Shape-Shifting Archive

Once a blog has grown in size and has many links, in my case often functioning as footnotes, it becomes obvious that the Internet is but a so-so archive. Things don’t stay in place, links go bad. Today I wished to find an essay by Mortimer Adler I’d linked to a while back and discovered that the link now produces commercial pages, a different one each time I click it. I had to edit the post and get rid of the reference. We expect reality to reflect a certain permanence. When I see an apple and bite into it, I expect a certain taste and texture—every time. When I reach for the big brown volume which says Aristotle on its spine, I’m startled to open it and find it filled with the adventures of Superman.