1832-2013 (and some additional blank space) is a jump of not insurmountable means and so when I fill out any hospital forms for their ledgers, I enjoy telling the administrative staff that I am one-hundred thirty-one years old and some change. While it garners a blink of surprise from some of the Medical Assistants and PCAs, my Nurse -- dear Nurse Florence -- gives a scoff and bustles them out before I can trap them in their entirety. Is there anything in 2013 quite so powerful as a nurse with absolute control over a young man confined to his bed?
I think not.
But as I continue my confinement and hope to return to my friends and to this Potts Tower as soon as I can walk under my own steam, I grow more interested by the pastiche of information that is consistently available to the populace. Free, (more or less) peer-reviewed information that was shut up in libraries and behind the doors of universities in my time. It was information that I yearned for, that my teachers could only grasp at and though we imagined a day in which the world was small enough to share its knowledge, its perspective and the full breadth of its inter-connectedness, I did not think I would see it.
EXHIBIT A Maria Sibylla Merian, illustratrix and naturalist, took her notebook to share the world's incredible biodiversity a full hundred years before even I was a twinkle in my father's eye. The richness of colour and the depth of detail in her illustrations are only superceded by imagining her (a bloom of colour amongst the drab inconstancy of the sciences dictated by man at the time) with a pencil behind her ear as she industriously catalogued Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium.
I began to dirty my fluffy white tail discover her because of Google. And a doodle. What a curiosity is Google. All of the information you seek (or nearly), if only you know how to ask.
How lucky you are, New York City, to have such information at your fingertips if only you have the heart to seek. I do very dearly hope that you seek.