Thank you

And, about to sign off, I need to thank you, the reader, for visiting. Whether you stopped in by chance, or followed this blog for its entire span, I thank you. If you posted a comment, or forwarded a post to a friend, I thank you. You may have snickered, or scoffed - or perhaps you felt momentarily interested. Regardless, thanks. For a text remains inert without a reader, just as a musical performance depends, in some sense, on its listeners for its completion.

In Metin Arditi's The Conductor of Illusions, the protagonist takes his turn giving thanks. "He turned," we read, "again to the audience and thanked them with little nods of his head, looking first to the left, then along the boxes, across the back of the hall, where the cheapest seats were, then back to the boxes on his right, ending his courteous round of thanks at the presidential box."

Are there cheap seats on the Web? A presidential box in the internet? Arguably not: the connections may be slower, or the resolution slightly sharper, in certain locations. The table on which your dad's laptop sits may be a little high. But all seats, in our view, are important. And so, wherever you sit, you have my thanks.