The Dancing Class, Edgar Degas, 1871-72

• Here are some notes about something I’m trying to get my head around. I would appreciate feedback and reflections!

• At the end are some recommendations of films and books I’ve found interesting lately.

In Récoltes et Semailles there is a famous passage where the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck writes about the years he spent as a young man isolated from the mathematical world, and how the experience of solitude was the key to his creativity.

Because of the Second World War, which Grothendieck partly had to spend in the internment camp at Rieucros, by 1945, as a seventeen-year-old, he was almost entirely self-taught as a mathematician. Too poor to get into a good school, he spent three years as a student in Montpellier, where the teaching was inadequate for his capacity, and where he therefore almost entirely avoided the lectures to instead pursue his own questions (and pick oranges to pay for his rent).

Three years later, when Grothendieck arrived in Paris to study at the École Normale, the French elite school for the country’s most gifted students, it became obvious how far behind his new classmates he was; they had spent their childhoods in private schools and with tutors.

Grothendieck writes that,

I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle—while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end.

While the other students had been attending lectures, Grothendieck had, among other things, spent his time being confused by what length is. None of his teachers had been able to give him a satisfactory answer—they thought it was obvious what length was. His new teachers also brushed away what he had spent his teenage years on—the insights about length he had arrived at had already been known for thirty years as the Lebesgue integral! In the eyes of the faculty in Paris, his effort had been wasted.

But in Grothendieck’s eyes it had “not been wasted in the least.” In his eyes it was precisely that solitary work, when he had reinvented what a more competent teacher could have taught him—it was that work that allowed him, over the course of the next thirty years, to leave a mark on the history of mathematics, while his more competent classmates failed to do so.

Grothendieck, again:

In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn’t really capture my meaning. I didn’t, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in isolation [1945–1948], when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring, in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law....

That is to say, the work in solitude had trained his ability to autonomously navigate to interesting and valuable problems—an ability that is crucial for navigating skillfully at the frontier of human knowledge and expanding what we know. (I also suspect that Grothendieck underrates how much more naturally gifted he was than his peers.)

(Johanna and I have written about Grothendieck in more detail here.)

One way to think about what happened during those years of solitude was that what Grothendieck developed was mental proprioception.

Proprioception (without the adjective mental in front of it) is our ability to, without the help of sight, determine how our limbs are positioned. It is a kind of three-dimensional sense for our body.

Ballet dancers have extremely good proprioception. In fact, a large part of the challenge in becoming a skilled dancer is precisely that kind of feel for the position of the limbs: it is at least as important as having the muscles required to execute the movements. A large share of ballet training is devoted to developing proprioception. You stand in front of a mirror and execute movements while observing what you are doing, so that you can more accurately correlate the shape of a good movement with how it feels in the body when it is performed. When the dancers have a deep, precise understanding of how it should feel when the back is straight in the right way, and the ankle bent correctly, and the leg lifted just so … then they can, during the performance, follow their feeling and know that the form is correct, and they can notice precisely what is wrong when they deviate.

The thought I am playing with is that the same is true for our thoughts: it is possible to have a better or worse sense for how our thoughts flow around in our heads. And it is possible to train your mental proprioception so that you can feel when your state of mind has the right shape for generating valuable thoughts and solving the problems in front of you, or when your mental posture is wrong.

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Peatery in Drenthe, Vincent van Gogh, 1883

In the 1930s, people on the island where we live would go down to the old coal pit after thunderstorms, the village historian told me. They went looking for pink fragments of stone, the size of a finger—fossils after a kind of 120-million-year-old squid that had been hauled from the ground by the miners. But the villagers thought the pink stones were the arrowheads of lightning that had struck, and they would put the lightning tips they gathered under their beds to keep themselves safe. Lighting will not strike the same place twice.

There was still a thin drizzle in the air when, after the next rain storm, our four-year-old and I parked our bicycle next to the coal pit. There was no life in sight: it was all soot and sand, a black desert. A century after the production had closed down, not a single straw of grass. The rain, pouring in thin streams, had carved the black sand into a labyrinth of ravines.

We walked the labyrinth toward the sea. I told Maud that this is what the earth must have looked like 500 million years ago, before life seeped and wriggled out of the sea and conquered land.

Rolling down the walls of the ravines were scraps of coal, few of them larger than my thumb. The village historian had told me that a sculptor, a stone cutter, who lived nearby, used to go down here in the winters to collect these scraps of coal to heat his house. In the early 1960s, when he was in his twenties with two kids and few prospects of selling his art, he had been brought to such financial despair that he could be seen out here with a wheelbarrow, crawling on his knees.

In the years after I heard about the sculptor scavenging stone coal by the sea, I began collecting information about him. When artists who had known him came into the gallery where I worked, I would interview them. I looked for pictures of his sculptures. In our archives, I found a self-published book he had made and read what he had written.

These, our first years on the island, were, as I’ve written elsewhere, difficult years. Johanna and I had two young children, whom we raised at home. To have time to write, I would go up at 5 am and write until 9, when I took care of the kids until I had to bicycle down to the art gallery, where I built exhibitions and did the bookkeeping in the afternoons. I remember us climbing with lamps on the roof, late at night, tarring the wood on the new roof.

It was, I think, in order to handle the exhaustion and loneliness I felt, that I began collecting stories of local artists who had struggled and seen little external reward. It felt good to know that we weren’t alone, even if no one Johanna and I knew shared our obsession and were willing to make the tradeoffs we made. These landscapes had known others like us. There had been an autistic farmhand who spent his spare time painting the fields around our village; his paintings were discovered when he was 61, a year before his death. There had been a homosexual German art collector who had fled the Nazis and hid in a boat house, where he hung the walls with Matisse and Kandinsky. At the local museum, I had bought a stack of postcards of paintings done within walking distance of our house, and I kept them on my writing desk.

All of the artists had been outsiders. They had not been part of a scene. But when you grouped them, they looked like a constellation—like lone suns, hung in infinite darkness, that from afar revealed themselves to be part of the same pattern. It was a pattern of people with a compulsive need to look at the landscapes around them, at their small life worlds, and to capture what they saw. I imagined myself and Johanna as a part of the constellation and took comfort in that.

I knew that artists always struggle with poverty and social ostracisation, unless they are born wealthy. But whenever I read about famous writers or painters or filmmakers, it was hard not to read the stories of their hardships in the light of the fact that they would eventually succeed. And I couldn’t relate to that. It is cute when someone calls a plumber and then gets shocked when the American composer Philip Glass appears to fix their toilet. Well, how do you expect artists to pay the rent? But it is cute, precisely, because Philip Glass is Philip Glass and will eventually have his operas playing on every continent.

I found much more comfort in the stories of artists who fixed toilets but never got famous, and who did it anyway. It helped me remember that that cave man desire to populate the earth with your art is normal.

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The sculptor had moved to the island in 1957. Looking for a place with good granite, he and his wife, K, both young art students, had bicycled around the island, looking at old farms. The one they bought cost 18,000 kroner (about $30k, inflation-adjusted). It lacked electricity, running water, and sewer.

By the time they moved in, their first daughter had been born. The daughter, who later married a Japanese stone carver who came to study her father’s work, says growing up with two working artists was, despite the poverty, a beautiful experience. “It felt like we [kids] owned the forests, the fields, the cliffs, and the small ponds with salamanders.” “Dad would always whistle Bach while he worked.”

In 1961, the family had grown to four, and their annual income was 1,800 kroner ($3k, inflation-adjusted). Their daughter says the municipality refused to believe that they could survive on that. But they kept sheep for milk, meat, and fur; they grew what they ate; and the granite for sculptures, the sculptor quarried himself on the farm and pulled without machines, using rolling logs and pulleys.1

The sculptor’s wife, in an interview in 2004, says he had an unfathomable capacity for work. He would rise early, eat breakfast with the kids, and then work in the quarry or carve or tend the farm until lunch, when he’d sleep—as the old stone cutters he had apprenticed with would sleep each lunch, sitting up—before going out to work until dusk.

A local art historian, who knew the family, says, “The only thing that could keep him from the stone was if it was so cold that he couldn’t be in his workshop. Then he would sit inside and work with clay instead.”

