Did Walt Whitman work for Google?

Of course it's a rather common thought. To a certain extent it might even be considered a riff on Kohelet. Still, when reading Walt Whitman's Continuities it's hard not to get the feeling that he was aware of the power of the search engine:

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form — no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.

The problem, of course is being able to find something, since even if it's not lost, that doesn't mean it hasn't been misplaced, or purposefully put somewhere that we can't remember. That's probably Whitman's intention in the line about appearance not foiling - it only seems to be lost, but with a search engine strong enough, we would realize that it was always there.

Go to: Holding on / Letting go.