Oh, those search engines…

Every blogger wonders what leads viewers to click into his/her blog. WordPress, being the wonderful blog platform that it is, actually tells you every day what search terms landed people at your doorstep. Today’s, for example:

night landscape photography
scorpion without tail
baby scorpion
spider mite poop
moonflower plant tattoo
petrified wood lithic
capitol reef national park pictures
image of eggs cooked and uncooked
ghost town waterfall
alpacka red raft
people viewing sunset atop knoll
great gallery horseshoe canyon
ben franklin’s identity crisises
why solitude is necessary
unitards
pics of huge red tailed hawk
mice b gone
the maze canyonlandsmousebgone наскальные рисунки shaman rock art big long black caterpillars in fremont ohio

My name's Ranger Kathryn and I believe every literate person should read the classics.

Some of these are entirely predictable and anticipated; I can even figure out how the Ohioan looking for caterpillar ID found me. But — “ben franklin’s identity crisises” (sic) ?!? I’m racking my brain trying to imagine what I could have written! And, the Cyrillic query? I used an online translator to copy and paste that; my Russian reader seeks info on “rock paintings.”

Ah, the siren song of Google! The tantalizing allure of access to anything — literally anything — about which we want to read. The promise of more knowledge, more facts and opinions, more photos, and endless links. How can the classics compete with it? What young person would patiently work their way through 700+ pages of The Brothers Karamazov — which took Dostoyevsky nearly two years to write — when one can breeze through a Wikipedia article about it which took perhaps a day to write?

Oh, sorry. I’m listening to my favorite Wagner overture — Tannhäuser — and its lofty, chromatic, brooding tone always inspires me to ponder Grand Themes. Here’s what I have to say: leave my blog and go pick up a classic. Today. Be enlarged.