I have news that Eng lit graduates and lovers of music are tapping away in large corporate IT offices across the world. bending and inclining their heads over their computer screens, affecting their chances of being one of the 250.000 people who will be over 100 years old by the year 2051, with the low level radiation they are receiving in the course of their work; curving their spines and injuring their hands and wrists repetitively. Not to mention their brains.
but every now and again one will break out.
on the National Express booking form one W A Mozart is phantom passenger for us all. His name appears as the passenger on the help page which tells you how to fill in the boxes and order your ticket-
seems obvious really.it's good for marketing;A National Express passenger just might be a genius, whose music affects forever after, sensitive yet fun, by all accounts, a bit edgy and dissolute, perhaps? often strapped for cash, a traveller. but possessing the quality that would make his name raise a complicit smile hundreds of years later, among the unsuccessful intellectuals who would book a cheap coach ticket to Leeds. It holds out to the customer the promise of stylish credibility , a touch of raffishness, perhaps the chance of listening to some Mozart on your headphones and feeling happy and fulfilled, a promise not always achieved.
But lo! Another strange thing. signing up to Google, the help page for the form there is full of text from, if my eyes do not deceive me and my memory does not fail, Paradise Lost! Is this a strange comment by one John Doe on the state of US political health, or is it some summa cum laude graduate who has burst out of his googling chains to post lines of 17th century poetry on the most banal thing he could think of, and thus cast his bread upon the tidal waters of googledom. Is it a lament from the kingdom of google made by a pale youth or maid, yearning for beauty and truth, looking beyond the plasma through the windows to the clouds beyond? And contemplating the Fall.