The work was what kept him connected to himself and to the life force he felt in the world. “The more you work, the more things come to you. It’s a very amusing function,” the sculptor writes. “You get into a good circle, where the more you make, the more you can do, and the more ideas come to you. And conversely, if you’re away from it, it’s very hard to get going again. And your stomach starts to hurt, and you get depressed. Then you just have to throw yourself into it, but that can be hard. … I love the feeling of stone dust between my teeth after a long winter.”

Describing the work with the clay, he writes that he would sit with his eyes “almost closed,” feeling the shapes take form in his hands. When a shape gave him a deep tactile pleasure, he would open his eyes and study what had happened. “I fill both my warehouse, but also my head with experiences of form, so that I can scoop freely from it [when I stand before a rock to be carved]. And the fact that I’ve had the form in my hands means I can remember them much better.”

He spent a lifetime exploring which shapes spoke to his hands, the hands of this particular man, who loved children and nature and who will not be mentioned in the history books. Then he took these small, intimate, and often sexual feelings and made them permanent as rocks.

“If you look at the cliffs that have been carved by the glaciers during the ice age,” he wrote, “you can still see the carvings there 10,000 years later—so these shapes will live on for a long time.”

The feeling of a hand in 1972 made into an object that will stand for millennia… It is hard not to see a parallel to some of the oldest preserved cave paintings, which are hands that have been held up against the cave wall and preserved as silhouettes by color pigments blown at the hand. We were here; we felt this.

In the late 1960s, the sculptor began working with a local factory that produced sewage pipes. In the winters, when his workshop was too cold for him to carve stone, he would go to the factory and pick up unburned clay pipes, place them in his living room, and start bending and reshaping the pipes into sculptures. When he delivered them back to the factory to be burned in their 100-meter-long tunnel kiln, there would come a glimmer into the workers’s eyes as they offered knowing assessments of the sculptures—often abstract penises or vaginas, or abstract penises penetrating abstract vaginas. Again: like cave art. The workers were delighted to participate in an art project like that.

There was no economic logic in doing what the sculptor did. But it spoke to a deep human need. We need sewage pipes, yes, but we also need to honor the sense of aliveness that rushes through us. As in the apocryphal story about a legislative session during the Second World War, when someone suggested cutting the arts funding to support the war effort, and Churchill answered, “But then what are we fighting for?” It is ok to sacrifice yourself to the hunger for art; that is what the sculptor’s work says to me.

Some of his works were sold as public decorations, but many just filled the forests and fields where his children played. Their reason for existing was that he wanted to make them.

In 2023, Karen and Mette, two women in their late 70s who volunteered at the art gallery, told me that the sculptor’s farm was still intact. Why no one had told me this before, I do not know. They had been out there in the morning before work, looking at the sculptures, and they giggled when they talked about it.

“You have to go there,” Karen said. “It’s…”

Instead of finishing the sentence, she touched her face in a way that looked embarrassed.

Given that Johanna and I had so much work to do with the gallery and the farm, the kids and the essays, I didn’t have time to search for the sculptor’s farm.

A year passed. I wrote 40 essays, made 24 exhibitions, and tore out an inner wall in our kitchen where I found a mushroom the size of a man.

But then, in October 2024, I found myself with four hours to kill. The air was still warm from summer heat captured in the sea when I got up on my bike and set off in the direction I had been told the farm was.

I rode on the curving paths among hazels, maples, hollies, and oaks. The roads got narrower and narrower, and I spent twenty minutes going down dead ends that led to pig farms and summer houses.

But then the landscape changed: cliffs of granite shot up among the oaks; there was bramble stretching its arms across the road.

Coming around a bend, I saw them. It was a herd of sculptures. They looked primordial, like the remains of a forgotten ice age fertility cult. I saw abstractions of flowers and testicles (“flowers are balls, essentially… so I won’t keep myself from making those even if people go around saying: he’s naughty, that one,” the sculptor had written). I saw a rock that held the essence of a voluptuous woman, a Venus of Willendorf. I saw a giant, four-ton penetration that was, on closer inspection, titled The Priest.

I had already seen some of these works, depicted, but it had not prepared me for the emotional impact of walking into his landscape.

I think the effect came from the deep resonance between the art and the nature it grew out of. The nature around the sculptor’s farm was unusually wild and fecund, with bramble and ivy climbing the trees and mushrooms bursting from the ground. And these forces and forms were mirrored in the art—it was the fecundity of this land, this precise land, that had worked itself into his subconscious and returned as stone. As he wrote in his notes, “It is fantastic to look at, for example, moss and lichens or the smallest flowers through a loupe. Rich independent worlds.” It was here he had spent his life, crawling in the grass, observing the life around him.

But the influence went both ways. By being mirrored in his sculptures, the surrounding nature was changed—it got charged with the eroticism he must have felt for it. The moss, the same moss we have on our farm, here, I felt, was very clearly fornicating, making moss babies, spreading, putting out their forms. The robins sounded like they were getting into it, too. The mushroom caps, with their rich musky smells, revealed themselves as what they are: sexual organs, as did the autumnal pollen blowing in the air—I was surrounded by acts of sex.

Walking to the edge of the farm, I found one of the quarries and thought about the fact that he had carved this world with his own hands. He had torn it from the bowels of the earth. He had quarried and carved stones, and made and fed babies, and quarried again, until, after 45 years, the land had been transformed—had absorbed him.

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This essay is a part of series about art works / artists that have moved me. See also:

At the end of the post, I’ve listed some good things I’ve read / watched / listened to recently.

Here is something I’m think about—

The day before we left for Málaga, Johanna was talking to me about how a lot of consumption tends to make us lose touch with ourselves.

If she goes to check something on the internet, for instance, she often forgets what she meant to do and discovers, half an hour later, that she’s aimlessly scrolling things that make her feel ambiently bad. Even just having internet turned on at home makes her—and me—feel less in touch with ourselves, as if some distracting noise is heard in the back of the head, making it harder to fully tune into ourselves. The internet (and other similar types of consumption, such as TV series) often creates some sort of insatiable hunger that makes you lose touch with yourself.

And then there are the other kinds of consumption (if consumption is even the right word): the kinds that tend to bring us back into ourselves. Looking at paintings, for example. In the evenings, when we’re too tired to work, Johanna and I sometimes open a page in an art book and look at it for 10 minutes (we can’t do it for much longer than that: paintings, unlike reading the internet, spit us back out after a while). And despite having allowed ourselves to get completely absorbed by something external, when we close the art book, we feel more attuned to ourselves.

On the ferry, traveling to the airport, Johanna and I discussed why this is.

There’s this passage from the memoirs of the composer Philip Glass, which I think can shed some light on why art—good art—can bring us into a closer connection with ourselves. Glass writes that,

[when I compose music for films,] I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don’t want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like “Buy these shoes” or “Go to this casino.”

Because art has a gap, a distance, a space we need to fill, well—there is little wonder that, at the end of a session sitting before a painting, we feel more connected to ourselves. To make a painting meaningful, we need to fill it with meaning; we need to listen inward and channel the felt sense that the painting evokes into the gaps left in the art. We need to attune to ourselves. And so when we step out of it, we feel closer to ourselves.

Art can in this way be seen as a kind of guided meditation. It is an external structure that guides our attention until we’ve achieved an interesting and deep connection to what happens inside of us. But it is not only art that is like this. Many things can attune us to ourselves if we attune to them.

I thought about this a lot during the week we spent in Málaga.

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From Lessons in Darkness, Werner Herzog, 1992

I recently reread The Path to Power, the first part of the biography of President Lyndon Johnson, which Robert Caro has been working on since 1976. Before I first read Caro seven years ago, my understanding of how political power works was, as I recall it, very limited and flawed. I thought about power—to the extent I thought about it at all—in abstract and formal terms, along the lines of how it was explained in school. There were branches of government vested with different kinds of powers, and rules and laws governing how they can be used and by whom. If you got elected to a public office, you gained power; if you got a job as CEO, you gained another sort of power, and so on.

In Caro’s biographies, it is clear that the real political operators don’t think about it like this at all. To them, power is something you frack, something you force out of the stone by pumping fluid into the cracks. If you pay close attention, you will discover that there are drops of power everywhere—in the good feelings someone’s mother holds for you, in being able to get your college friend a job, in knowing embarrassing facts about your mentor, in having someone’s trust, and so on. To any normal person, these drops are so small that they barely register, and anyway, it feels wrong to treat someone’s mom as a reservoir to frack. But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.

