ABLE: When the modem squeaks in a hostile voice and we can't dial up, we feel frustrated. We can't function. Sometimes the making of meaning in cyberspace becomes depressing. A good dose of nostalgia sometimes acts like a welcome laxative. Often, walking past the stream and hearing the leaves in the breeze, we feel we can restore the way it was before all this. "Wouldn't it be good if Alexander Graham Bell had not been born yet," we thought one day. "Wouldn't we feel comforted if 'oversoul' as a word still signified something that we thought was there....the way 'donny brook' signifies our stream?"
BAKER: When we were doing the romantics of the nineteenth century many decades ago, we simply expected resolution after conflict and crisis. Always. This was not a matter of consciouly chosen belief: there was nothing for us to choose to believe, as opposed to something else. There was no "something else." Even if a poem did not resolve, we could make it resolve. We always had an implied point of reference, out there, out somewhere. Meaning was always the immediate and the ultimate. Both. We thought we knew there was an ultimate.
ABLE: It was a better time. Even now, after all of this, they can't take Emerson away from us, or Thoreau. Even after Bell. You can rename the stream, or strike its name on the map altogether, and it won't matter. Something will be there. Out there, in the town. The map be damned.
CHARLIE: But the map has its own charm. A donnybrook! A free-for-all!
ABLE: We have "no carrier" on the screen. We should take a walk. If we followed Donny Brook, we could travel far in Collegeville.
22 November 1995; updated 13 December 1996