One of my favorite passages from Faulkner, Judith’s monologue upon giving Charles Bon’s letter to Quentin’s Grandmother, passing on something precious to someone she barely knows, strikes me as a weirdly accurate description of what happens on the internet:
…and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after awhile they don’t even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something — a scrap of paper — something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it can never become was because it cant ever die or perish…(Absalom, Absalom!) (more…)