This may come across to many people as a somewhat ridiculous epiphany. Perhaps it is something that I’ve never spent a great deal of time contemplating before, especially in the wake of a secondary school environment that did a great job exposing me to a wide variety of literature and historical fact. But the fact remains still that I will never get through all the information that is available to me today. Not even close.
I would dare to say that individuals in my respective level of intellectualism have not enjoyed and suffered from this phenomenon much before probably the dawn of the twentieth century. Prior to that time, it seems to me like the information of the world, centered in multitudes of cultural centers throughout the world but never truly connected, had never been linked in enough of a way to provide easy, unrestricted access to literally all of it, in my everyday apartment, in an everyday town!
I came to this realization in the pursuit of a digital abstract of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, so that I could remind myself how significant of a novel it has been for my palette when put up against Huxley and Orwell (I loaned out my printed copy to a dear friend). What do I find in my search? Strangely enough, the entire novel surfaces, unscathed in the original Russian, on a website funded “With the financial support of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications”. With a short burst of Google Translate, I have found exactly what I sought.
Despite the text of the website being in Russian, my realization of just how far away this server actually is did not dawn on me until I attempted to locate it. It dwells in Moscow- thousands and thousands of miles away, and I retrieved it on my computer like it was nothing, another mere commercial website in the Dallas area! What a scathing realization- that my entire society rarely if ever considers the awesome complexity of this phenomenon! And naturally, my shell shock from this thought process only made me want to seek out more.
As the downhill boulder grew larger, I found efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has contributed by themselves almost 30,00 eBook documents for free and open access- enough for a lifetime! Then through my work on an English term paper, the magic of Texas’ Interlibrary Loan shows itself to me- not only does my library have more to study that I could ever endeavor to pursue, but every University library from here to the border with Mexico throws their doors open to my curiosity! I need not include the capitalistic side of the journey- for a nominal fee, I can purchase the information I seek instead through bookstores found in every level of society, every city and every town…everywhere.
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