What it is like to be in Milan right now.

Foucault's Pendulum is set in Milan so last night I was reading about street protests in a city which at the moment must be in a weird state. Anyway, the book has such a sense of impending revelation, that I could not help feeling that it was going to work in the plane crash at some point. Along with the virtual reality world, what if we had a virtual reality novel which wrote itself as world events occur. There is a web facility which trawls all online news stories and writes a sort of composite article. You would only have to change the writing style slightly to get a continuous novel - like the book in the "The Neverending Story" which is still being written when you reach the last page. We could filter the Zeitgeist down to a daily chapter of what would be a truly epic book. However, after my rant yesterday about the lack of Social History, it would have to take account of the smaller details of modern life.

Chapter 13952 - Thursday 18th April 2002 CE

It was a serious mistake, to start the day in the middle of an Ocean where nobody except a few sailors and islanders could appreciate how wonderful days actually were. This day was quite special in that it was special to someone in the world. It was the day someone was born, the day someone fell in love and the day when someone died. It was of course apt that today started - like all the others - in the middle of this particular ocean as one of the people who died, had sailed this ocean more than once to prove things which he thought were inalienable truths and that others thought were idealistic rubbish. He was old and he was a hero so that he had died was sad but it did not matter because he done so much. This day was happy because he had lived and not sad because he had died. Many other people died on this day and that was sad because they were young and they had not done a lot of things other than be miserable and be hungry, but some of them were heroes as well. In about the middle of the world or where the middle of the day would be if you wanted to measure things like that, there was an accident and it was frightening because it reminded a lot of people of other people who had been killed. There were also a lot of people for whom such things were meaningless because they are hungry and because they have no medicine. The day was like all the others and still it was special. It was everyone's only chance at this day.