It is not that the political “technicians” don’t care about the official sources of power—Lyndon B. Johnson is willing to do anything to become president, however appalling and degrading to himself or others. But a presidency, or a senate seat, or a seat in congress—that is like a big, well surveyed oil field. It will be intensely competed over, unlike the smaller crevices of power. And unless you have been able to frack enormous amounts, being elected to office is of limited use. Kennedy, for instance, struggled to push his programs and reforms through Congress, but the week after he was assassinated, the very next week, the reforms got unstuck and started moving, as Johnson was sworn in.

It seems Johnson saw the entire world in terms of instruments of power that he could collect. This is the purpose of life as far as he’s concerned. It seems to have been this way since he was a toddler. Age three, when he can’t get attention, he hides inside a haystack and listens for a long time as his father’s workers search the hills and the creek. His mother stands a few feet away from him, crying; he doesn’t let her know; he seems to enjoy being able to control what other people feel and do.

As a teenager, when he meets his friends’s parents and grandparents, he flatters them endlessly, climbing into the knees of harsh old women to kiss them and call them grandma. When his friends want permission to do something they know their parents will not let them, they send Johnson instead, because the adults are so enamored by him that he can get whatever he wants. His flattery gives him power over the parents, which gives him power over the children.

Since he sees the world always in terms of tools that let him bend people to his will, Johnson becomes a true connoisseur of leverage. He notices potential sources of power in places where I’d never think there was any. For example, he seems to realize, sometime in his twenties, that knowing how to get someone else a job gives you purchase over them. So, while still working as a teacher, he begins collecting jobs. When he quits a position, he does it in such a way that he can pass the job on to one of his friends. And when they quit, he makes sure the job goes to another person he wants to control—often by orchestrating so that the person who has the job quits at the worst possible moment for the employer, and the person Johnson wants to get the job comes in the same day with their CV and explains how they can take over and solve the problem.

It would never occur to me to treat jobs this way. But done over and over again, collecting more and more jobs, these odd maneuvers become a source of genuine political power for Johnson. When he is 27 and sees a chance to get elected to Congress, he has about a dozen friends placed at various workplaces, and as soon as the signal comes, they throw themselves into their cars and drive to Austin to help Johnson get elected (with the understanding that this will lead to him being able to give them even better work). By collecting jobs, Johnson had created a political organization for himself, a cadre of men who would do his bidding no matter what he asked, a forceful instrument of power. This, then, allows him to get elected to Congress—which naturally leads him to acquire even more tools: money, contracts, mentors, favors, scores of jobs to distribute among his allies.

The more power he manages to collect, the greater his capacity to acquire more, in a rapidly escalating loop. Four years after spending his time coordinating his friends so they can keep various teaching and administrator jobs within his circle, Johnson has managed to compound that small deposit of power into near-free access to the back door of the Oval Office and the president’s ear.

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Let me linger on the oddness of seeing a source of power in manipulating the principal at a school to pass a job on to one’s friend. It’s striking that the best players, those Caro focuses on, almost always seek out such unexpected sources.

Robert Moses, the Planning Commissioner, Building Coordinator, and Parks Commissioner of New York, and the subject of Robert Caro’s first book, is a good example.

During the years between 1934 and 1968, when Robert Moses had almost free rein to shape New York as he pleased, the root of his power was so-called public authorities. (To explain what a public authority is: sometimes when you build, say, a bridge, politicians will decide that part of the cost should be covered by the bridge itself by taking out a loan and setting up toll booths to pay it off. The money collected then goes to a public authority that is created for that bridge, and when the loan for the bridge has been paid off, the public authority is dissolved or turned into a vehicle for maintenance.)

Before Moses, no one had understood that public authorities could be a way to power—until this point, public works had been small projects, and public authorities seemed boring and inconsequential. But what Moses realized was that he could use part of the revenues from a public authority for other projects, and in that way the original debt would never be paid off… which meant the public authority could exist indefinitely and generate a steady income stream that its chairman could control. Also, since no one had thought that public authorities could be used this way, no one noticed the implications of certain formulations Moses snuck in when he wrote a new state law regulating public authorities, formulations which in practice made it nearly impossible to fire Moses from the chairmanships he began securing for himself.

In this way, Moses, a public employee who never held an elected office, became something bordering on a dictator, with full control over public authorities generating $2 billion a year (inflation adjusted to 2026 dollars), an empire which he used to sculpt New York as if it were his private art project.

There’s an element of hacker mindset in interacting with the world this way.1 Both Johnson and Moses took seemingly irrelevant details of reality and leveraged them to get results that seem unbelievable (and/or appalling) to others. It is like when people do speed runs of video games: it feels like they are playing a completely different game. Speedrunners don’t think of the games the way normal players do—they don’t think in terms of “walls” and “doors” and “levels” and “weapons” and so on; they think in terms of the structure of the underlying software that is generating this, and the hardware that the code is running on. The game for them is about figuring out how to push the controller in such a way so as to cause the underlying code and hardware to behave in unintended ways, causing “bugs” that will let them jump through walls or travel straight to the last level, and so on. Speed runners are looking at reality at a different level of abstraction and can, because of this, do things that seem impossible at a more superficial level of abstraction.

When you treat power in the same way, as Johnson did, it has very strange and unpredictable consequences for the fabric of a society. It is like being in a game where someone else is speedrunning, pushing the game engine to glitch in ways suitable for them: you, as a normal person, will be going about your days, but there will be these odd, seemingly unconnected bugs happening—the world around you will be changing in strange ways—and then suddenly, someone has teleported to the last level and gained enormous power. And perhaps is using it in disturbing ways.

Here is one way to think about what is going on. Normal people care about a lot of things. We want to have a good time and fit in and be ethical and have status and so on—it is a very complex sort of value function. And since it contains many competing considerations, none of the dimensions we care about get particularly optimized. We have an ok time, but not a great one, and we’re decently ethical, but not as good as we’d like to be, and we have some power over our lives, but not as much as would be ideal.

But someone like Johnson only cared about power, so he is able to optimize that much harder. When Johnson looked at a job, which to us is a complex bundle of “a role in the community, a source of income, some status, something to do with our time, and, yes, some limited power”—Johnson saw only power. Therefore he treated the job only as a way to acquire leverage, which is very different from how a normal person would treat a job. And because he optimized so hard along this vector, he got to be very effective at it.

But it also had a lot of unintended and unpredictable effects for other people and the aspects of the world he didn’t care about.

To take a contemporary example: most people like it when others pay attention to what they do. But it is not, or at least wasn’t until recently, something that most people optimized for. Rather, attention was a part of a complex web of social values. We received attention in interactions with people we cared about and had a relationship with, and as much as we enjoyed when people gave us attention, it was weighed against all sorts of other considerations that were at play in the lifeworld where it occurred.

But then social media companies realized that fleeting acts of attention were something that could be isolated from this rich weave and fracked and pooled together into a source of considerable power and wealth. They did not care about the complex lifeworld where the attention was situated; they were willing to optimize for attention capture irrespective of how altering that dimension of social reality altered other dimensions. These companies: 1) got very, very good at it, 2) without the users fully realizing how their lived environment was getting restructured to frack more of their attention, and 3) in the process, endless, unpredictable changes occurred along the other dimensions that the companies weren’t optimizing for. The attempt to capture and control attention changed how communities form; it changed people’s dating lives; it spawned new ideologies; it undermined the trust that had held society together, and so on.

You see something similar with Johnson. He saw power where people had previously seen none (or where people had sensed a tiny, inconsequential sliver of influence mixed in with a hundred other things, like oil in sand), and then he optimized ruthlessly along that dimension. But since the power he extracted was bundled with and connected to all sorts of other things, his actions reshaped not only the distribution of power, but the very nature of our societies. Johnson vastly increased the level of spending on political campaigns in the US and established the pipelines that led East Texas oil money into DC, with everything that followed from that. He precipitated the collapse of trust in government. And so on.

It wasn’t like everything else, everything he didn’t care about, got worse. Sometimes, it got a lot better (as when Johnson pushed through rural electrification, with genuine eagerness, improving the lives of thousands of people, since it aligned with his amassing power). But when that alignment broke, Johnson, just as eagerly, destroyed the lives of people. Before he was forced out as a president, his exponential accumulation of power had led to the killing of more than a million people.2

The sanitized view of power and institutions that I was taught in school is misleading and provides a cover behind which political operators can hide. For similar reasons, conspiracy theories of evil elites are also problematic.

