Runaway Future

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

Full Letter

I have a friend who really enjoys film and music. He’s quite a bit older than me, in his mid-60s and the movies and music he enjoys the most are from an era before my own. Classical music and the golden age of film from the 30s and 40s. There’s been a few times that he’s had the good fortune of seeing a film that he might have originally seen 50 years ago, or hearing a piece of music that he hasn’t heard for over 40 years.

When he explains it to me, the joy of hearing music that he only heard as a child or seeing a film that he only read about when he was younger, his eyes light up with an animated joy, but in the same vein, I know it’s a joy that I won’t likely ever feel. Part of it is definitely lacking that passion for the form: I enjoy film and music, but not in a fanatical sense. But equally because in my memory, I’m not sure that there’s much in the film or music world that holds up to the test of time at least not to this degree.

Granted, it’s entirely possible that maybe I won’t see a movie like the Green Mile or Forrest Gump (to pick two out of the ether) for years or maybe even decades to come, but the distribution is so much different, with DVDs and downloads and reruns on television, all things that often didn’t exist when my friend was younger. The same goes for music, where back in the day, you had to be content with hearing a particular tune on the radio or perhaps buying a record and now I can stream most music from online sources, or purchase the digital file.

In a way, I’m jealous of my friend, when he tells me with enthusiasm that he’s going to stay up late and watch Turner Classic Movies at 3am when a film that he hasn’t seen in 37 years is playing. I feel that he enjoys the experience more because of the rarity of it. That, because of the time passed and the limitations (he doesn’t own a computer and has no pretenses to start), he gets to appreciate the film more, in ways I could never imagine. The same goes for ordering CDs from catalogues or over the phone to hear a single track once again after decades and to have that experience live up to or even surpass the expectations of memory and nostalgia.

To have the appreciation, that dedication, that love of art…it’s truly remarkable.

Solar eclipses are unique to Earth, as far as we know.

The reasoning is that the Sun is about 400 times the size of the Moon, but the distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 400 times farther than the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

So what results is a Moon that just barely covers the entire Sun in the Earth’s sky, causing a solar eclipse.

And because of those special set of circumstances that need to occur in order for an eclipse to happen, we’ve yet to discover another planet that might experience this phenomenon. Which, when you think about it, is pretty cool.

Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about the definite. Actions that can’t be undone. Words that can’t be taken back.

For good and bad, I’ve often avoided many of these situations, because the absolute is a scary spot. It’s live or die, it’s black or white. The fear makes it too easy to not accept the risk.

But more and more, the world around me seems to be encouraging taking a stand, making a step, marking a line and going for it. The things that you can’t go back on.

Some of it is unfortunate, facing the music as a result of my own stupidity, like a speeding ticket that used up $300 dollars I certainly would have loved to use elsewhere.

Some of it is going to be positive, like going ahead with the plan to make the Cartoon Curling Challenge happen this season.

Some of it is making me nervous, like decisions on the future, those calls that could change the whole course of a life.

It’s a paradigm shift and it’s easy to choose to stay safe, ensconce yourself in a productive and satisfactory lifestyle, never putting yourself out there, never testing your own  limits and challenging yourself further.

But that’s not much fun. Fortes fortuna adiuvat.

Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It’s the most important aspect of my life that I hate. The more central it becomes to how I live, the worse it seems for the world at large. I believe all technology has a positive short-term effect and a negative long-term impact  and – on balance – the exponential upsurge of technology’s social import has been detrimental to the human experience. Obviously and paradoxically, I’m writing these sentiments on a laptop computer.

Eating The Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman