I find that when forced to wait out even a fast dial-up connection, it helps to have reading matter at hand of the kind that you should have read in any case. For instance, The Best American Essays of 1998, edited by Cynthia Ozick. It happens also to include, in Ozick's introduction, the best essay about the essay that I have come across in many years dedicated to learning what binds Montaigne to E.B. White, say. For me, bits of essays in this collection, Saul Bellow on graven images, for example, digested one or two paragraphs per session, feed my attentiveness (hence memory) better than, say, a poem a day -- unless, of course, it happens to be by Ogden Nash.

Another rumination on the virtue of technology.

I read an elegiac (need a less hackneyed adjective, but plow ahead) essay by Anwar K. Accawi who recounts what happened to a small Lebanese town when "The Telephone", the essay's title, entered the lives of it's inhabitants. . I came across it among the Cynthia Ozick--selected "The Best American Essays 1998." A few hours later I read of the adventures of a high technology writer (He edits The New York Times weekly section called Circuits) in getting to talk to his wife at home in the Eastern time zone from London, where he had business. With the help of some easily available computer stuff, and at no cost (except the short-term rental of a computer in a tea shop) he and his wife not only talked to, but saw, one another, on their respective computer screens, without fuzziness or stuttering images. Both essays are fascinating and slip in the question: Are we made better off by the new technology? The question flirts with inanity -- So what if we're not?-- but caused me to think about it anyway.