Words&Dirt

“As for Olivia, he hoped and trusted that she had found her way safely home and was well on her way to forgetting about him.  He had been reassured, back on Kinmen, to see a kind of intelligent guardedness on her face.  I can’t believe I’m fucking this guy.  He’d have been worried, on the other hand, if she had thrown hopeful or adoring looks at him.  Now that they had been apart for a while, her rational mind would have seized the controls from whatever part of her brain found a man like Sokolov attractive and wrenched her back onto a safe and reasonable course.

He was not entirely happy about this.  Under other circumstances, perhaps, it would have been worth pursuing.  Sad that it was impossible.  Not as sad as many other things in this world.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 806

“The idea of a global nervous system had to arise elsewhere.  In the next year, 1838, the French authorities received a visit from an American with a proposal for a ‘telegraph’ utilizing electrical wires: Samuel F. B. Morse.  They turned him down flat.  Compared to the majestic semaphor, electricity seemed gimcrack and insecure.  No one could interfere with telegraph signals in the sky, but wire could be cut by saboteurs.  Jules Guyot, a physician and scientist assigned to assess the technology, sniffed, ‘What can one expect of a few wretched wires?’  What indeed.”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 136