Sunday, June 26, 2005

Virtual Afterlives

An old aquaintance of mine from college days passed away last month. It was a suicide. Left is his homepage, where he had written very readable series of columns on Macintosh computers. He had his own one-man company, minding all the computer-related trouble-shootings. I'm not sure if anybody's going to take the trouble of closing his page down.

Francisco Varela, whose El árbol del conocimiento I translated in 1987, died in the year 2000. His homepage at the University of Paris (Jussieu) is still there. Will he live on in this manner, in his secret digital niche in the vast cyberspace?

We leave traces, and although immaterial, those traces survive our bodily existence into quasi-eternity.

What is life if not a series of traces?
What is death if those traces tenaciously remain?