There's a house that a man named Seabury Tredwell bought in 1835 for $18,000 on East 4th Street here in New York. It's now a museum, and for a small amount of money you can remind yourself how different the world used to be. Seabury's youngest daughter, Gertrude, lived there until she died in 1933 at the age of 93, penniless and lying in a four-poster bed hung with tattered, fraying curtains.

They found a bolt of fabric in the attic and re-did the bed curtains, and everything else is as it was in 1870 or so -- a family house around which the lower East Side grew up. You're supposed to be reminded of Henry James's Washington Square, and Gertrude has a sad story of love denied associated with her. But it reminded me of Being There, and the gardener suddenly stumbling outside his lifelong home into 1970s Washington D.C. (He tells someone that his name is Chance, the gardener, and she hears that as "Chauncey Gardiner" and takes him straight home.) Let's just say that the house stands very much by itself, isolated but real.

When someone asked the guide what the small round screens were that were sitting on the (now completely inoperable) piano, he said that people reading books or writing letters by the light of a candle would use these screens to keep direct light from shining in their eyes. Direct light was too much, even though the candle put out (puts out, I guess) only about 50 watts. People lived their lives in daylight or dimness.

He also said that even though there were eight children and travels and prosperous times and a farm in New Jersey, the family had left behind only three letters. Everything else had presumably been destroyed. The three letters were tantalizingly chatty and warm. As a result, the museum staff knows a lot about the furniture in the house but almost nothing about the people who lived there.

As you go out you notice the steep marble steps to the front gate, and you think about the people who kept those steps clean and watched the neighborhood change. All gone now, and no letters left behind.

So we now live in constant bright light, if we want to. Darkness has been completely overcome, and every bagel store is lit hotly and evenly -- not a shadow survives. We also leave very complete records of our lives (maybe involuntarily) as we move around the world. We write few letters (except for thank you notes), but we leave innumerable messages of various kinds everywhere. Our histories are well-lit (if we want them to be), and our networks transcend boundaries like Broadway or the Hudson River. I don't have a conclusion to offer, but it felt good to explore another world. No wonder the Victorians embraced the telegraph.