on community and communication wrote about a complication in his open marriage, that his partner really wanted to open it, and the heart-rending that ensued (under the guise of understanding). Others share their anguish or blare their angers, raise the dead or bury the living, compromise truth or correct fallacy, and in all senses become part of a modern digital organism called Babel.

Amazing creature. It groans and hisses and sings and argues in every language under this sun.

Sometimes I think it an honor to be pasting small images onto its body, or adding short snippets of song to its voice. It is a modern wiki-canon, whose contributors, among the legion of men and women, offer their spoonful of wisdom. There is something to speaking a truth – even a conflicted one, like my blogger friend as he publicly worked his head around the Real.

Other times, what is said seems little more than veneer for what is done, and hours of verbal decoration are overturned by a single moment of non-verbal expression.

Well, lace is a fine thing to add to the hem of her dress, or to a plain drawingroom table; and a touch of spoken color seems to call a shaft of light… no better thing to do, sometimes,if you are able.