We all did our best to fill the bill, but "Bucky" Fuller could no be restrained in his enthusiasm, I was typically ambivalent ("blessing or curse") and Boorstin was characterisically pragmatic and realist. After a recess during which we were urged to be more pessimistic, Boorstin, having listened to woe-speakers from the floor, said, "These are whinings of the sort Americans heard 100 years ago at the Philadelphia Exposition, where Alexander Graham Bell's invention, the telephone, was being given a hearing. Was it fair?

We three agreed that every professor we knew, every writer of our acquaintance, and we ourselves, did not welcome the cursed telephoned interruptions.. Franz Kafka wrote that "for the writer the silence is never silent enough; the night is never night enough." It was devastating to the soul to have interruptions, sometimes trivial and sometimes troubling, which interrupted the creative flow.

But then, also from the floor and from us came other reminders of the blessing. There was testimony, for instance, of someone's mother who was confined to a senior citizens' home, which was limiting her freedom and thus her soul Then someone: a club president or a pastor would call her and ask her to make some phone calls to other members, and she did. She welcomed the chance to be in touch with other souls, over matters trivial or troubling. The technology of the telephone was then a blessing.

Virtually everyone everyone I know knows complains about the curse of E-mail which demands to be answered at once. A curse. But there are ways to organize the schedule so that this task does not overwhelm. (I am told.) Meanwhile, the blessing side is also there. I am a retired pastor who can continue in "the care of souls," as pastoral activity was officially called, across the miles and the decades. Recently a former student who teaches in Haifa linked up with a former colleague who teaches at Notre Dame to elicit and produce almost a hundred reports an greetings from my Ph.D. dissertation advisees scattered everywhere. In the only-snail-mail era I would perhaps have heard from a half dozen, while the rest would be lost or in my mental shadows.

I despise spam and the misuses of the internet in blogs which bring out the worst in the worst, but I celebrate the ways friends greet friends, the distant sustain relations, and the hopers spread hope to the disappointed.

Name a technological invention all the way back to camp- and cave-fire starters or the wheel, that does not a blessing AND a curse side, and I'll be astonished. I'd go on further, but I hear the "you've got mail" voice sounding off. So I will press the "Sent" key and go back to the darkness and night in which I was working.