An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in — only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard ! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar ; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, — no gate, — no front-yard, — and no path to the civilized world.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden : Life in the Woods

Chaque fois que dans mes statistiques je relève la visite, plusieurs heures après qu’elle a eu lieu, de quelqu’un venu sur Fuir par un lien situé sur le site ou sur le blog d’un mort, connu ou inconnu, j’ai l’impression de voir venir des fantômes caresser mes fenêtres, ils me disent qu’ils me lisent et puis ne t’en fais pas.

J’aurais payé très cher pour ne pas devoir utiliser à nouveau des mots comme reporting, export, extract ou spreadsheets. Mon tableau, tiré d’une page HTML de 20Mo, mesure 32000 lignes. Parallèlement, voilà ce que c’est que je lis :

Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering ? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor ; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face ?

Ibid.

J’ai oublié d’où provient l’epub de Walden, j’ignore pourquoi il est mal encodé et d’où provient l’erreur, mais régulièrement les mots Definition et Web Site s’invitent en gros après un mot ciblé. Pas gênant. L’anachronie m’amuse, comme des pointes sèches de grande modernité plantée dans la vieille page (mais ce n’est pas une page, c’est un espace intérieur émulé par un processeur noir et blanc). Sur le seuil du retour (j’ai envie de lui dire : les drônes surveillent la France ¹) H. me dira que tout est contingent.