'Shaw didn't want to meet her in person for fear of breaking the spell'

Above, Moira Hodgson on George Bernard Shaw's love affair with Ellen Terry (above, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1863 at the age of 16).

It's from Hodgson's March 5, 2009 Wall Street Journal review of Michael Holroyd's new book, "A Strange Eventful History," about Terry and Henry Irving, along with the other major figures of Victorian English theater whose lives intersected with those of the two world-famous actors.

More: "'Ellen Terry is the most beautiful name in the world. It rings like a chime through the last quarter of the 19th century,' he [Shaw] wrote to her. They corresponded for more than a decade, but Shaw didn't want to meet her for fear of breaking the spell."

I have precisely the same sense about the many people around the world I've come to know through bookofjoe.

The great majority of my favorites I've never met nor spoken to nor do I have any interest at all in doing so.

The terms of the relationships which make them so appealing online cannot survive an in the flesh encounter, methinks.

So if you're passing through my Podunk town and want to get together, don't be too angry or put out when I make some mealy-mouthed excuse why I can't meet up with you.

In the end, it's because it's very, very hard for me to imagine anything better than my default setting, how I spend most of my waking life: walking on the treadmill, watching TV MOS (mit out sound), listening to Jimi Hendrix at ear-splitting volume, creating bookofjoe, petting Gray Cat and from time to time looking out the window at the birds and the squirrels.

If this makes me a loser, hey, I can live with that.