A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.
Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.
But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.
My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.
You’re a formidable riddler and I’ll not match words with ye. Only save my crusted mug from out your ledger there for I’d not have it shown about perhaps to strangers.
The judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.
—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, ch. XI
Methinks Webster is a 19th-century Facebook refusenik.