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For myself, as a writer, there are few things more humbling than considering the fact that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was written by a man for whom Russian, not English, was his native tongue: It is a book that uses the English language so deftly and elegantly that even after numerous readings, secondary and tertiary meanings of individual sentences are discovered; a book that does not merely showcase outright command of the language, but a deep and evident love of it.
It’s almost as daunting, though, to recognize the fact that when Nabokov crafted his masterpiece, in such perfectly structured, magniloquent prose, he did so without the aid of a computer. As someone who liberally cuts and pastes entire paragraphs when drafting a weekly newspaper column—someone who moves sentences to-and-fro till they find their appropriate spots on the page—it’s hard to come to terms with the idea that, until the very recent past, writers did not have such a luxury at their fingertips. I won’t say I can’t imagine it, because I was writing on a typewriter as recently as my freshman year of college, but I can’t imagine going back to it, and when I struggle with my own words on a screen, I am entirely unable to visualize Nabokov struggling with his words without a screen.
On a similar note, this past Sunday, August 6, 2006, marked the 15th birthday of the World Wide Web. Though the technology and ideas had been circulating for some time prior, it was 15 years ago that those ideas and that technology were finally functionally wed and the first website was put online. And much like my relationship with my computer’s word-processing applications, it’s not hard for me to remember what it was like to live without the Web, but it’s almost impossible for me to consider living without it now.
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E-mail Mike Nelson at mnelson@longislandpress.com. | 
