Closest book meme

It's bonus post day! A more substantive blog entry will come later on, but for now I'm playing along with the closest book meme:

1. Grab the nearest book to you.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Knitting Rules! and The Knitting Answer Book were closer to me by a foot or two, but you all are far too familiar with anything in those books for me to bother using them. Instead I'm going with John Steele Gordon's A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable. I heard an NPR piece about it years ago and finally tracked down the book at the library. I have yet to read a page. Maybe this will provide the impetus to do so. Anyway, here are sentences six through nine from page 123:

"The daily newspaper," wrote the North American Review in 1866, "is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities of modern civilization. The steam engine is not more essential to us. The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind."

Many people, deeply disappointed at the latest failure and influenced by the pessimism of many members of the board, had decided that the Atlantic cable was a wild-goose chase.

There was all kinds of synchronicity in the air last night. In a way this touches upon what I wrote regarding newspapers today. Replace "newspaper" with "internet" and it applies to what Donna wrote last evening about blogging and writing.

We take the ease and speed of modern communication for granted, so I'm fascinated to learn how much work was required to connect the world in a manner that, while not rapid by today's standards, was a watershed event. (The book is about the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866.) I don't think twice about being able to chat online with friends in Arkansas, but before the telegraph, it surely took weeks for a letter to travel almost eight hundred miles. Now imagine sending a message across the ocean. It is truly amazing how we can speak with one another instantaneously from practically any point on the planet.