I began to write, "I am not here to contribute to the interchange of information." But I'm doubtful what that means, doubtful where my voice has come to ground. If I'm anywhere, I am where you are, reading these words, this printed voice, these letters on a humming screen. I am not clambering up a mountainside in Costa Rica. I may, it is true, be in the newsroom, looking out on a tall brick building. But the snow will not be fluttering sideways and down like cold confetti, and morning light will not be striking the sill at this exact angle, and the curtains across the alley might even have been flung open. The body that wrote these words belongs already to the past. The words are mortal, too. You won't find them in a used bookstore or recycling bin. They survive at the mercy of a webmaster. All I am on the Net is out of my hands.
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