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Recently, for a book I was writing, I needed to track down a statement that I believed came from John Henry Newman. And I knew just what to do: I googled it. I typed in the key words from the quotation and immediately got confirmation that the author of the statement was indeed Newman, though I had misremembered it slightly. But now, if I was going to quote the statement in my book, I needed to get a proper source for it—a particular volume, its publisher and publication date, the page number the quotation is on—and websites rarely provide that sort of information. But no problem: I could simply turn to Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book" feature. Once I figured out which of Newman's books could be internally searched, it took me two or three minutes to find the one the quotation came from, to make note of the page number, and to copy the publication information and paste it into my book manuscript. Task accomplished.

But what the satisfaction of finding, immediately, "just what you're looking for" hides from you is the simple fact that you have not found anything you weren't looking for. That is, the technologies that enable such unerringly direct access to the object of your quest depend for their success on a simultaneous concealing of everything except that object. Google in particular is so good at this that it offers an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which takes you directly to the URL that—according to Google's algorithms—best matches your search terms. And it is truly extraordinary how often "I'm Feeling Lucky" indeed takes you right where you want to go.

But Google is just an exceptionally well–honed example of this kind of technology, which is becoming pervasive. For instance, in writing that last paragraph I needed a synonym: I had used "hides" in one sentence and didn't want to use "hiding" in the next, but couldn't immediately think of a similar word. Thanks to my Mac's built–in thesaurus, a couple of mouse clicks led me to "concealing," which seemed to work well enough, so there it is. And I moved on. Why not? I have work to do.

Perhaps there was no reason for me to do otherwise. But it occurred to me to see what my old hardcover thesaurus might offer. This required me to find my old hardcover thesaurus, which, because I had not used it in so long, had migrated to one of the least accessible shelves in my office. When I got it out and looked up "hiding," I was led again to "concealing"—but also to a couple of hundred related words that my computer's thesaurus didn't suggest. And I noticed this: that the major term preceding "concealment" in the thesaurus is "secrecy," and the major term succeeding it is "falseness." The thought that concealment stands somehow between secrecy and falseness is provocative and cautionary. But I would never have seen it if I had not taken the trouble to consult a book which did not return instant results, and which almost forced my eyes to scan information that I was not looking for.

I did not take that trouble when I was looking for the Newman quote, largely because that would have required me not to walk two feet but a hundred yards, to my college's library—where I would have had to undergo the staggering burden of looking up call numbers, trudging to the stacks, and lugging a pile of books to a table where I could spend who knows how long looking through them. But if I had taken up such a Herculean labor, I would certainly have—however inadvertently and even against my will—learned a lot more about Newman than I now know, and perhaps could even have found other passages in his work that would have illuminated the quotation that I had slightly misremembered, or even have served as a replacement for it. And perhaps I would have discovered that I was taking the quotation out of context and that, far from supporting my argument, it actually undermined it. And there's the rub, or one of the rubs anyway. Now that the possible shortcomings of my online Newman–searching have entered my mind, I'm just going to have to go to the library after all. Exposing oneself to the fortuitous has its dangers, and perhaps a subliminal awareness of those dangers is one of the factors—along with sheer laziness—that keeps us focused on what we already know, or already think we know, we want. (This is a familiar strategy in many of life's venues: it's the reason that national restaurant chains position themselves at freeway exits. Why should we drive past the familiar to take a risk on the wholly unknown?)

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