Neal Stephenson's alternate-universe conception of the academy has the architecture of a medieval university but the mindset of a classical academy. He manages to exclude the factory mindset so rapidly encroaching on so much of the turf in this universe, but fails to engage a much deeper controversy between those who view the life of the mind as a retreat from the world and those who see it as a deliberate engagement with as much of reality as possible. We can clearly see where Stephenson's sympathies lie by how much more closely he is able to paint the interior of his cloisters than the world outside them.

Here we have so fully confused the issue that we get few of the benefits of either approach. Modern academics have very little time for contemplation, and far too much of their work is in the service of the demands of society, which is growing more frivolous, distracted, and violent-minded by the day, to judge by the sorts of ideas that occupy front and center stage of our public lives. Rational arguments are drowned out in the mindless scream. They have a voice, of course, and many people hear it, but the effort of trying to filter out the dreck closes the ears to new ideas.

I'm still glad to be here, and thankful to the people who educated me. It's a good thing to have a strong mind that can stand up for itself, and a strong mind is something that can be passed on to other people, regardless of how talented they are. You don't have to be smart to think for yourself. But you do have to fight for it. Human societies only exist because there is some tendency in the mind to act with the group. That tendency gives rise to internal resistance and external pressure, because other humans feel the same desires. There will always be a tension between the university and culture; the question is how to respond to it.

Even after all these years spring does not fail to surprise me, how it emerges with such terrifying glory from what seemed like bare ground. I don't worry so much about this planet when I know how quickly the grass will come up through the cracks and the nightjars take possession of the McMansions, but it is sad to watch us try to shut all that life, which is intimately ours, out of our hearts because it scares us.

For Buy Nothing Day I went to Sleeping Bear Dunes, up in lower Michigan just west of Traverse Bay. It's about three hundred miles from Chicago, which took about seven hours to drive at my moseying pace. I love these long drives to the edges of the world, swimming up the interstates and their tributaries. I can't say much for small town Michigan. Muskegon, Ludington, Manistee, all seem molded from the same cheap plastic. I watched the town where I grew up follow the same trajectory, from open fields to pavement swarming with angry machines. It used to make me angry too; it used to have power over my own wild spaces. Now I just drive slowly, carrying my peace with me, looking at everything.

The dunes are formed by winds carrying sand over the lakes, where there is nothing to slow them down, until they reach the land and lose velocity. The shape of the dunes already there influences the movements of the wind, so the land shapes itself. This sort of feedback can lead to chaotic behavior: a five hundred foot dune seemingly content with its view will suddenly split in half or wander a hundred feet downwind. In such conditions life's contingency is immediately apparent.


And now it has laid aside its glory, and become small and quiet. Whatever you see is only a trace of its former existence, or its quiet hope for a future existence. It is a wilderness as profound as the emptiest desert. The heart's silences grow.

Knowledge of nature, like all knowledge, requires a setting aside of what had previously passed for truth. Anyone who claims science can be achieved without entering into ignorance and confusion is only a theorist. But in this respect the knowledge of nature differs: it is not only the mind that must be surrendered, but the body as well. If it is not placed, at least a little, at the mercy of the elements and its own needs, the most vital fact will be missed. You cannot even begin to speak the language until you become as vulnerable as the lives that you want to know.

The thing I forgot is how much light was there, and how many moods it can have near the sea. The bright surrounding glow in haze, the drum-tight flat blue, the suspended colors, the cold dull morning fog, the perfect repose and spreading distances of sunset. Under the water, too, where the sea thrashes through the rocks and through kelp as tall as trees, as pale as new grass. Fish of every description, orange and blue and yellow, strangely unafraid when you are used to chasing birds, and when you know how tenuous their lives are there.

It was an excess of beauty, and we had nothing to do but let it flow through our fingers.

There is a pleasant little mystery in the workings of physiology. So much goes on below the level of consciousness, but at times the more substantial changes become noticeable. The mechanisms are often unknown, and in any case they seem to have nothing to do with the inner experience of the transformation.

This is not to say that they are inaccessible to the understanding. The potter does not need to know the physics of clay to shape it. When the substance in question is governed by a complex web of finely balanced interactions -- when it is alive -- the supremacy of the intuition is even more evident. There are general rules, but these all contradict each other, and only become coherent to the observer who is completely immersed in the life that gave rise to them. It is a form of understanding that never destroys the sense of wonder.

I've been biking a lot this summer, ever since I moved up to North and Western, twelve miles or so from work. Not with any deep commitment -- I'll hop in the car if it's raining or if I know I need to stay late -- but enough to shave about 10 or 15 minutes off my time, and provoke my muscles into some unexpected construction. Age and experience have taught me to expect more complaining and a general tendency toward deterioriation, so the impression of there being some alien process at work in me is particularly strong.

There may be a general principle in this. Making a place for oneself in the world (which inevitably means society) is a process of setting up barriers. These are both internal to the mind, compartmentalizing the desires, and external to it, dividing the world into realms where various needs can be met. Experience creates forms and expectations, and an order emerges. But this order is static, and the internal life inevitably comes into conflict with it. Life is inherently inimical to these constructions; it accepts many contradictions, but its central unity will always find expression.