What is needed is an understanding of the real game of power, the kind that Caro provides. It makes us less naive about how things get done, and it gives us a better understanding of the value of democracy. The official story about the expression of the collective will and so on is largely a fiction, but the institutions and rules still matter a lot: as a check on the runaway loops of power grabbing that people like Moses and Johnson engage in.

This essay was written in conversation with Johanna Karlsson. The copy edits were done by Esha Rana.

A polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky

I had a discussion about writing with Johanna, my wife and collaborator. The context is that she is in the early stages of a new writing project—she knows the rough outline of the ideas she wants to cover, but the actual content of the essay is fuzzy. She asked me what I would do in this situation, to go from rough idea to first draft. Here are some bullet points from our discussion:

• I would be tempted to start writing the essay, but that would be a mistake. Everyone is different, but for me, writing essays is like shooting a documentary. I need to record the raw footage before I sit down and edit the film. And I want to have more footage than I will use, often a lot more.

• By raw footage, I mean actual prose—not outlines, not summaries—about the topic I want to write about. But I don’t mean essay-grade prose: that is too costly to write; it would be like making the actual film. I mean rough attempts written as fast as I can, as well as excerpts from my journal, transcriptions of conversations I’ve had about the topic, and quotes from books I’ve read, and my comments on the quotes. Very rough and pragmatic stuff.

• And importantly: this rough, raw material needs to be “at the same resolution” as the final essay. Again, imagine you are making a documentary—let’s say, you’re Werner Herzog, and you’re making Into the Abyss. The opening scene of that film is “Herzog interviewing a reverend who in 15 minutes will be accompanying a young man to his execution.” If that summary was all Herzog had, it would be impossible to know if the scene deserves to be in the film; it all comes down to the detail. The reason the scene belongs in the film, and in the opening of the film, is that the reverend ends up telling a story about a squirrel—and not only that, it belongs in the film because of the way his face looks before, during, and after he’s told the story. Herzog only knew these details of the scene until after the interview had been shot. So the decisions about what should be in the film couldn’t be made until after the raw footage had been collected. It is the same, for me, when it comes to essays. I can write all the outlines I want (and I do, because they are a tool that lets me remember ideas that I haven’t had time to unpack yet), but there’s little point in writing the outline until I’ve made full length sketches of all the ideas in it, and all the examples and anecdotes I could use and so on.

• But isn’t that the same thing as writing it? I guess it might be for some. But for me, if I think I’m writing the essay, I get all tense and start polishing the prose and put in way too much effort into ideas and stories that might not deserve to be in the essay. And when I do that, I get reluctant to cut the material, which means the essay gets bogged down with mediocre stuff. I need to write rough notes and so on, so that I can go really fast and try many ideas and see them in high resolution, before I edit together the essay and polish the prose. During the preproduction of an essay, I want to write 1,000 words an hour or more. I want to go fast enough that I can afford to try many more ideas than I will end up using.

• Johanna points out that I tend to create and collect raw material in a few different ways:

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When children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age five, when they learn to be boring. The multicolored hedgehogs with 47 legs give way to a series of established forms and colors, like stick figures, pastel green grass, and houses with triangular roofs. The wild diversity is gone. From now on, it’s crude, habitual symbolism. Most people never relearn how to draw anything interesting again.

This tends to happen in all domains of our lives. We figure out how to do things “well enough” and then get stuck.

One way to think about this is by analogy to what in machine learning is known as mode collapse. Mode collapse is when a generative model (most notoriously GANs) stops producing diverse outputs and instead obsessively reproduces a small subset of patterns that reliably fool the discriminator. We’ve seen this happen with language models. The early models, up until about 2020, were deranged but could write spectacularly surprising prose from time to time. Now the models are much smarter, but they all write in that uncanny AI voice. “And honestly? That isn’t just sad—it’s stylistic trauma.” The wide space of potential ways of thinking and writing has collapsed into a limited mode. I’ve gathered that Roon has been working at improving writing quality at OpenAI, but so far there hasn’t, in my opinion, been much progress on reintroducing novelty and diversity into the prose.

My probably partly false understanding of what’s going on here is that the models get rewarded when they output certain tokens, and once they get smart enough, they learn that they are more likely to get rewarded if they stay inside a small area of the space of potential ways of writing. Through millions of training cycles, they learn to associate going outside of mode with loss of reward.

I guess something similar happens with human drawings. Once you learn that grass is “supposed” to be green, it becomes almost embarrassing to make it blue (even though real grass often is blue, as good painters learn when they start to pay closer attention to reality). Once we’ve learned that grass “is” green, we often can’t even see that it actually looks blue in a certain light (and red in another), until someone points it out to us—

Unless we actively push against it, it seems like we will mode collapse like this in all domains. As Andrej Karpathy put it in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, children “will say stuff that will shock you, because you can see where they are coming from, but it’s just not the thing you say. They’re not yet collapsed. But we are collapsed. We end up revisiting the same thoughts. We end up saying more and more of the same stuff, and the learning rates go down.” We get stuck at good enough and then ever-so-slowly backslide. I saw that with our 8-year-old last month. After making predictable drawings for a few years, she had a breakthrough and learned to pay attention to how horses actually look. Then, after she’d mastered a more accurate way of drawing horses, she stopped looking and began repeating the new form until it hardened into caricature.

As Nabeel Qureshi wrote about Karpathy’s remark, people who are able to remain interesting design “their lives to avoid [mode collapse] happening to them.” He suggests they do this by writing a lot and exposing themselves to information that contradicts them or is novel to them:

It seems that when you’re younger, weight updates happen kind of naturally. As you age you have to do this explicitly, which means:

1) reading and writing a lot, to make updates “clearer”

2) having conversations with people, esp people who disagree with you

And on the reading, at least some of the time you need to be sampling from places you wouldn’t normally look. Otherwise the natural tendency is just to read more of whatever reinforces your existing views.

This is good advice. But the hard thing is that this gets more painful the older you get. As you learn more and grow more skilled, there is more reward associated with staying within a limited mode; the opportunity cost of remaining uncollapsed increases.

When I was 20 and played around with writing, no one cared what I did, and so I lost no reputation or income by doing novel things. These days, I have found a mode of writing that is rewarded, and if I go beyond it—which I try to do consistently—I get a salary cut the same day. I’ve seen many writers I know end up losing their edge in this situation. The playful wildness that made them successful gets replaced by increasingly hollow repetition as they struggle to maintain the career they worked so hard to achieve.

I thought a lot about this as I was contemplating writing full-time in 2024. It just seems so depressing when “what you do to survive / kills the things you love” as Bruce Springsteen sings in “Devils and Dust.”

As I was weighing the pros and cons of quitting my day job, I read about and talked to people who have managed to stay interesting for several decades, to figure out what they did to avoid mode collapse. A lot of it is what Nabeel says: they keep learning and consuming novel information, and they write a lot. But it’s instructive to look at what a life like that is like, more concretely.

Take Brian Eno, who I, at least, find remarkably interesting 50 years into his career. When I listen to Secret Life, the album he did with his protégé Fred Again.. in 2023, it sounds to me like one of the most modern and novel sounds in recent years—just as the album Eno did with Roxy Music in 1972 sounded ahead of its time (and is still surprisingly strange and interesting). In between, he invented ambient music, was one of the midwives of the No Wave sound of late 70s New York, helped shape arena rock with U2, and so on. He also wrote interesting essays, made procedural art, invented oblique strategies, and co-founded the Long Now Foundation. Almost at any point in the last 50 years, it feels like Eno’s been doing interesting work!

As I was reading about Eno and others last year, I was sort of hoping to come across a clever trick you could do to keep going like this. But the truth is painful and simple. Eno is able to remain interesting because he’s willing to risk everything he’s achieved again and again.

It is an endless loop where:

1. Eno does something random that no one is interested in

2. then, every few years, one of his projects turns into a surprise hit, after which

3. people come running, asking him to do more of it, offering him large sums of money, which he

4. turns down, in order to work on something that no one cares about.

With Roxy Music, in the early ‘70s, Eno incorporated synths and electronic processing into rock music, which wasn’t a thing at the time. When that became a hit, Eno got offered large sums of money to tour and make more records like that. But instead he quit the band and started playing classical music with an orchestra consisting of only bad musicians, something that, naturally, exasperated his manager. Then, when his forays into strange noises led to ambient music, his albums with Talking Heads, and No Wave, and so on, people got excited again and wanted to pour money at him to do more of that. Eno decided to go to Thailand to work on light art.

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A reason it is hard to have both a creative career and remain interesting, then, is that it is a high-risk strategy. There is probably a lot of survivorship bias in the sample I studied (meaning: most people who were wild enough to blow up their first success never got around to a second success, and so there are no biographies written about them). Looking at Eno and concluding that blowing everything up again and again is the key to remaining interesting might be true. But it might also be true that it is more commonly the key to losing everything.

As someone who is well-positioned to blow up a good career, I don’t think we should read too much into the survivorship bias, though. If these risks are necessary for creative work, then not taking them means you automatically lose; and it is possible to take these risks in a somewhat controlled manner. It is clear to me that Eno did so. He might like to give the impression that he was simply following his curiosity, but it was at least partly calculated. Especially in the early years of his career, he did the obvious, rewarded thing more often than he did later. But he did so in order to position himself to do wilder things longterm.

It is sometimes necessary to play conservatively, to be able to pay the bills. But if you’re wired like me and care deeply about doing good, creative work, you must never lose sight of the hierarchy of values. If writing full-time makes you write fewer good essays—as has happened to some people I know—then writing full-time is the thing to sacrifice, not the essays. If you have a hit and can build up some savings, that is meant to fund bigger risks going forward, not keeping up with the Joneses.

I’m not saying this is how everyone should live. In fact, I think it is very, very important that some people optimize for money—it makes them do valuable work that I would never bother doing. And for the same reason, I think it is important that some people optimize for status or consensus or risk aversion.

But if you want to avoid mode collapse, it will require sacrificing other things. It will require saying no to lucrative projects in order to explore things no one cares about. It will require looking stupid. It will require feeling uncomfortable. And it will require, in many cases, living hand to mouth from time to time.

Life update

Johanna, the kids, and I spent two weeks in Sweden over Christmas and New Year’s.

The first part we spent near the border to Norway, where Johanna grew up. The kids played with their grandparents, and Johanna and I walked along the river, and went shopping for Swedish books. On Christmas Eve, Johanna’s mother and I took the elevator down into the basement and I got to put on the coveted Santa costume and do my routine. I was a very grumpy Santa who played piano whenever attention drifted away from me to the Christmas gifts. It felt good to not be writing—I haven’t had a proper pause in 4 years; I needed some time to step back and think about where I want to go in the year ahead.

Am I at risk of mode collapse? Am I repeating myself and becoming too conservative in what I allow myself to work on? Am I habitually doing what I had to do to get here, rather than looking clear-eyed at the possibilities that actually exist now?

In bed at night, I made a list of some alternatives, things I could work on. I always like to get a lot of options on the table so I can get a better sense of the possibility space and not get stuck on the first thing that comes up. I could:

1. Write a book. I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it feels like a natural step—I’m at a point in my life where I could do it properly, with a good team of collaborators and a reasonable advance, so I could invest a few thousand hours into the project. But because it feels so natural, and many people urge me to do it, I am uncertain: I have such difficulty hearing what I feel when there are strong external reasons to do something.

2. Compile an essay collection.

3. Get back into programming. It feels like there are so many fun little art projects I could throw together by vibe coding. I have this old dream of making essays the size of cathedrals—making very ambitious essays with bespoke homepages for each, so I can leverage code to do things that haven’t been possible before. I think the cost of doing it has now dropped to the point where that vision becomes affordable for me. But I haven’t programmed for 6-7 years now, so I would need to set aside considerable time to bring that part of my brain back to life, so the ideas start flowing.

4. Do a book club. Maybe Proust.

5. Do meetups. Or make it easy for others to arrange meetups with readers from the blog.

6. Machine translate the full text of Grothendieck’s Récoltes et Semailles. It seems like the attempts to get it translated have stalled, and per my experiments lately, I think it is now possible to set up a pipeline to make a passable translation. Could publish it as an ebook + a homepage with the original text available if you click on a passage.

7. Do more small playful collaborations with others.

8. Gather a group of independent researchers, writers, and artists on the island, rent all the houses around our farm, and have a summer camp where we work, have seminars, and swim.

9. Do reportages and interviews. And by that, I don’t mean I should write in those genres, I mean I want to spend more time travelling and talking to people to collect material that can enrich my essayism. I’m thinking something along the lines of Werner Herzog’s documentaries. It would be fun to visit the production of Ruben Östlund’s new film (which he’s working on in Hungary right now). It would be fun to go to England with Johanna and look at gardens and interview Dan Pearson, Arne Maynard, and others. I notice this idea scares me—it is a different process than the one I’m used to, and I’m uncertain whether I have what it takes to write good essays in this way. I might end up plowing months into it, and come out on the other end with little to show for it. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to handle the complexity of the logistics and still produce the steady stream of essays necessary to pay our bills, and I’m afraid the work won’t interest others, so it ends up eroding the support I’ve built up over the years. This fear seems good!

I note that the last idea attracts me the most. I want to meet more people and write in a higher-resolution way. Of all of the ideas above, it is the one that will force me most outside of my comfort zone and into novel situations.

Having articulated the idea, the fear seems largely unfounded. There are some risks (there are always risks), but they can be mitigated. I can try things in small, low-cost ways. I can carve out part of the week to work on illegible projects and part of the week for doing work that keeps the food on the table, until the illegible can replace the legible. Once I start sketching out the ideas, talking them over with Johanna, I can see solutions and possibilities that I hadn’t considered.

I’m very glad I took the time to think this through. And now I’m glad to be back on the island, looking out at the snowy woods outside my office, listening to the kids through the wall. It feels good to be writing again.

Thank you Johanna for the conversations that led to this essay. The copy edits were done by Esha Rana.

The Driveway, Fairfield Porter, c. 1967

It was on November 20, 2024, that I handed in my keys at the art gallery where I had worked and began writing full time. It has now been a year. Let me reflect on how it’s been.

But first, since this is a sort of yearly review, here are the ten most read essays this year:

1. Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet

2. On agency

3. Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself

4. Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

5. How I read

6. When facing a complicated problem, don’t try to solve it, try to understand it

7. The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change

8. When is it better to think without words?

9. A list of books and essays that I love (this was paywalled when I published it, but I’ve unlocked it now)

10. On the pleasure of reading private notebooks

Also, for those who are new here, these are the ten most popular pre-2025 essays on Escaping Flatland:

1. Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

2. Looking for Alice

3. Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

4. Childhoods of exceptional people

5. Relationships are coevolutionary loops

6. How to think in writing

7. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

8. Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on

9. Don’t sacrifice the wrong thing

10. On having more interesting ideas

The main thing I remember, looking back, is how tired I was for the first three months after I quit my job. All through December, January, and February, I felt wrung out, empty, and sad. This came as a bit of a surprise to me. I had expected to be filled with energy now that I had reached my goal and finally had plenty of time to work on my projects.

What I had failed to acknowledge to myself was just how hard Johanna and I had been working for the preceding five years, and how much rest I owed my body. It had been four years since we decided to leave Sweden and start a new life; we had had our second kid and renovated a farm house, while homeschooling, working, and writing this blog (often at 5 in the morning before work, or late at night while the kids slept). Johanna and I were committed to what we were doing. We wanted to provide a good childhood for our kids and we wanted to pursue projects we found worthwhile; we didn’t want to sacrifice the wrong thing. But this also meant we had so much to do, and so little time and money, that we couldn’t afford to waste time complaining. We couldn’t acknowledge how tired we were. We just had to brace ourselves and do the work.

I remember us discussing how we might be able to postpone the major repairs on the house until 2024, to save money so that I could afford to keep writing the blog a little longer. I remember we had a deadline when I would have to give up my writing if I couldn’t find a way to fund it properly. The only option under those circumstances was to be frugal, stoical, work hard, do all short-term renovations ourselves, and spend all my spare time writing. And when the deadline came we were “so close” to making it that we kept postponing until it ended up being … four years of working every day without a vacation. I managed to find time to see a grand total of three films in 1642 days.

“But was it really four years?” Johanna says. She runs the numbers. “I can’t believe we lived like that for four years.”

