We are stung by it, in Flannery O’Connor’s world, where grace is a holy bee attracted to the colors of the soul’s peacock-like feathers, or we are brushed by a mere grace singing like a wind, stirring Wallace Stevens’s “gold-feathered bird” in “The palm at the end of the mind”; its “fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” and we become grace when we are satisfied to merely be. In any case, we can not know if grace will, like Portia’s mercy, “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,” or if grace, like Flannery’s wooden leg, will smack us between the eyes as we roll casually under a mellow blue wave.
So it seemed when we were close to rest last evening, checking our Gmail, and noticed, in the sidebar, links, to ads, whose words appeared pulled directly from our text. After a few clicks, we got to the bottom of this, for Google explains: “Ad targeting in Gmail is fully automated, and no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information.” As if we should be comforted by the fact that no humans read our email; it’s not the humans we are worried about, we thought, and thought again of Richard Brautigan’s (1967) “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” We are living with the machines now, their grace as palpable as bees whose dance would show us the way to an immortal light, which is to say a mere mortal light, but which might be enough to light us a new path to an old palm.
The Coming of the Toads 