Felicity and Depravity

July 23rd, 2009 § 0

From a terrific English translation of the Zhuangzi, we have this gem:

“This Mighty Mudball of a world spews out breath, and that breath is called wind. Everything is fine so long as it’s still.  But when it blows, the ten thousand things cry and moan.  Haven’t you heard them wailing on and on?  In the awesome beauty of mountain forests, it’s all huge trees a hundred feet around, and they’re full of wailing hollows and holes – like noses, like mouths, like ears, like posts and beams, like cups and bowls, like empty ditches and puddles: water-splashers, arrow-whistlers, howlers, gaspers, callers, screamers, laughers, warblers – leaders singing out yuuu! and followers answering yeee!   When the wind’s light, the harmony’s gentle; but when the storm wails, it’s a mighty chorus.  And then, once the fierce wind has passed through, the holes are empty again.  Haven’t you seen felicity and depravity thrashing and failing together?”

Specialization is for…

March 10th, 2009 § 0

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

- Robert Heinlein

3000 feet of perspective

August 11th, 2005 § 0

Last weekend, I went flying with my friend Rob who is getting his pilot’s license one choppy flight at a time. We flew a 4-seater Piper Archer, a single propeller aircraft from the 1970s. It was painted a dull shade of metallic blue over white and had hard plastic seats. We took off west-bound from the Palo Alto airfield and soared into the Pacific ocean at an altitude of about 3000 feet, just under SFO airspace. Then, turning due east near the Marin headlands, we headed towards the town of Concord, where we landed and had lunch. On the way back we circled past tall Mt.Diablo and across the blue-gray waters of the bay.

I realized that the Bay Area is simply beautiful from up in the air. I’d probably have to try very hard to dream up something more picturesque, more appealing as a whole. Imagine: the deep blue hues of the Pacific ocean shimmering in striking contrast to the wispy, fleece-white clouds hovering above it. Imagine the soaring, majestic California coastline dotted with dozens of little sandy beaches and rocky coves. Lush verdant mountains, redwoods and forests, little colorful waterways with white sailboats and their creamy wakes – the bays, the inlets, and the lakes. The surreal gleaming glass city at the tip of the peninsula. The Golden Gate. Mount Tamalpais.

I guess it often takes a change of perspective, 3000 feet in my case, to appreciate the charms of something you once treasured but now have come to take for granted.

Floyd Salas used to say that everything that is beautiful is sad, because it will be gone soon. But there’s the other side to it – that even if things stay as they are, unchanged for eternity, our perceptions of them don’t remain the same. Sooner or later, what used to be beautiful becomes boring, ordinary, unattractive. When I first moved to the Bay Area, driving up 280 was a feast everyday the way the setting sun painted the sky like a playful child would splash colors on an empty canvas. Now, I don’t pay as much attention to most sunsets because spectacular sunsets are so common here that they’re ordinary. I almost wish they weren’t.

Demise of the Renaissance Man

July 6th, 2005 § 0

As I stood under the colorful bookshelves of the local library last Sunday, I thought of the rather tragic post-modern irony that we humans have wrought upon ourselves. I looked at all those books, juicy fat tomes arranged in long neat lines, and suddenly realized that I’ll never be able to read them all. And neither will you.

We humans have produced and unraveled a cornucopia of knowledge and thought, a spectacular growing mountain of information about everything: from the ruminations of wise-old-men about the human condition to models of nano-particles that can’t be seen with the naked eye. We have created a staggering, gigantic, leviathan universe fueled by our thought and imagination over the ages and crystallized into little words dancing around conceptual paragraphs to Helvetican rhythms, sans serif.

Why is this a tragedy? Because no single man can experience the fullness, the entirety, the breathtaking enormity of our legacy. We can nibble on the mountain, little chunks at a time, we can stand back and use devices such as synopses and summaries, optic aids to give us the macro view of a ledge, a peak, a forest on the never-ending slopes, perhaps. But we simply can’t partake of the whole.

So this is where the individual ends and Man begins. For only the human race as a whole can imbibe of this metaphorical mountain – only a billion people can scale it and consume it together. While a surgeon who specializes in taking apart the left-pinky may not know a coccyx from a cockatoo, “the surgeon” as a collective figure can repair everything from despondent bone marrow to that peculiar bigger breasts fixation of ours.

The Individual Man, proud, self-sufficient island of yesteryear, is revealed in all his nakedness to be neither. It may seem obvious, even laughable, this inevitable predicament of ours, but I lament the loss of innocence, the demise of the Renaissance Man.

You cannot be an astronaut and write a Walden too.