back for a sec with a beautiful, serendipitous moment in time.

i get about 100 unsolicited mass-advertising bot-generated emails per day, and i rarely visit the junk mail folder except to delete its contents. except for yesterday. for some ungodly reason i decided to browse around and see who and what had been sending me so many financial tips, diet tips, ‘enhancement’ tips, and prescription tips.

i chose one that asked if i was ‘feeling down’ - i wasn’t feeling particularly down at the moment, and i wondered what might’ve led ‘evangeline meier’ to believe otherwise. sure, there are more ‘fingers’ on more ‘buttons’ now than there were at the peak of the cold war, extremists of all stripes & faiths are calling the shots, 85% of the troops in Iraq believe that they are there ‘to retaliate for Saddam’s role in 9/11′, 1/3 of the country doesn’t even remember in which year 9/11 took place, NOLA’s post-Katrina evacuees are still scattered throughout the country, assimilated into the sprawl… but other than that what’s to be down about?

anyway, you know how spam usually includes a few lines of gibberish, to spoof spam-filters into thinking it might be a legitimate letter? well, in this case it wasn’t gibberish. it was one of the most beautiful and brilliant lines of prose i’ve ever read:

“As the tree of knowledge sprouts and expands within him, shooting out leaf after leaf of practical experience, the succession of surprises dulls his faculty of wonderment.”

i tried to imagine how many monkeys at how many typewriters over what length of time were required to produce the above sentence, and then i discovered that it was actually written by L. Frank Baum, the man who gave us ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and over a dozen other fantastical Oz-based adventures in the first years of the 20th Century.

in fact, the quote itself comes from ‘The Master Key’ (’an electrical fairy tale founded upon the mysteries of electricity’), published in 1901. it’s available online thanks to Project Gutenberg (eText #436), and i’m only halfway through it. but i have to say, i’ve read alot of books, i’ve read alot of SciFi books, but i’ve never read anything as profound and prescient as ‘The Master Key’. i cannot recommend this book strongly enough. read it ASAP, it’ll take a day or two.

and it’s going on my wishlist, in case anyone wants to buy me a 1st edition…
(christmas is only 3 months away, after all)

so, aside from the praise for Baum and the plug for my wishlist, i just wanted to say ‘thanks, random spammer… i’ll probably not look at another junk mail again for years, but i feel incredibly lucky to have read yours’.