That giant engine, incessantly gorging all the intellectual sap of society, incessantly vomits new material for its work. The entire city is its scaffolding. Every mind is a hive. Even the humblest soul may spark a trend or alert the whole to an issue. Every day a new deposit is laid. Certainly, these structures grow and pile up upon each other in endless spirals. There is a confusion of languages, untiring labor, incessant activity, a furious competition of all humanity, a promised refuge for intelligence against a deluge of noise, against another submersion by barbarism. Connected by wires, freed by wireless, the bonds that hold Houston together are nothing more than minds.

If you were to receive from the city an impression of its whole, do not ascend to the highest peak of downtown or the Galleria, behold, the millions of minds, blogs, twitters, conversations, transactions and robberies starting from their sleep at any moment of the day. At first you hear only scattered tinklings from point to point, as when musicians are giving one another notice to begin. Then, all of a sudden, behold—for there are moments when the mind can actually see—behold, ascending at the same moment from every person a column of existence, as it were, a cloud of harmony. At first, the vibration of each seems clear, direct, and isolated from the rest in the splendid blue sky. Then, by degrees, as they expand, they mingle, unite and are lost in one another. All are confounded in one magnificent concert. They become a mass of sonorous vibrations, endlessly sent forth from the innumberable minds—floating, undulating, bounding, and eddying over the town, and extending far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. That sea of harmony is not chaos. Wide and deep as it is, it has not lost its transparency: one may perceive the winding of each group that escapes from the mass; one can follow the dialogue by turns grave and clamorous, of Screw music and the jackhammer; one can perceive the octaves leaping from chattering phone to phone; you observe them springing aloft, winged, light and effortless from laptop to laptop; falling broken and limping from voice to ear. You can admire among them the undulating sea of observations and deprecations on twitter, whose moods incessantly flicker. You see clear and rapid trends running across the list, in luminous zigzags, vanishing like flashes of lightning. Down in myspace is a shrill and broken scene; nearer is the sinister voice of facebook; farther away emails are forwarded in showers of badly cropped photos and garish fonts. Then, again, from time to time that mass of sublime noise half opens, and gives passage to an actual person, who glitters like a cluster of stars.

To anyone who thought that the internet would kill the edifice, that one art would dethrone another art, don’t forget how long that edifice took to make. The 21^st century began like the last epoch. First was literacy. Later they made programs. Phones became verbs, computers nouns. On servers across the globe visual culture and gobs of writing accumulated, forming societies that lived their lives over months or a few years, evolving and metastasizing. It was the liberty of humans from architecture of thought. Hence the countless number of avatars online, a number so prodigious that it is unbelievable. All the intellectual forces of society converge on the same net. In this matter, under the pretext of erecting monuments to commerce, art will develop to a high degree.