Webs

Webs

"Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web." (Delillo The Body Artist 9).

Get Derrida quote about webs from Plato's Pharmacy.

The Body Artist is a novella that traces the manner in which its protagonist, a young woman named Lauren Hartke who recently lost her older husband of six months, grieves.

"The wind came harder now and they turned away from it. She amused herself by thinking he'd come from cyberspace, a man who'd emerged from her computer screen in the dead of night. He was from Kotka, in Finland." (Delillo 47)

"You stand at the table shuffling papers and you drop something. Only you don't know it. It takes a second or two before you know it and even then you know it only as a formless distortion of the teeming space around your body. But once you know you've dropped something, you hear it hit the floor, belatedly. The sound makes its way through an immense web of distances. You hear the thing fall and know what it is at the same time, more or less, and it's a paperclip. You know this from the sound it makes when it hits the floor and from the retrieved memory of the drop itself, the thing falling from your hand or slipping off the edge of the page to which it was clipped. It slipped off the edge of the page. Now that you know you dropped it, you remember how it happened, or helf remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else. The apperclip hits the floor with an end-to-end bounce, faint and weighttless, a sound for which there is no imitativ word, the sound of a paper- (91) clip falling, but when you bend to pick it up, it isn't there" (Delillo 92)

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Tools as webs / webs as tools see Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan.