E R I K V I D A L

The First and Best of the 33 Strategies of War

Like Cortes you must locate the root of your problem. It is not the people around you; it is yourself, and the spirit with which you face the world. In the back of your mind, you keep an escape route, a crutch, something to turn to if things go bad. Maybe it is some wealthy relative you can count on to buy your way out; maybe it is some grand opportunity on the horizon, the endless vistas of time that seem to be before you; maybe it is a familiar job or a comfortable relationship that is always there if you fail. Just as Cortes's men saw their ships as insurance, you may see this fallback as a blessing--but in fact it is a curse. It divides you. Because you think you have options, you never involve yourself deeply enough in one thing to do it thoroughly, and you never quite get what you want. Sometimes you need to run your ships aground, burn them, and leave yourself just one option: succeed or go down. Make the burning of your ships as real as possible--get rid of your safety net. Sometimes you have to become a little desperate to get anywhere.

-- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War, 2007

SETH'S BLOG: Quieting the lizard brain

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don't read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we're going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

>> To read the rest of the article at SETH'S BLOG click here

In the Landmark Forum they have a great label for people who consistently give in to this kind of phenomenon (which, it's fair to say, is most people--and I certainly I've been one myself from time to time): the "95 percenters". You get 95% of the way through a project and then, right before the finish line, you stall out, you get nervous, jittery, you start to wonder if you took the right path after all, thinking, "Well, maybe I should go all the way back to the start and retrace my steps, just to be sure I made the right choices, took the right path..." Writers are particularly guilty of said phenomenon (or perhaps it just seems that way to me, from the writerly POV): I imagine I've lost count of how many times I or another writer I know has gotten to within a few pages of finishing (more often than not, a script), and then, rather than push forward and just finish the thing, we go back, edit, re-edit, fuss with the formatting, spend an afternoon trying out new titles, a new character name, think about re-inserting that one amazing but long (oh, sooo long...) subplot we cut right at the outset, and on, and on, and on...

Getting over the lizard brain can be a daunting task, but it can be done. How to do it? Hear it, LISTEN to it, know what it is, realize where it's coming from, silently nod your head in acceptance, and then move forward regardless. Sometimes the tiniest bit of blind faith in the human part of you can work wonders, when it comes to overcoming the lizard...

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don't read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we're going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

RE:FOCUS: TED TALK: SIMON SINEK Start With Why

We make assumptions about the world.  More importantly, our behaviors are often governed by those assumptions. But what if our assumptions are incomplete or wrong? This doesn't necessarily only apply to things when they go wrong...what about when they go right? Do you know why things go right? Most people would say yes - but then why is it so hard to repeat great success?  If we know why Apple is so innovative, for example, why can't anyone else do it? Don't you want to know WHY?

This is what I talked about when I had the honor of speaking at a TEDx event in Seattle this year. It was such a privilege to share the stage with some remarkable and inspiring people. Ed Visteurs, the only American to scale the 14 highest peaks in the world without oxygen, and Erik Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh's grandson and an amazing human being in his own right, to name but two. (Click here for other TEDx talks).

The vision is that everyone knows WHY. To learn more about why you do what you do, check out Simon's new book, Start With Why. If you order a copy, order two and give one away to someone you want to inspire. The goal is to share the WHY with as many people as possible.

>> To read the rest of the article at RE:FOCUS click here

One of the best I've seen in a while, absolutely a must see (entrepreneurs, artists, everyone).

Welcome back

Ladies and gentlemen, let's do this like a Buddhist. ERIKVIDAL.COM now updating daily. http://www.erikvidal.com

Someone Once Told Me That Snow Was "Philosophy Made Physical"...

In honor of, as Joyce once put it, the "snow falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling" here in New York today: from my own script "I am Lost in Oceans of Light", one of my favorite short monologues, from Evelyn--

Evelyn pauses, gazing into the snow globe. Lost in thought.

                    EVELYN
        Someone once told me, when we were
        looking out at the city, covered in
        snow, that snow was "philosophy
        made physical".
        That when the the world's covered with
        snow, you realize how much
        appearance and reality are
        different. That what you're seeing
        isn't what's real.
            (beat)
        I like that. How the snow blankets
        everything when it comes. It's a
        kind of beauty that can't be
        hoarded, a shared asset that's
        vaster than our island of self.

Evelyn continues playing with the snow globe--shaking it,
turning it over, watching the snow fall. Kyle watching her.

(Above: Radha Mitchell, my number one pick to play Evelyn, one of two female leads in "Oceans of Light", and who the part was written expressly for. My agent is sending the script out to her this very week, let us hope she falls in love with the part and says yes.)