Then, once I could afford to quit my day job and the pressure let up, all of my suppressed tiredness and pain welled up. I remember sitting at the kitchen table in January, joking about the time when the house rained in and we had no money to fix it. How I would have to run out in the middle of the night and try to secure the tarpaulin that had been caught in the storm, waving violently, and how I would curse the wind. How we woke up one morning with the balcony door blown wide open and a tongue of water reaching into the room. Johanna told the kids the story about a day three years prior when I had an interview for a job that would pay enough that we might be able to pay for the repairs and hold on to the farm. Johanna and I spent all day practicing what I would say, and then, just before I had to leave for the interview, I stepped in a pot with the baby’s pee, spraying it all over me, ruining my only good pair of clothes. So much for that job! So much for us affording a new roof! As we laughed, the 8-year-old reached out and squeezed my hand. I stopped laughing and felt the tears well up in my eyes.

There was so much tiredness and frustration and pain that I had not allowed myself to feel and express, and I spent much of last winter having it ooze out of me.

Thinking back, a frustrating thing about living in an unconventional way was that we felt like we weren’t allowed to complain about our problems. Maybe this is a Swedish thing. But if you break the script and then run into problems, people (not all people, but many) take it as proof that you were wrong and they were right. My family and several of my friends, for instance, disagreed with our decision to homeschool our kids (homeschooling is frowned upon and illegal in Sweden, so we had to emigrate). Homeschooling in a country where you don’t have any family to rely on for support, and where you don’t speak the language, is, quite obviously, exhausting. But given how much they had disapproved, I didn’t feel comfortable showing this. Only once did I let my guard down and mentioned to a friend how tired I was and how strained our economic situation was. He suggested we put the kids in kindergarten. I just wanted someone to feel some sympathy; I didn’t need solutions—we had one already. I didn’t share our struggles again.

Another time, when my parents visited, I went up at 5 am to write and then fell asleep on the floor while we ate lunch. While I lay there, they told Johanna about one of their friends who had waited until the kids moved away from home before he indulged his writing hobby, as a piece of advice. Maybe we read too much into all such small things, but we didn’t feel we could be open with our challenges.

When people make unconventional decisions, it often feels like they are measured to another standard than those who follow the default script. If you do the normal thing and it fails you, then it isn’t your fault; it’s the system. But if you do an unconventional thing, even small, normal setbacks are read as proof of your foolishness. When a normal solution isn’t working, no one suggests you are wrongheaded for not trying an unconventional solution instead. But they will hold you accountable if you do something differently.

If I had been more confident and open with what I thought and felt, I suspect that I could have received more sympathy and support. But, as I said, the pressure was so high in 2021-24 that I simply couldn’t. I didn’t have the emotional reserves necessary. We had to get the work done. So I packed my frustration and sadness and pain deep into my bones and worked more or less every waking hour (when I wasn’t taking care of the kids) until we got out of the hole. As did Johanna.

I’m happy we held together and made the necessary sacrifices, because our plans were sound, and we love the life we’ve now made for our kids and ourselves. But in 2025, I didn’t want any more sacrifices. I wanted time to decompress. I wanted to read books, be with Johanna and the kids, and go for long runs, which I did.

Fortunately, it wasn’t only pain that seeped up when the pressure was removed. 3-4 months after I quit my job, we also started to experience a happiness deeper than any we have experienced before. With more time, Johanna and I settled into a very lovely work rhythm where we spend several hours a day reading books together and talking. We’ve had so much fun writing the blog this year. It has felt less like “trying to write essays” and more like tending our conversation and harvesting thoughts. The process has been more open and playful than ever, like I’m putting fewer restrictions on what I feel I can write about. Because of this, the writing has felt more personal and strange than before, and we feel like we’ve been able to go deeper into the ideas.

Writing full time has also meant that there are fewer distractions, so the ideas are always churning in our heads. It’s like we’re living inside the essays now, instead of just visiting them.

Right now, as I’m typing this, Johanna is lying at the other end of the sofa with a pile of books on her belly, taking notes; the four-year-old is looking through Don Rosa’s Uncle Scrooge collections, and the eight-year-old is drawing horses.

Johanna waves her pencil at me, trying to get my attention, and seems to be bursting with things she wants to discuss. I tell her I’m just about to wrap this up so I can give it to her for comments, and then I’ll put the kids to sleep, so we can talk uninterrupted. “What time is it?” she says. “Oh. They should have been in bed 30 minutes ago.”

I’m very grateful to be alive in a time like this where it is possible to do something like this blog and support my family with it. Getting to this point was hard at times, yes. But five years ago, before Substack, these essays could not have been written at all. So thank you, thank you so much for being here, and in particular, thank you to everyone who has been generous enough to support the work.

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Here is last year’s retrospective:

Thank you, Esha, for your help copy editing the essays this year :)

I recently wrote a post about books and essays that have had a big impact on me. A few days after writing it, I read another essay that struck me at that level. The essay in question is “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” by Iris Murdoch. I haven’t yet been able to figure out why it hit me with such force and the implications of its ideas, but…

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The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
—Carl Rogers

On various hard drives and USB sticks stored in our barn, I keep the diaries from my university years, 2010–2014. Last week I reread them for the first time since I wrote them. It was interesting, but also uncomfortable, to see myself at such a distance. Many of the things that were important to me then are not visible from here (I only see blurry outlines of the situations I was in and what I thought), while other things, which I couldn’t see at all then, stand out clearly now. It’s like when you zoom in on a graph, you mostly see the small daily fluctuations, while when you zoom out, you see the trend.

I spend page after page interpreting the nuances of the situations I’m in, without seeing that the situations all resemble one another and follow each other with an almost mechanical logic.

For example, I often feel miserable. (This is partly an illusion created by the fact that I wrote more in my diary when I felt agitated, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it looks, but I really did feel down a lot back then.) I was worryingly often sick: there were five hospital visits in 2012 alone. I also had much more angst than I realized. The angst I was aware of and wrote about was only a small part, the most intense part. I don’t seem to have understood that many other things I experienced were also signs of anxiety—my ceaseless work, my desperate need to always be around people, my fatigue, my feelings of unreality, the moments I would wake in the middle of the night, realizing that I would die.

And every time I’m miserable in the diary, I know what will happen on the next page: I will throw myself into some activity that can distract me from myself. It is like clockwork. As soon as I feel bad, I get busy, I seek out social situations where I feel high status (the literary world), I go to parties, get drunk, and/or flirt with people. A wave of euphoria breaks over me, and the anxiety disappears—and then I overstep my own boundaries and do things that fill me with shame. I’m back where I started. The loop starts over.

I was almost completely trapped in this holding pattern, like a plane circling for years above the airport, waiting for clearance to land. I couldn’t acknowledge what was happening.

From September 11 to 13, 2012, I sleep at my friend’s place (ten minutes from my apartment), and when I leave on the 13th, it seems I can’t bear to go home, so after a lecture on macroeconomics I tag along to a party and don’t make it home until the 16th: this was a fairly typical week for me during this period. I was never alone, except when I was laid up with a fever. A recurring theme in the diary is long, Cărtărescu-inspired accounts of fever dreams filled with disturbing bodily textures. One of these reports is from February 2013, and it is clear that I was writing it in a bar where I read for class: I was still sick, but as soon as I could get out of bed, I had to look for something exciting that would distract me from my feelings.

It’s almost as if my need to be happy led me into misery. But that’s not really it.

Rather, it’s more like there are two kinds of happiness in the diary. I also felt very happy when I read, for instance, and there was nothing destructive about that happiness. Reading didn’t trap me in loops, it carried me forward and inward, toward myself. I really read a lot back then, fifty books a year on top of course literature (and the books were good, too: Pascal’s Pensées, Augustine’s Confessions, the collected works of Coetzee, Tranströmer, Sebald, Sem-Sandberg, Popper, to name a few), and I get a lovely feeling when I read my book notes. I also like the passages about my travels (I somehow managed to visit seventeen countries during my four years at university), and it amuses me to read about the creative projects I was working on. The happiness there feels entirely different, much softer. There is none of that jaggedness and intensity that characterize the joy I felt when I thought that people were attracted to me, or when I was on stage in a bar reciting poems, or when I drank. The joy of reading and travel was more like a cocoon. I hid and changed.

Such was the joy when I started to get to know Johanna, too, in the fall of 2011.

A few nights ago Johanna showed me an old TV broadcast about Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström (two Swedish artists who used to be married), and I suddenly remembered how I perceived Johanna before we became a couple. What struck me in the documentary was that there was nothing performative about Mamma and Jockum (unlike most artists I’ve worked with).

