CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser
This reminds me of the wonderful short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. In the story, the character attempts to authentically rewrite Cervantes’ Don Quixote — not by simply copying the known text, not even by attempting to re-live Cervantes’ life and spontaneously writing the novel just as Cervantes did, but by somehow living his own 20th century life and happening onto writing a novel that is word for word identical to Don Quixote. It’s a marvelous, impossible premise which speaks to our fantasies of creativity and fetishization of original artifacts.<p>“Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory.  Pierre did not want to compose <i>another</i> Quixote, which is surely easy enough — he wanted to compose <i>the</i> Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of <i>copying</i> it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”<p>Here’s a PDF of an English translation:<p><a href="http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-Pierre-Menard.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-P...</a><p>The story has some really funny sections where Borges compares a passage by Cervantes with an (identical) passage by Menard, comparing their style and meaning (which are not the same!). It's just fantastic.