STEVE JOBS: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

It certainly is a truism that you never realize, even remotely, how much you rely on technology to live your life until you're forced to do without it for an extended period of time. This is something that I've known to be true, in a kind of a abstract way, all of my life (well, that is, with the occasional iceberg of experience coming to the fore in my otherwise free-of-incident ocean: the 30 hour power outage here in New York a few years back, and so on); but it wasn't until about a month ago that I underwent--shall we put it lightly?--a very grounding experience.

Just after I'd gotten back from the "Healing Your Deepest Wound" workshop, I had a day-long layover in Manhattan before heading down to Orlando to see my mother for the first time in a few years. I'd purposely planned said latter trip to take place immediately after the former, thinking (and rightfully so, as it turned out) that anything I wanted to say, that any past images I wanted to clear (in myself), that, indeed, any healing that I might hope to finally take place whatsoever, if any of this was to ever happen, would, most likely, only happen if I was still riding the energy I'd taken with me from the workshop I'd been through only days previous. And while it's still not for me to say if any healing did in fact take place (though perhaps the process in and of itself has been aired and acknowledged--for me, now, this is probably enough), one of the interesting side effects, of spending that off day here in town meditating on both what I'd just been through (the workshop) and what I was about to go through (finally having it out with my mother) did serve to put me in, understandably, what I can only describe as a very acute state of mind... And in this, for lack of a better phrase, "rather sensitive" state, I had a premonition. And not just any premonition, mind you--anyone who knows me knows I've had a few of these in recent years, with the one caveat being that the vast majority of them, as profound as some may have been, have, at the same time, been almost impossible to DO anything with on this plane of reality--this one new particular "feeling state" was, for the first time, absolutely practical: and I suddenly knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, one very striking, very inevitable thing:

My computer's hard drive was about to fail.

Some news, considering that, between the half dozen or so computers I've owned over the last 15 years of my life, I have, not once, ever had any sort of hardware problem whatsoever that has resulted in any kind of data loss. And with this Powerbook I'd been using for more than two years? Never a single problem of any kind. As a result? Well--

I fear that I just might have fallen into that peculiar bad habit which is so endemic of our digital era: that of not backing things up.

For some--for most, actually, in this day--I'd imagine a data loss would entail the erasure of photos, music (though most of you will have had your music backed up on a portable device), and software (though again, likely backed up, this on the original CDs from whence it came). And perhaps a bit of writing, too, for a lot of you--though the diaries of many are increasingly being held online (witness the content you're reading right now). But for a writer... One who's been working consistently for four years on two scripts and a novel...

The loss, naturally, would be devastating.

I wasn't completely adverse to backing up my data, of course--it was just something that I did once every several months. But it never occurred to me--never, once, ever--that I might actually have to REVERT back to my saved data (from months past) and begin again from said foundation. The thought of it, the very thought, of having to reconstitute months upon months of thinking... It was a damning realization--and one I corrected IMMEDIATELY by reformatting an external firewire drive, disk doctoring it, and pushing absolutely everything I had on over to it--a process that took the better part of 5 or 6 hours (effectively killing this one day off, a day I'd set aside for more important things...). But happen it did, and the relief that followed--knowing that everything actually was, indeed, safe--was tremendous.

My hard drive, for the first time in my life, failed days after I got back from Florida.

I brought my Powerbook to the Apple Store here in Soho (twice, before they were of any help, and on the second visit the prognosis was simply, "Your hard drive has failed", which, obviously I already knew...), and then on over to Tekserve (highly recommended, on 23rd and 7th), who dutifully who recommended that, yes, they could replace the drive--up it, in fact, from 40GB to an even 100--but the work would take at least a week. Possibly longer. (As it happened, it took ten days--and then another week on top of that as it quickly became clear that I had to, yet again, re-install newer versions of the OS and re-register and/or re-pirate most of the software I had on the machine, but regardless, the personal data itself was safe, and thank God for that, and for premonitions in general, but I digress--) And during those few weeks, I would be, for the first time in years, actually on a forced vacation.

Or perhaps "vacation" is probably the wrong word. Perhaps "forced temporary retirement" fits the bill a tad better--but alas, for a writer, when the writing machine has been taken away, it is NOT a relief (though I always imagined it would be, here...); instead, it's more like sitting in the most hellishly dry desert you can fathom, not moving, waiting for water to come, taking it on faith that it will, and yet not knowing when, if ever, it will arrive.

