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THE THEME IS

BABEL

Babel. The world is Babel.

The world is shrinking into a single skyscraper. Every year a new language is discovered, and a hundred languages die. Babel: when an old hunter dies, a library in Tokyo burns down.

Babel. Babble. More books have been written about books than on any other subject. Dictionaries can only grow. No commentary is definitive because it requires commentary. The tower of text can never be complete: high pilèd books in charact’ry. Thoreau was sure that by such a pile we would scale heaven at last. But texts make haphazard bricks, a Babel of jenga.

A computer crashes. One day, the power will fail and the Web will drown. The Cloud will finally vanish. Not even ruins of our Babble will remain. Babble, Babel, Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Talk to text. Treaties. The power of print. The madness of mechanism. All this is Babel.