Cultural is our business 37 The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph (Baltimore to Washington). II mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz. All the fuss and feathers about existentialism was the direct result of pulling out the connections between events as in a telegraph newspaper, pulling the story line of art as in symbolism. The exisfentialist trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system. Professor Morse’s telegraph is not only an era in the transmission of intelligence, but it has originated in the mind of an entirely new class of ideas, a new species of consciousness. Never before was anyone conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city–40, 100 or 500 miles off. For example, it is now precisely 11 o’clock. The telegraph announces as follows: 11 o’clock— replying to Mr. Butler upon the adoption of the Senator Walker is now two-thirds rule. It requires no small intellectual effort to realize that this is a fact that now is. and not one that has been. Baltimore is 40 miles from Washington. It is a most wonderful achievement in the arts. (From David Tanner’s manuscript on Print Technology in America, to be published by McGraw-Hill)