The Other Web

I just received about four boxes of books from a friend. They needed them out of their home and we happily obliged to take them. I started pouring through a book a professor recommended me about five years ago and never got to until now — Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. There are countless others volumes within those boxes that I'd like to read.

I find myself picking up a couple and placing them on my desk, skimming through a couple before digging back into The Glass Bead Game. The only thing I can compare it to is having many tabs open on your browser — if only tabs looked as elegant as disheveled book covers upon your desk, each with bookmarks of different shapes cast within their pages.

And this reminds me of a quote of Umberto Eco's that is printed on the cover of Andrew Hurley's translation of Borges' Collected Fictions:

Though so different in style, two writers have offered us an image for the next millennium: Joyce and Borges. The first designed with words what the second designed with ideas: the original, the one and only World Wide Web, The Real Thing. The rest will remain simply virtual.

This view of Borges as the World Wide Web, nay the realWorld Wide Web, took me by surprise. At first I dismissed Eco as being hyperbolic, but the more time goes by, the more I read Borges, the more I read in general, the more I believe it. Borges' encyclopedic mind is the product of logging into that analog web that existed way before the digital one did, immersed in books. The World Wide Web as product of the original World Wide Web of analog, of books.

While I may not be able to live in the stacks like Borges did, perhaps I can emulate him in choosing to log into that other web more often.