<<WAY, WAY OFF-TOPIC... NO TOPIC... DO NOT READ UNLESS BORED...>>
A little night music for the old thread...
A COMPLETELY FALSE HISTORY OF SEEK
Back in 1887, along a rural road in Virginia that
would eventually become Route 5, a meandering little
road with stretches of pine shadows and hints of plantations
off bosomed in the forests, there was an inconspicuous white
frame house with dark-green shuttered windows and a sense
of quizzical humor. In it lived one Jerome Stance, a tinkerer,
inventor, perennial laggard, and enthusiastic failure, who
when speaking would emphasize certain very ordinary words
like "dog" and "pistol" and "tree", giving them an
odd sheen... as if they were part of some great code that
he felt others could readily grasp. Needless to say, this
could be very off-putting.
Like a lot of very ordinary folks--even in
our own day--we don't know much about Mr. Stance. We know
that he had a low-slung brown dog named Aaron who never
saw a lap that didn't look like home. We know he had
a pistol, which was found in his hand the unfortunate
night. And we know there was a large pine tree. And
we also know that Mr. Stance was found very dead beneath
that tree, with his low-slung dog whimpering into the
warm dark of a July evening and tugging at one shirt sleeve, and his right
hand clasping a Colt 45 that had apparently never been
fired. There was no sign of foul play. No bullet wound.
Nothing. And this little "tragedy"--though not much of
one because no relative ever claimed his body and, while
there was a polite service at St. Peter's in Richmond, the
only attendees were two reporters from the Richmond Post-
Dispatch and the low-slung dog--would have gone completely
unnoticed were it not for the extensive journal that Mr.
Stance had kept, apparently since learning to write at
his Mother's knee. To call it a journal actually would
be the grossest oversimplification. For its many, many
volumes--numbering well over 7000--had created a huge
storage problem for Mr. Stance. Indeed, with the exception
of one small "greeting room," it could be argued that
the house itself was but a giant volume recounting EVERY
SINGLE CONVERSATION, VISIT, SIGHT, SOUND, TASTE (right
down to his last meal which consisted of a few soda crackers,
bread, and a slice of cheddar cheese), THOUGHT, EXPERIENCE,
FLEETING FEELING, ILLNESS, and DREAM that occurred in
Jerome Stance's life. A man of reduced means, Mr. Stance
had utilized every imaginable material he had found or
received to keep his daily, indeed, hourly records...
including the unprinted margins of the Richmond Post-Dispatch,
old scraps of cloth, anything with space sufficient for
at least a few, quickly scrawled words.
And his last entry, made apparently just moments
before his death, was "I've gone forward, forward, forward
always forward... but I wish I had a machine that could
take me backward... so I might reflect or gather or
re-member... but, I'm going outside now under the
tree and it seems like the stars are gasping for air...
and how many times have I written about the cricket
songs... how many times? I don't know... because I'm
always forward... and the air is heavy... and Aaron is the best friend
I've ever had... Come here, Aaron... Aaron? Oh..."
And some 103 years later, a computer
programmer named Steven Kirsch came across an article
about Mr. Stance in the Winter 1990 issue of American
Heritage Magazine. The article, entitled "Stance's
Paper Brain"--which is how the Stance Collection now
housed at the University of Virginia has come to be
referred to by numerous scholars--intrigued Kirsch,
who at the time was utterly fascinated with a research
and collaborative network then being called The Internet.
In a moment of reverie, Mr. Kirsch asked himself
a question, "What if I could make a machine that could
go backwards and find and re-member... so that this
thing called the Internet might be used, organized,
and understood...?"
And thus a company and a "search engine"
called Infoseek were born. (Initally, Mr. Kirsch,
a bright man but a tad on the prosaic side, had
entertained the notion of naming his company, COMPUTING MACHINE
FOR SEEKING AND FINDING INTERNET INFORMATION, Inc.... but his wife
quickly talked him out of it.)
Best Regards,
c m
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