“[Alighiero] Boetti was just about to embark on his major work of the early ’70s, the compilation of a list of the world’s one thousand longest rivers, which would be published as a book in 1977. It may not be immediately apparent that this was a huge undertaking in geographical research, calling not for consultation with available reference works but for extensive inquiries with scientific institutes around the world. As Anne-MArie Sauzeau-Boetti wrote in the book’s preface, of the various ways of comparing rivers according to size, that of length is ‘the most arbitrary, the most naive, but even today the most common.’ Any true measurement of a river’s length, as Sauzeau-Boetti points out, is rendered ambiguous by ‘its meanders and its passages through lakes, its branching around islands or displacements in the delta, by human intervention along its course, by the ungraspable limits between fresh and saltwater.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.’ Boetti’s task in compiling his list of the thousand longest rivers was to give an apparently logical and scientific structure to an obsession, an irrational project – to produce a disinterested contribution to knowledge that would be not only useless but perhaps not even really knowledge. One wants to ask, as a narratorial voice in Ulysses does of its hero, ‘What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?’ And to answer, as did its oddly Whitmanesque interlocutor: ‘Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level.’ ”

(Barry Schwabsky, “Imaginary Itineraries: Alighiero Boetti’s Dossier Postale,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 26 no. 3 (July–August 1995), p. 91.)

“— And I hear this and I start thinking, What is my child thinking?; now, for the first time, I need to know what my child is thinking; for what are his or her thoughts if not my own – though purified, and stripped of inessentials; that, for me, had been a reason to have a child: to be able to think again, but anew, afresh, displaced; after all, it is called conception; until now, I haven’t wanted to communicate with my child through anything even approximating language; all through my first months of pregnancy, I was glad to dispense with literal meaning, to free myself from the restrictions of verbal significance; then I could just listen, and hear what my child – my self – was telling me without words; and there was much that I heard; but no longer: now I want to hear what my child would like to say – what he or she would want to say; in an excess of significance I had waited 5 years before agreeing to conceive, following the California Organic Growers’ Association guidelines for reconversion of soil; it was foolish, I knew all along, but I needed it: I needed some objective metric; now, again, I need some objective metric: I want to know what my child is thinking; I can no longer rely on an absence of meaning: I have been betrayed by silence and interpretation; now I want to know what my child is thinking; I am terrified of unmeaning—”

(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, p. 419.)