At the heart of Clay Shirky’s impressive new essay is a reference to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work on the transition between manuscript and print culture, with its redrafting and recasting of social and institutional frameworks. What’s not mentioned (only because it’s not pertinent to Clay’s argument) is the extent to which manuscript culture had itself gone through significant changes in the century before Gutenberg: private copy-shops in large cities served a bourgeois clientele whose interests lay outside monastic and academic remits. With apologies for the dodgy teleology, literary production was ripe for print.

The easiest comparison, perhaps, is to the multimedia CD-ROM of the early 1990s. (Amy Virshup’s 1993 piece on Voyager reads like ancient history now.) Except I’m not sure that’s right, and can’t help thinking that we’re still not quite at the revolutionary moment. Although as Clay points out, we won’t know it until long after it happens.

On the other hand, I glance at the scattershot reports from The Week of Two Conferences, and can’t help thinking of so very many Lilliputians binding Gulliver.

The obvious mental leap from the extended present is to ‘Vexations’, but it’s a different creature, counted out one bean at a time. (And I’m sure that enough has been written on Bach as an intensely Protestant musician, graphing the headspace of the listener in variation.)

There’s a meditation focused on the shape of one’s own breath, and a rarer one that seeks to discern the breath of others.

Orpheus went to hell and back, and lost what he went there for anyway.

We strive to fill the gaps of antiquity, scan palimpsests from rubbish-tips, train every fragment of the spectrum upon them. The lacunae, though, are part of the story.

What we have is what we have; what we’re given, we should be grateful for.