In Traveler, Your (Digital) Footprints, Chuer Yang ’27 explores the various internet rabbit holes she’s tumbled down.
“’Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’
‘Where we going, man?’
‘I don’t know, but we gotta go.’”
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road
I have never had a strong enough constitution to stop myself from getting lost in the labyrinthine sprawl of information at my fingertips. I can’t help but be drawn to the 17th citation at the bottom of a Wikipedia page; I am destined to chase after the briefly cited study in that article from The New York Times. A mere peripheral glance is enough to flare up my hedonistic disregard for the items on my to-do list.
In roaming the hills and valleys of our great cultural landscape, my pilgrimage has become one marked by hyperlinks and open tabs. The World Wide Web has made it possible to preserve the here-and-there ephemera of past worlds, and I am on a quest to collect as much of it as possible.
The dr. T Project
Recently, I was browsing the Stanford Events calendar to curate my weekly repertoire of events when I wondered what options my best friend across the country might be choosing for her own Google Calendar. Scrolling through the Yale events calendar, something caught my eye: the dr T projecT: Shortbread, San Pellegrino and Three Things Worth Knowing.
With a few keystrokes and a Google search, I was led to a bright orange background covered by a mosaic of flipcards with various faces, icons and landscapes. The dr T website is a collection of 30-minute lectures by Shawkat Toorawa, the Yale Brand Blanshard Professor of Arabic Literature, spanning from when the project began at Cornell in 2011 to Toorawa’s present tenure at Yale.
Behind each card are “Three Things Worth Knowing” — elements of literature, culture or music:
March 26, 2013 lecture: Frank Deford, Wong Kar Wai, and Muddy Waters
- Frank Deford is an “American Award-winning sportswriter, novelist, and NPR radio commentator…”
- Wong Kar Wei is an “accomplished Hong Kong second wave filmmaker and auteur, of such films as In the Mood for Love, 2046 and Chungking Express.”
- Muddy Waters is “the father of modern Chicago blues…”
November 4, 2017 lecture: Borneo, Somerset Maugham, Deadicated
- “Borneo… is the third-largest island in the world.” It is the home of three countries and Mount Kinabalu.
- W. Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer known for his keen insight into human nature and works like Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge.
- “Deadicated is a 1991 tribute album to the Grateful Dead.”
After some more digging, I came across an article from the Cornell Daily Sun about the lecture series. The article mentioned the following tripartite composition:
April 9, 2013 lecture: Antonio Machado, Changi, “Parallel Lines”
- “Changi is the name of the eastern end of the island of Singapore.”
- “Parallel Lines is a multi-platinum studio album released in 1978 by the New Wave American group, Blondie.”
- “Antonio Machado (1875–1939) was a Spanish poet and a member of the Generation of ’98 who made a living as a professor of French. His poetry is contemplative, plaintive and socially conscious.”
Machado’s Poem: “Traveler, your footprints”
The next leg of this journey took me to Machado’s Poetry Foundation profile, where I stumbled across the inspiration for the name of this column: “Traveler, your footprints.”
“Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.”
Machado meditates on self-determination, freedom and life’s impermanence, but if there is anything to really take away, it’s that life is made day-by-day, moment-by-moment. In the barren cold of winter quarter, I hope this poem can serve as a gentle reminder that, as poet David Whyte said, what we can plan is too small for us to live!
On the joys of cerebral wandering
But truly, reading through documentation is akin to strolling about the streets of a foreign city. Follow the olfactory offerings in the alley to a roadside cafe. Meander towards the beating surf of the sea and feel the soft sand slip through your fingers. When you rest your feet sitting at the stairs of the church in the city centre, you’ll be in awe of the beauty that you discovered in chasing the simple impetus of your mind. This is the sublime experience of intellectual flaneurism.
In the words of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, excavating and traveling the internet is an exercise in one’s own “angelheaded” freedom.