I mentioned this sensation days later to my analyst (a Jungian, and hence we do a lot of dream work, but as this new state was affecting my life a great deal I certainly thought it bore mentioning), who in turn came back with the observation, "Exactly: this is a GROUNDING experience for you..." And, physically, it was: for so many years the various sources of conflict in my life--my demons, all of it--had been internal ones; and now, for the first time, the "wall" was not in me, but rather, it had actually displaced itself outside, into a separate, physical artifact. And there was nothing I could do about it--there would simply be no "flights of mind" for a little while: I was, then, in every sense, "grounded".

One of the side-effects of this phenomenon--so rarely encountered, and yet so crucial, I believe, for all of us--is that, when your creative life stops, and yet, this is all you have (and here, I don't, at this time, pretend to have any real social life to fall back on in circumstances like these), you really are forced to spend a lot of time looking into a kind of metaphysical mirror, cracked and distorted as it may be. And if you look long enough, and the silence goes on long enough, you're going to have to come up with, if not some answers, at least a few questions: questions which, for the longest of time, you just might have, as an intellect (ahem), found very clever ways of avoiding...

First the obvious, standard, metaphysics-of-being ones:

"If I subtract all of the experiences I have had, am having, will ever have, and can imagine having, what is it that is left over, if anything, that constitutes my sense of self?"

"Why have I made the choices that I've made? And did I ever really have any control over my having made them?"

"Am I living the right life?"

And so on. The standard stuff, nothing terribly profound, and clearly nothing all that far from anything that might arise out of a group of suitably inebriated college freshmen.

But here's where it gets interesting--if you extend the time at which your creative life has ground to a halt, and (having no other means of output, nor distraction), thus, as a result, you extend the time you spend in front of your (metaphysical) mirror, you begin to notice something: the questions start to take on an air of--shockingly--PRACTICALITY... Dig a few layers deeper, and you start getting to questions which, when you answer them (and here you'll find that you actually can), usually provide you with A) answers that you don't like and, wonderfully, terribly B) answers that you know you need to change, and can, but haven't.

Purely through a lack of your own volition.

"Why am I surrounded by the people that I am? And why do I feel like I don't have an authentic relationship with any of them? And never have? And never will?"

"Why am I doing what I am doing right now, in life? Why do I keep at it with all the passion and fervor I can muster, all the while knowing that, as happy as I am with the result, I hate the process and feel like it kills me just a little bit every time I go through it?"

"Why have I never truly known the experience of love?"

These are all questions that HAVE ANSWERS. They are easy answers as well, because it's not really so much about the specifics of any of the above given situations, as to what, instead, they all have in common...

Me.

This is grounding.

I have a lot more to say on this, and quite a few more posts to get up in the next few days, but in the interim, considering that I am now, obviously, back online and that my Powerbook is finally up and running in perfect working order, I'll go ahead and, having at least raising the issue, bow out this evening on something of a higher note: this with the commencement address given last month by Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple, the company that makes the machine I am now, once again, writing on) to the graduating class of Stanford University.

More soon.

Steve, take it away...

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

-- Steve Jobs

The Only Currency That Matters: Time

Thinking about the notion of time, this morning—how we perceive it, how we utilize it, and, perhaps even with a touch of melancholy, the realization that, after about 25, the manner in which our feel for time begins to dilate, seemingly slipping through our fingers at an ever more rapid pace, with each successive passing year...

An amusing anecdote, courtesy Rilke, below.

This petty official next door had got the notion one Sunday that he wanted to solve a curious problem. He supposed that he still had a long time to live—let us say, another fifty years. His generosity toward himself put him into a buoyant frame of mind. But now he wanted to outdo himself. It occurred to him that these years could be changed into days, into hours, into minutes—indeed, if only one had the endurance, into seconds; and he figured and figured and attained a sum the like of which he had never seen. He felt dizzy. He had to steady himself. Time is precious, he had always heard; and now he was surprised that a man who possesses such a lot of time should not be watched. How easily he could be robbed! But then his good, almost gay, mood returned: he put on his fur coat to look a little broader and more impressive, and gave himself this whole fabulous capital as a present, addressing himself with some condescension:

“Nikolai Kuzmich,” he said benevolently and imagined that he was also sitting on the horse-hair sofa, without a fur coat, thin and wretched; “I hope, Nikolai Kuzmich,” he said, “That your wealth won’t go to your head. Remember that this is not the most important thing: there are poor people who are entirely respectable; there are even impoverished noblemen and daughters of generals who try to sell things in the streets.” And the benefactor went on adducing several examples which were known all over town.

