Tamsin Walker

It is cold cialis outside. The kind of cold that feels heavy and all-consuming and entirely out of tune with the pretty perfection of the tiny snow flakes sent as its visual marker. I am watching them fall, and they are so light that they can’t follow a straight path from the sky, but are blown about every which way and then back again. Even when they land, they cannot settle.

They remind me, these snow flakes, of the internet and the endless possibilities it offers for learning, contributing, exploring and just being. Taken further, the train of thought delivers me to the pages of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, to the passage in which Joyce describes eternity as the time it would take for a bird to move every grain of sand in a mountain a million miles high and a million more wide.

I remember the feelings of hopelessness his description stirred in me on first reading. It made me shudder as it crawled under my skin. And it makes me shudder still. For although eternity will never be mine, the infinite nature of the mountain that is the internet will.

I hear the cries of “long live the digital age”, and “life without the internet is unimaginable”, but today I am inclined (besides posting this of course) to imagine that unimaginable, and just sit back and watch the snow flit and flurry.