Straining against the husk the bones
In the dark unseeing conceive the source.
Knit with desire they spring up,
Surprised at their lightness. Something green
Gnaws at the stones in last year's tunnels,
Saved from ice by nimble hands
Serving other purposes.

The issue is not whether a world infused by or even composed of
technology is any more or less real than one in which nature
dominates. What matters is not the habitat, but the life, and life is
a far greater thing than habitat, though it is always subject to it.
Where does the life exist? Not in the fortuitous arrangement of atoms,
or the dynamics of their interactions, or even in the organism itself.
No, the life exists because the organism responds to its environment;
it exists in the exchange between the organism and its environment; it
consists wholly of relationship.

One of the aspects in which human life seems to distinguish itself
from the rest of nature is that its deepest currents require a choice
to live in them. You can go through this world well-fed, successful,
acceptable to the hive, without once risking your hide and feeling the
wild grace of surrender. As the old man with the microphone says in
Richard Linklater's Slacker, "The necessary beauty in life is in
giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself
and become coherent."

The question for me, by which I mean the thing I've got to find the
answer for, is how (and if) technology can contribute to my presence
in the world, to being open and responsive. Bikes are definitely in.
But the stuff that lets you be in ten places at once ain't doing
anything good for me.

way ahead of his time:

"There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadgetridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish." (The Long Goodbye, 1953)

The other day I was reading an ad for Google's new operating system, Chrome. Or maybe it's for their browser of the same name; I don't really care. It's "for people who live on the web". I guess people who live in reality don't really care what operating system they use.

I lost my Blackberry a couple of months ago after owning it for a little bit more than a year. Of course, it was an inconvenience having to cover my tracks. I set the thing to lock itself, so I wasn't too worried about someone calling Aboukir on my dime or deleting my email. But I had to get a new SIM card and I changed the passwords on all of the accounts it was linked to. I kept it backed up pretty regularly so I don't think I lost many contacts or notes.

This was about a week before I left for Africa, and I still had my clunky little Ericsson, so there was little point in replacing the phone. Then, by the time I got back I had gotten out of the habits associated with a constant feed of information, and I'm still using the clunker. It's sort of a pain to write text messages now, which also turns out to be fine. It's nice to hear voices.

One of the explanations for why a lot of people in rich countries are obese, which I think I first heard from Michael Pollan, is that our appetitive systems are adapted to situations where food is scarce and sweetness tends to indicate a high-value resource. So in places where the food is loaded with high fructose corn syrup and all kinds of sweeteners, most people have a hard time controlling how much they eat. I suspect an analogous situation exists for the human mind encountering the Internet. Like acquiring food for most of history, learning is slow and laborious. It's punctuated by moments of realization and mastery, when the pieces fall together and enable a new level of comprehension. Those moments are the payoff: they reinforce the behaviors that led up to them. And it's powerful stuff, as anyone who's encountered the life of the mind can attest.

The hypothesis is that the Internet, or more specifically the modes of presenting and transmitting information that the Internet enables, have greatly increased the availability of those payoffs. It's not just that more and more data is available online; there's an increase in the degree of interconnectedness. Back in the days of books and newspapers, if you mentioned a person or a concept, you had to rely on your reader's knowledge. The best you could do was cite a reference you used. Of course, references lead to other references, and a dedicated reader could follow citations in the same way we click on links. And I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to make the claim, which has always sounded a bit ridiculous to me, that we're learning or socializing in new ways because of new technology. The difference is in the speed, which I claim can make a qualitative difference. It's just like the sugar: the biochemical mechanisms for processing carbohydrate and protein molecules are the same, but the higher-level mechanisms for regulating how we seek out those molecules aren't able to deal with an overabundance of sugar. The result is that the energy in the sugar is not properly integrated into the organism, and a qualitative transition from health to sickness.

Maybe in ten years or so people will be ready for a Slow Information movement.

I've finally started packing up my books. Eight boxes (sort of a useless unit, except with respect to the work involved in carting them down and then up three flights of stairs), and three bags set to go back to the bookstore. It's kind of a good feeling, blowing the dust off the pages of new and old friends and setting them carefully in stacks that never quite fit their boxes. The old friends are used to the ritual now, especially the ones that traveled from Oregon to Boston to Berkeley to Chicago, too much a part of my travels to let them go though I don't know the next time I'll ever crack their pages. Borges kept me company on a lot of lonely nights in Massachusetts, in days when I was a good deal more introspective and a lot more concerned with abstract form and principle. I see him in my photographs from those months, all black and white studies of abandoned factories under streetlamps and other curious shapes invisible and ignored in the life of the city. My life is almost entirely different now, though I still take a great pleasure biking down Milwaukee Avenue late at night where it runs into the meat-packing district. I've changed so much in those ten years I can hardly imagine a tenth of the things I must have been thinking, but holding these mute inanimate objects seems to bring it all back. As if they had a soul, but a different sort of soul from that of an animal, not an independent creation, but a bit of my own life. Memory, of course, but where does it reside? In my own synapses, but requiring a specific key to unlock them, which I placed in these things. They are a sort of home, taken together, a landscape where my mind can roam freely. The only home I've had for quite a while.