As all great art does, the picture has a powerful presence. In addition, you sense the tens of thousands who have been here to see it in the past, and the millions more to come in the future. Fortunately, all these ghostly presences are silent, and you can plunge easily into Velazquez’s world and stay as long as you like.

Whether collectors consciously acknowledge it or not, this triple agglomeration of human energy (from the picture, and from viewers past and future) surely forms one of the bases of the compulsion to collect great—and even less than great—art. Negatively, it is to assuage loneliness. Positively, it is to be able to enter the human community at any time simply by stepping in front of the picture.

And so we acquire reproductions. The uncanny presence of the original is lost, but the reproduction calls up with effortless facility the memory of an encounter with the original, and of those wraith-viewers from the past and future hovering just outside the field of vision. The phenomenon works even in digitized form. The first time I went to the Prado web site and opened the tiny, pixeled Las Meninas, the shock of recognition and remembrance was strong.

The long, long thirty minutes when I was lucky enough to be alone in the room with the painting came back full force. I remembered not just the picture, but the magic of seeing it, the deep mystery of its presence.

Likewise with music. No recording-reproduction setup truly captures the spark of the moment of creation in a live performance. But any recording, low- or hi-fi, can take us out of ourselves and re-establish the connection with all our other musical encounters, past and future.

Viewing video movies, everyone bemoans the loss of the impact of the big screen as well as the group theatricality of the real movie experience. The anonymous communality of seeing the movie in a dark theater with a lot of strangers is gone. But we nonetheless acquire and watch, acquire and watch, for the same reasons that we listen to recordings or look at reproductions. Our loneliness becomes less. Our heart becomes more.

And the cultural wise-guys also bemoan the "alienation" produced by computers and the internet. But thanks to my clunky old Pentium (which in ten years will seem as funnily old-fashioned as a Commodore 64 seems now) I daily and nightly soar around the world, re-encountering the great (and the trivial) of human experience. Those near-sighted critics would be surprised, I think, how often I encounter graphics, words, music which jog my memory of past encounters with great art, great science, and great ideas. The skeletal music of midi’s? No problem? Caravaggio reduced to pixels? No problem. The Rig Veda reduced to my browser’s blurry Times New Roman? No problem. Because how often those revivified memories in turn give a further nudge to my sense of wonder and curiosity.

More than mere hypertext links, they are links into my (our) past, and many possible futures.

What's to say but, "Thanks, old HAL. You may be clunky and slow, but who's to complain about a stuck or squeaking door if it opens into a room contain Las Meninas?

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Magellan's Log IV

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