All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ’tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Garry and I have recently taken to collecting words for the Dictionary of Words in the Wild. Since then, I’ve found a curious side-effect in myself: I have a greater appreciation of urban beauty. I find myself noticing and  appreciating the little quirks of the city in a way that I have not before, constantly regretting not havving a camera with me, regretting my inability to share the beauty. Words in the wild are by definition a human affect on nature, but when you really start looking, you appreciate this not as a tainting of nature but as a sort of growth of it.

It seems that the act of observation has changed the nature of what I set out to observe. In trying to digitize an object, we bestow upon it a status that had never been intended. This strikes me as perhaps a broader rule. In trying to digitize history, we fret about how, if at all, can we retain the essence of the object being digitize. Yet, perhaps its not the product that matters as much as the process. In seeing the shortcomings of the copy to the orginal, we are reaching toward a greater appreciation of the original than often been intended upon it’s creation.