In the late 80s, while still in art school, they had kids together, and so have spent almost their entire adult lives inside the bubble that is their apartment and studios. They haven’t let themselves get polished by social life, which makes them seem odd in the way very young children seem odd when they think aloud. In 2005, Jockum is in NYC to open The Armory Show, where he’s the headliner, and he really doesn’t fit in among the other artists. He looks like a roe deer that has strayed into the gallery, sniffing at things. How they come across to others genuinely doesn’t seem to matter to Jockum and Mamma; they just want to crawl around on the floor of their studios, painting, working.

That’s how Johanna struck me, too, when I ran into her in the frozen section of the supermarket, at the bookstore, or in the street. She seemed her own in a way that I was not, and she seemed to be close to life. I remember seeing her outside of the pharmacy, where she sat eating at a small children’s table, throwing her head back in laughter as her friend read aloud from Sara Lidman’s The Tar Pit. I remember the intensity with which she listened and the unpredictability of her questions. I had talked to her for only ten minutes when I fell for her. It didn’t matter that she turned me down when I asked her if she wanted to do something someday—that a person like her could even exist was enough to make me feel that the world was a good place.

So I notice two kinds of happiness in the diary: a soft joy, which makes me ease up and feel more like myself, and a hard one that again and again leads me into shame.

There is another difference between these two kinds of happiness. The soft one is private—I struggle to share it with others—whereas the one that drives me into misery is social. For instance, at university I could never bring myself to ask librarians for help finding the books I was looking for—it was way too private for me to reveal that I liked to read Jean Rhys, or Imre Kertész. But in other situations I was totally shameless about telling people private stuff they probably didn’t want to know! There are several passages where “attractive people” are drawn to me (and when I write “attractive,” I mean people I assume other people are attracted to), and when that happens I get excited in a sharp-edged and feverish way. This happiness I have to share. I want to force it upon people. I’m ashamed but I can’t stop myself: the excitement, it seems, comes from being seen as the sort of person that this or that person desires. I don’t actually seem to like going home with them; that part makes me uncomfortable. But I get worked up by the thought of telling people about it.

Conversely, when Johanna after 18 months finally asks me out (and I feel that other kind of joy—the one that tells me that she is a path towards life), then I don’t want to talk about it. My friends ask about her, they are curious, but I avoid the subject. I get defensive. What Johanna and I have is too private. I’m afraid that they will misunderstand our relationship or reduce her to one of their stereotypes. So I hide myself from them.

All of this makes me very sad when I read the diaries. That I couldn’t show who I was, that I treated people in ways they didn’t deserve, that I lashed myself so hard about treating people in ways they didn’t deserve, that the self-flagellation drove me back into the loop...

If I jump forward two years in the diary, the pattern is gone. I have broken out of the loop and am moving forward. What changed? I’m not sure. It is hard to tease out these things: a life is a complex pattern.

But the main thing was, surely, Johanna. I remember the first time she invited herself to my apartment, how we sat on the balcony, and how I suddenly heard myself say things I had never been able to say before, not even to myself. I felt no shame when she listened. It was, among other things, because of her eyes. What made them light up was the complete and utter opposite of what made the eyes of others light up: if I talked about things that normally earned me admiration, she got bored, but when I spoke about what was private, odd, embarrassing, painful, or taboo, she became curious.

She was moved by reasons in a way that no one else I knew was. She seemed incapable of accepting as true anything she hadn’t deeply considered herself. Her default position was, “I don’t know.” But if she received information that contradicted her, she eagerly changed her mind. And she treated me as if I lived by that standard, too.

It was a strange mix of relief and discomfort to meet a person who loved me in the Erich Fromm sense (“I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.”) A relief because it was like decompression to let go of all of the fear and insecurity that made me shape myself for approval, and to feel my own sense of curiosity and value unfold. But discomfort because it put me on a collision course with the life I had been living and many of the people I interacted with. When I understood my values, I had to confront the pain of looking stupid and having people get angry at me when they disagreed with my decisions; I had to let go of the safety of social status and the coping mechanisms I had relied on. I soon withdrew from oversocializing, stopped giving poetry readings and publishing in magazines, and instead turned toward what felt private and alive.

At this point the diary gradually shifts from being a place where I vent my feelings and make laconic jokes about my flaws to a place where I think about things that interest me or give me awe. To use Visa’s phrase, I began to focus on what I wanted to see more of. I moved toward the good, rather than away from the bad.

In the late winter of 2015, 18 months after Johanna and I started dating, we bought a house in the countryside near my grandparents. By this point we were 25. We barely used the internet from then on and spent our days reading and talking. We gleefully questioned everything we had learned and tried to figure out how it would make sense for us to live. On the weekends Johanna and I walked with my grandfather along the paths he’d made around the tarns, asking him about his life. He had always been my big role model as a kid because of his kindness and strength of character. It was fantastic to have a friend like that to share life with.

At our house and at my grandparents’s, the norms and expectations were completely different from what they had been in the city—everything felt richer and more human here. The thought of living transgressively, the way I had during my years at university, was now foreign to me.

I was no longer reacting to what happened in mechanical ways, but was moving forward, toward things that mattered to me. It felt like being set free.

Acknowledgements

As always, this essay is the result of many conversations with Johanna Karlsson. The writing was made possible by the generous support of the paying subscribers—thank you! Esha Rana did the copy edits.

The drawings and paintings used in the essay are, in order:

Tête d’homme, Alberto Giacometti, 1961

Dagen efter, Mamma Andersson, 2020

Vi bor på kontoret, Jockum Nordström, 1999

I thought it’d be fun to do a series where I answer questions, or write essays in reaction to prompts you give me. This essay is the first attempt.

If you want to submit a question or a prompt for a future essay, you can do so in the comments to this post, or in the Google Form I link at the end.

RJ: What books/authors have influenced you?

I’ll give you a list. But first some context.

When our oldest daughter, Maud, was a toddler, she used books with author portraits on them as her dolls. She had Crime and Punishment in a baby stroller, Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking in a diaper, and on the sofa, Maud herself sat, breastfeeding Thomas Bernhard.

This amused me no end because I love seeing books brought down to that level: it’s where they belong. It always felt strange to me how some people put famous authors on pedestals. Authors are our friends! They are odd people who talk to us, sometimes from across the grave.

I haven’t always found it easy to relate to people in everyday life, so Tolstoy and Tranströmer and others I have read and reread since I was a teenager feel closer to me than most people I have met; they feel a bit like my high school friends. When Johanna and I talk, we’ll say Tomas and mean Tranströmer; he is one of our mutual friends, and we gossip lovingly about him. My journals are filled with thoughts I have had as I’ve read him and the rest—it feels like we’ve been talking for years, and in some ways, I know them better than my parents.

If I am to name a single literary event that has shaped me most as a writer, it is the publication of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, 2009–2011. I was living only a few blocks away from Knausgård, in Malmö, while he wrote the books—every street and store and park in book 6, which describes his life while working on the series, were streets and stores and parks that I was walking in. If you live in Paris or New York, I guess it is quite common to read well-written books that describe your everyday life, but living in the provinces of Sweden, it was a revelation: literature is not something that happens far away, or in the past; it might as well happen right here. You can write about what you feel, and what you see, and if you infuse it with enough care, it will become literature.

One of the things I’ve gotten from repeatedly rereading My Struggle and Knausgård’s essays is the permission to cease play-acting when I write; I don’t have to do the “literary” stuff; I am allowed to just type what I actually think. There is a passage in Inadvertent, where Knausgård describes one of the insights that unblocked his writing:

There are some fundamental rules of writing, for example that one shouldn’t psychologize when describing characters, or the related dictum “Show, don’t tell,” both of which spring from the realization that literature by its very nature always seeks complexity and ambiguity, and that monologic claims of truth about the world are antiliterary. [...] For many years I followed these rules of writing, that one shouldn’t psychologize and that one shouldn’t tell, but show. However, the texts I wrote ended up being neither complex nor ambiguous; on the contrary they were closed and unfree, as if the space they unfolded in was a prison, with locked doors and no windows. It wasn’t until I started breaking the rules, showing how something was and should be understood, very precisely and with no room for doubt, and describing people in psychological terms, that my writing came alive. This was so, I think, because even in the most meticulous and exhaustive explanation of a person’s character or actions, even in the most heavy-handed explication, there is always an outside.

