Now That Rates Are Moving Up, We're

The World's Fair Audience Tended To Think Of The Machine As Unqualifiedly Good, Strong, Stupid And Obedient. They Thought Of It As A Giant Slave, An Untiring Steel Negro, Controlled By Reason In A World Of Infinite Resources.

Confidence Is The Prize Given To The Mediocre

Drawing Never Dies, It Holds On By The Skin Of Its Teeth, Because The Hunger It Satisfies – The Desire For An Active, Investigative, Manually Vivid Relation With The Things We See And Yearn To Know About – Is Apparently Immortal.

The Point Of A Library's Existence Is Not Persuasion Or Evangelism, But Knowledge. It Is Irrelevant To The Good Library Whether, As An Institution, It Shares Or Promotes Your Core Values Or Mine, Or The Attorney General's Or Saddam Hussein's. The Library Is Always An Instrument Of Choice, And The Choice Is Always Yours, Not Your Elected Or Designated Leaders.

For The Machine Meant The Conquest Of Horizontal Space. It Also Meant A Sense Of That Space Which Few People Had Experienced Before – The Succession And Superimposition Of Views, The Unfolding Of Landscape In Flickering Surfaces As One Was Carried Swiftly Past It, And An Exaggerated Feeling Of Relative Motion (the Poplars Nearby Seeming To Move Faster Than The Church Spire Across The Field) Due To Parallax. The View From The Train Was Not The View From The Horse. It Compressed More Motifs Into The Same Time. Conversely, It Left Less Time In Which To Dwell On Any One Thing.