Great piece! Mind if I re-stack it to my Fields & Energy Substack (https://aetherczar.substack.com/)? It will complement the post I'm doing later this week on "What is 'Free Space'?"
I think this would all be interesting on its own but it is made immeasurably :) more interesting through the filter of your lens. A fun Sunday morning read. Thank you. It reminds me of the work I do in with trauma therapy where I tell my clients that we don’t need to fear failure of an approach or a session because it’s just more information.
The last line calls Herman Melville's career to mind. His best novels are the failures, the dumpster fires, the ones (excepting Moby-Dick) that add up to less than the sums of their parts—but are too deliriously ambitious and too laden with passion and roiling genius to ever forget.
Aha! So you've read his first and last works. The real weird stuff in in the middle. Obviously there's Moby-Dick, but if you're looking for something more bizarre and off the beaten path, try Mardi—his third book. After his first two publications, which were basically embellished memoirs of his travels in the South Pacific, Herman decides to compose an actual work of fictive invention. Superlatives fail me when I try to describe how hard and how far this thing goes off the rails. But as you read it, you're seeing him beginning to tap into the true depths of his powers for the first time, and losing control of them in short order. It's an absolutely fascinating mess of a book (and it destroyed the good reputation he'd cultivated from Typee and Omoo).
It's a really fun read, but it helps to go into it with the foreknowledge that the author (incidentally a genius and one of the greatest prose stylists of the English language) completely loses the plot and spends some hundreds of pages chasing frantically after it.
Funny enough, I read Amir Aczel’s book about the same thing, and he wrote another great one called “Finding Zero,” about searching for the oldest known use of zero and its cultural significance in eastern philosophy.
Great piece! Mind if I re-stack it to my Fields & Energy Substack (https://aetherczar.substack.com/)? It will complement the post I'm doing later this week on "What is 'Free Space'?"
I’d love that. Thank you Hans. Good to meet you.
Great meeting you, too!
I'll restack your post on Friday.
I think this would all be interesting on its own but it is made immeasurably :) more interesting through the filter of your lens. A fun Sunday morning read. Thank you. It reminds me of the work I do in with trauma therapy where I tell my clients that we don’t need to fear failure of an approach or a session because it’s just more information.
Right! So many ways to apply this lesson. Thanks for reading, Ben.
The last line calls Herman Melville's career to mind. His best novels are the failures, the dumpster fires, the ones (excepting Moby-Dick) that add up to less than the sums of their parts—but are too deliriously ambitious and too laden with passion and roiling genius to ever forget.
Great connection. I read Typee and Billy Budd, and I've been wanting to dig deeper.
Aha! So you've read his first and last works. The real weird stuff in in the middle. Obviously there's Moby-Dick, but if you're looking for something more bizarre and off the beaten path, try Mardi—his third book. After his first two publications, which were basically embellished memoirs of his travels in the South Pacific, Herman decides to compose an actual work of fictive invention. Superlatives fail me when I try to describe how hard and how far this thing goes off the rails. But as you read it, you're seeing him beginning to tap into the true depths of his powers for the first time, and losing control of them in short order. It's an absolutely fascinating mess of a book (and it destroyed the good reputation he'd cultivated from Typee and Omoo).
Thanks for the recommendation. I need something to read on the plane next week, and I'm excited about it now.
It's a really fun read, but it helps to go into it with the foreknowledge that the author (incidentally a genius and one of the greatest prose stylists of the English language) completely loses the plot and spends some hundreds of pages chasing frantically after it.
Thanks for reading, Ben. I read Six Easy Pieces about once a year. You might enjoy Sean Carroll’s new book series “The Biggest Ideas In The Universe.”
Funny enough, I read Amir Aczel’s book about the same thing, and he wrote another great one called “Finding Zero,” about searching for the oldest known use of zero and its cultural significance in eastern philosophy.