The other Nikolai Kuzmich, the one on the horsehair sofa who was receiving the present, did not yet look overjoyed at all; it seemed likely that he would be reasonable. Indeed, he did not change anything in his modest and regular way of life, and he spent his Sundays trying to keep his accounts in order. But soon, after only a few weeks, he noticed that he was spending incredible amounts. I shall limit myself, he thought. He got up earlier, washed himself less elaborately, drank his tea standing up, ran to his office, and arrived far too early. He saved a little time everywhere. But on Sunday there were no savings to be found. Then he realized that he had been cheated. I should not have changed my capital, he said to himself. How long a year is! But this wretched small change, that is spent, one doesn’t know how. And the afternoon became disagreeable as he sat there in his sofa corner waiting for the man in the fur coat from whom he wanted to ask back his time. He wanted to bolt the door and not permit the man to leave until he had produced it. “In bills,” he wanted to say, “Perhaps ten years each.” Four tens and one five, and the rest he could keep in the devil’s name. Yes, he was prepared to give him the rest, just to avoid any difficulties. Irritated, he sat there on his horse-hair sofa and waited, but the man did not come. And he, Nikolai Kuzmich, who had been easily able a few weeks ago to picture himself sitting there—now that he was really sitting there, he could not picture the other Nikolai Kuzmich, the one in the fur coat, the generous one. Heaven knows what had become of him; probably his frauds had been noticed and by now he was in prison somewhere. No doubt, this man had not ruined him alone. Such swindlers always work on a large scale.

It occurred to him that there must be some state institute, a kind of time bank, where he would be able to change at least some part of his shabby seconds. After all, they were genuine. He had never heard of such an institution, but in the address book one would certainly find something of the sort—under T, or perhaps it was called “Bank of Time”; it was easy to check under B too. Possibly the letter I had to be considered too, for it would presumably be an Imperial Institute, in view of its importance.

Later, Nikolai Kuzmich always insisted that on this Sunday afternoon he did not drink anything, though he felt, of course, depressed. So he was completely sober when the following events occurred, insofar as it is at all possible to say what happened. Perhaps he had dozed off a little in his corner, that might well be. This little nap relieved him a great deal at first. I have allowed myself to become involved in figures, he said to himself. Well, I really don’t know anything about figures. But it is obvious that they must not be conceded too much importance; after all, they are no more than an official device, to keep things orderly. Has anybody ever seen one, except on paper? At a party, for example, one could not possibly meet a Seven or a Twenty-five. There they simply did not exist. And then there had been this little mix-up, merely owing to absentmindedness; time and money, as if those two could not be kept apart. Nikolai Kuzmich almost laughed. It was a good thing if one caught up with oneself like this, and in time, that was the important thing, in time. Now everything would become different. Time—that was a touchy affair, no doubt. But did it concern him alone? Did it not affect others in the same way which he had discovered, second by second, even if they did not know it?

Nikolai Kuzmich even felt some delight at the expense of others: Let it—he just wanted to think, when something strange happened. He felt a draft past his face, past his ears, he felt it on his hands. He stood aghast. The window was shut tight. And as he was sitting there with wide open eyes in his dark room, he began to understand that what he felt now was time itself as it passed by. He literally recognized them, all these tiny seconds, one as tepid as the other, but fast, but fast. Heaven knows where they were rushing. That that had to happen to him of all people, when he considered any kind of wind a personal insult. Now he would be sitting there, and the draft would continue, his whole life long. He foresaw all the neuralgias he would get and was besides himself with rage. He jumped up, but his surprises were not over yet. Under his feet, too, there was something like a motion—not only one, several motions wavering in strange confusion. He froze with terror: could that be the earth? Certainly, this was the earth. After all, it moved. That had been mentioned in school, though it was passed over in a hurry, and later on they had tried to cover it up; it was not considered good taste to speak of it. But now that he had become sensitive, he could not help feeling this too. Whether other people feel it? Perhaps, but they did not show it. Probably, they did not mind it, these sailors. Nikolai Kuzmich, however, was unfortunately touchy precisely at this point: he even avoided trolley cars. He reeled around his room as if on deck, and had to hold on to right and left. To make matters worse, he suddenly recalled something about the slanted axis of the earth. No, he could not stand all these motions. He felt wretched. Lie down and keep quiet, he had once read somewhere. And since then Nikolai Kuzmich had been lying.

