rumination on a whole minute

My father once told me that Exxon had had a red star for their logo, but in the climate of the Cold War they changed it. When the Soviet Union fell, he bought me one of their flags. He had explained tyranny when I was small, and the desolate vision of the police state stayed with me. All my life this flag had been the symbol of the terrible enemy; now it was suddenly the sad remnant of a dream of millions. ...

Much of the successful fantasy that I have read is obsessed with prophecy. Perhaps it makes sense: it harkens back to the old idea of cyclic time, the reassurance that what was will be again. But I don’t get it. Prophecy robs the characters of agency; it turns them into puppets. Yet it comes up again and again in the most successful fantasy—and science fiction. …

This isn’t about sex or the Asian experience in Canada (that sentence may draw a few confused Google visitors). At some point in high school, one of my English teachers told a story about the danger of drugs. A writer – perhaps Coleridge? – was high on opium. In his trance, a sudden a flash of insight revealed to him the truth of reality: of life, the universe, and everything. He wrote it down, and when he recovered from his trance, he read what he had written: . . .

I just finished Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s book Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature. At first he captured my attention with his description of an ice-bound culture in which “dogs . . . were leaders of men” (44). But he details so many civilizations it started to read like a catalog: this kind of vivid material became too rare in the few pages of material accorded each civilization. . . .

I’ve had it up to here with being lied to by politicians. I’m through with being cheated by businesses. I’m fed up with being shut out of the conversation. My generation has been betrayed. We won’t be treated like second-class citizens anymore. It’s time this country lived up to its obligations. . . .

I just read this story. Someone phoned the police because a student was photographing locks in Washington State. They were afraid he was a terrorist. He’s definitely a photography student. . . .

Once, I reveled in complexity. I studied the baroque rules of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and other complicated games. I knew the C programming language back-to-front: I delighted in the stringizing and token-pasting operators (# and ##) and gloried in the perversity of C’s declaration syntax. When I encountered a new system, whether it was a VCR, programming language, game, or what have you, I began by reading the manual cover to cover. Browsing Fidonet (similar to usenet) I thought how wonderful it would be to be overwhelmed by cascades of information. . . .

I was trying to explain to someone the other day why a small hack to add a feature to a program just wasn’t worth it. If you push a piece of software too far without going back and revisiting your design, there always comes a point when everything just starts to fall apart. That’s when you hit the wall. . . .

I wonder because these seem to be three important elements of spirituality. It is true that we tend to think that beauty is good – in nature, in people – not only ordinary goodness, but often moral goodness too. Religious art and people who speak of spiritual experiences testify to the bonds between beauty and religion. Fear is clear also – fearing God and fearing death are two powerful motivations present in all religions, and this fear is often explicitly linked to morality. But why are these three things all bundled up together? Is it a historical accident? Couldn’t there be two or three separate drives or institutions? If beauty is connected to morality, and morality to fear, is there a third connection between fear and beauty? Perhaps I have just picked out three arbitrary qualities of spirituality with no correlation beyond coincidence and the flow of the words off my tongue. Beauty, Morality, and Fear.

In The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen critiques personal development books (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People et. al.), and contrasts the values of the protestant ethic with those of his hacker ethic. One of these protestant values is that one should be goal-oriented. It occurs to me that this is the key difference between work and play. If you stop playing half way through, the play is in no sense a failure or not any less valuable. He describes how hackers like to play and experiment. This also makes me think of the old saying that life is about the journey, not the destination. So then life is about the play, not the work. I like that. . . .

Canada is a great space, filled with nature and a few people clinging to the edge. We do not belong here, surrounded by nature and living in boxes thrown together and ready to collapse. Our cities were built in a century and could vanish without trace in half that time, the land reclaimed by the trees. . . .