He lay there with his eyes closed. And there were times, less stormy days, as it were, when things were quite tolerable. And then he had thought of the poems. You would hardly believe how much that helped. If you recite such a poem, slowly, with an even stress on the rhymes at the end of the line, there is, so to say, something stable on which you can fix your eyes—figuratively speaking of course. How lucky he was to know all these poems. But he had always been especially interested in literature. He did not complain about his condition, the student who had known him for a long time assured me. Only, as time went on, he had developed an exaggerated admiration for who, like the student, walked around and could stand the motion of the earth…

...

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and be real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors…

— Rilke, “The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge”, 1910

Notes from Overground

An observation: we live, now, in a society in which all of our relationships, all of the various ways in which we as human beings communicate with each other, are, without a doubt, becoming terminally mediated by technology.

In keeping with this fashion, then, that has become so popular as of late: ladies and gentlemen, I, too, am going to utilize one of these technologies—the Internet—in order to have a terminally mediated relationship with you, my audience. Here, I am going to publish my daily musings on the Arts, Cyberculture, the New Age, Modern Love, and whatever else should happen along and strike my fancy during our brief time together. I am, in essence, going to do what a great many others are, in this day, doing: I am going to publish the very thoughts that make up my life—this for those few of you who’ve found their way here to read. And of course, what ongoing existential memoir would be complete, were I not to write and publish my own thoughts on the very process of writing and publishing my own thoughts? Indeed...

Welcome to my Notes from Overground.

Before I begin—and why not, then?—I woud like to set the stage by offering two selections which, I believe, together, should serve to distill—and this far more effectively than I might even think to attempt myself, at the moment—a few of the ideas surrouding the character of this aforementioned era in which we live. (Of special note here: do pay particular attention, oh reader, to the dates in which these selections were written—for the prescience at work is, here, truly stunning.)

They say Cleopatra (excuse an instance of Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls’ breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man (though to my mind it’s a superfluous luxury), that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents of adventures in the world.

Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then… In fact, those will be the halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Or course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then…”

-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground”, 1864

…

At the age when one still attaches great importance to everything connected with tailors and barbers and enjoys looking in the mirror, one also imagines a place where one would like to spend one’s life, or at least where it would be smart to stay if one did not care for it too much personally. For some time now such an obsessive day-dream has been a kind of super-American city where everyone rushes about, or stands still, with a stopwatch in hand. Air and earth form an anthill traversed, level upon level, by roads live with traffic. Air trains, ground trains, underground trains, people mailed through tubes special delivery, and chains of cars race along horizontally, while express elevators pump masses of people vertically from one traffic level to another; at the junctions, people leap from one vehicle to the next, instantly sucked in and snatched away by the rhythm of it, which makes a syncope, a pause, a little gap of twenty seconds during which a word might be hastily exchanged with someone else. Questions and answers synchronize like meshing gears; everyone has only certain fixed tasks to do; professions are located in special areas and organized by group; meals are taken on the run. Other parts of the city are centers of entertainment, while still others contain the towers where one finds wife, family, phonograph, and soul. Tension and relaxation, activity and love, are precisely timed and weighed on the basis of exhaustive laboratory studies. If anything goes wrong in any of these activities the whole thing is simply dropped; something else or sometimes a better way will be found or someone else will find the way one has missed; there’s nothing wrong with that, while on the other hand nothing is so wasteful of the social energies as the presumption that an individual is called upon to cling for all he is worth to some specific personal goal. In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn’t hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is. Besides, zoology teaches that a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.

It is by no means certain that this is the way it has to be, but such ideas belong to those travel fantasies reflecting our sense of incessant movement that carries us along. These fantasies are superficial, restless, and brief. God knows what will really happen. Presumably it is up to us to make a new start at any given moment and come up with a plan for us all. If all that high-speed business doesn’t suit us, let’s do something else! For instance, something quite slow-moving, with a veiled, billowing, sea-slug-like, mysterious happiness and the deep, cow-eyed gaze the ancient Greeks admired. But that is not how it is; we are at the mercy of our condition. We travel in it day and night, doing whatever else we do, shaving, eating, making love, reading books, working at our jobs, as though those four walls around us were standing still; but the uncanny fact is that those walls are moving along without our noticing it, casting their rails ahead like long, groping, twisted antennae, going we don’t know where. Besides, we would like to think of ourselves as having a hand in making our time what it is. It is a very uncertain part to play, and sometimes, looking out the window after a fairly long pause, we find that the landscape has changed. What flies past flies past, it can’t be helped, but with all our devotion to our role an uneasy feeling grows on us that we have traveled past our goal or got on the wrong track…

-- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, written in the 1920s, published 1954

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have arrived.