This realization has influenced me a lot. If I think something, I don’t need to go through this big roundabout thing, where I “show” it and make it literary. I don’t need to make my writing ambiguous. If I just pay close enough attention to reality, the complexity of reality will seep into the writing and make it ambiguous and charged anyway. There is no need for me to be clever and artful and introduce mystery. Just “telling” it as I see it, if done with enough detail and care, is mysterious enough.

Another author who has greatly shaped my view of life and literature is Dostoevsky. In particular, Dostoevsky as seen by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bachtin. Bachtin’s core observation is that Dostoevsky, unlike most other authors, treats his characters as full individuals, as if they are too big to fit in his head: he isn’t using them as mouth pieces but is listening to them. His books are polyphonic: they are made up of a multitude of voices, each with their own inner logic and perspective, and there is no voice that stands above the others and knows the final truth. There are, of course, many books that have multiple voices in them, especially after Dostoevsky, but when I read these books, there is nearly always a subtle feeling that the characters are being used as dolls by the author, who is trying to get a view across; you can sense what the author thinks of everyone. But in Dostoevsky, each character is so strong and independent that they feel like authors in their own right.

I remember that this fundamental respect for the unknowability of others was a deep revelation to me when I read it, at 24. It completely changed how I viewed myself and others. It made me more curious about the inner lives of others, and the dialogue between us; I started to pay attention to how the words I was saying, even inside my head, were always in reaction to and in dialogue with things others had said or things I expected them to say in the future. This was immensely useful, and for Johanna and me, Dostoevsky and Bakhtin have been valuable touchstones as we have built our relationship and learned how to talk in a way that enables each other to grow.

Another thing I love about Dostoevsky is how he incorporates long essayistic segments in his novels, but he always makes sure to undermine the authority of the person expressing the ideas. You get these wonderful philosophical tracts about free will and the Russian church and utilitarianism and the nature of love, but you don’t know what to make of it, really, because the person saying it seems a bit deranged. This is closely connected to his deep respect for the individual: rhetorically convincing the reader of a perspective would undermine their autonomy. Compromising the characters forces the reader to stand alone, to borrow Kirkegaard’s phrase. Since there is no safe authority that you can submit to in Dostoevsky’s books, it is up to you to meet these hurting, strange voices with compassion, critical thinking, and curiosity; you have to evaluate if anything they say is valuable and true and applies to your life. As Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov says, there is nothing more painful to humans than our freedom, that we are responsible for everything we do, and so we long to submit to an authority. But Dostoevsky just won’t let us do that. He forces us to face our freedom.

With Knausgård and Dostoevsky, I found an ideal to orient toward. They wrote in a way that was driven by their minds and their curiosity; their writing was jagged and strange, since they ignored many of the “rules” that make a piece of writing “literary,” and they did so to be able to be more direct and honest. They also shared a deep respect for reality and its complexity, especially the reality and complexity of human beings. I haven’t been able to get anywhere close to writing in a way that approaches the ideals I found in them, but it has provided me with a direction that I’ve been following for more than a decade now.

There is a third author, too, whom I need to mention before I get to the list of books I have been inspired by, and this is the author who made my own writing snap into place.

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Portrait of a Man with Glasses I, Francis Bacon, 1963

This essay can be read as a complement to last year’s “How to think in writing.”

Thoughts die the moment they are embodied in words.
—Schopenhauer

1.

In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads.1

Hadamard, who had the same types of experiences, wrote in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field that this mode of thinking was distinct from daydreaming, and that most people, though they often think wordlessly, have never experienced the kind of processing that the mathematicians did.

When I read this, in December 2024, all sorts of questions arose in me. First of all, what does it even mean? Do they not think in words and equations at all? And secondly, how do I square this with my personal experience, which is that whenever I write what I think about a subject, it always turns out that my thoughts do not hold up on paper? No matter how confident I am in my thoughts, they reveal themselves on the page as little but logical holes, contradictions, and non sequiturs.

I recognize myself when Paul Graham writes:

The reason I’ve spent so long establishing [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another [point] that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

How come Hadamard’s colleagues are able to have productive thoughts, working in their heads, without words, sometimes, for days on end?

Tense subconscious processing

Hadamard’s book is most famous for its detailed discussion of what Henri Poincaré called the “sudden illumination”—the moment when the solution to a problem emerges “in the shower” unexpectedly after a long period of unconscious incubation.

The hypothesis here is that if you work hard on a problem, you soak your subconscious with it. Wrestling with a problem helps you build a mental model of what you know and what you don’t—providing the subconscious with building blocks to work with. (You can’t have genuine intuition and inspiration in areas where you lack knowledge.) Then, once you drop the problem from conscious thought and go take care of the dishes or something, the subconscious begins a silent and parallelized search, trying many, many alternatives (in a somewhat random fashion), until something snaps in place. When this happens, the solution bubbles back up to the conscious mind, as if out of nowhere, making you freeze mid-motion with a stack of dirty plates in your hands.

This is a very useful thing to know about the mind, because it means you can steer your subconscious towards the particular problems you want it to work on. By priming yourself with important problems before doing the dishes or going for walks or sleeping, you make sure your mental resources are used on what matters for you, instead of, for example, the open loops in a Netflix series you watched before bed. It is free labor.

But—this is not what Hadamard is talking about when he describes the wordless thought of the mathematicians and researchers he has surveyed. Instead, what they seem to be doing is something similar to this subconscious, parallelized search, except they do it in a “tensely” focused way.

The impression I get is that Hadamard loads a question into his mind (either in a non-verbal way, or by reading a mathematical problem that has been written by himself or someone else), and then he holds the problem effortfully centered in his mind. Effortfully, but wordlessly, and without clear visualizations. Describing the mental image that filled his mind while working on a problem concerning infinite series for his thesis, Hadamard writes that his mind was occupied by an image of a ribbon which was thicker in certain places (corresponding to possibly important terms). He also saw something that looked like equations, but as if seen from a distance, without glasses on: he was unable to make out what they said.

I’m not sure what is going on here. But here’s a speculation. As I understand it, when one part of our brain is working, it often inhibits another—if you put words to distressing feelings, for example, the language-oriented parts of your brain inhibit the amygdala, which reduces the emotional distress. Similarly, when you are focused on a task at hand, the executive control network of your brain will tend to inhibit the default mode network which is responsible for mind wandering. (This might explain why illuminations tend to occur mainly in the shower, when the executive control networks downregulate and the mind is allowed to wander.)

Here’s my speculation: perhaps Hadamard and the other great mathematicians are able to enter into a modality of thought where they are able to keep both the default mode network and the executive control network on at the same time. Perhaps this allows them to do a sort of subconscious, in-the-shower-type processing, while still maintaining enough conscious focus to ensure the thoughts don’t drift away from the problem and its constraints.

When I look into this, I notice that there is research indicating that when doing certain types of creative work, the default mode network and the executive control network are, indeed, active at the same time, which they usually aren’t. Individuals who are experienced in a creative field seem to have the capacity to keep the default mode network turned on, allowing them to generate many permutations of ideas, while steering it with the executive control network, ensuring their parallelized mindwandering is constrained by the facts of the problem. I suspect we are all capable of this to some extent, but doing it to the extent Hadamard’s subjects did is akin to a ballerina spinning on her toes: a mental posture that requires serious practice to develop the necessary muscles and coordination.

I’m not well-versed in neuroscience enough to know if I’m interpreting this right; I’m just speculating.

But what we do know is that Hadamard, as he worked, would pace up and down his room with what “witnesses to [his] daily life and work” called his “inside” look. (Others, like Poincaré and Helmholtz, seem to have sat at their desks, staring into nowhere.) And this type of deep, consciously-blurry concentration could go on for a long time: Hadamard mentions that he only stopped walking if he needed to write down a proof (reluctantly). An acquaintance writes that a friend of his shared an office with one of the best now living physicists; this physicist’s work habit was to come into the office in the morning and then stare into the wall for 8 hours before going home. Imagine holding a productive thought for that long without writing any steps down and, presumably, without even compressing things into words inside your head!

The interplay between writing and non-linguistic thinking

Hadamard writes that he sometimes used algebraic signs when dealing with easy calculations, but adds that, “whenever the matter looks more difficult, they become too heavy a baggage for me.”

Why are words too heavy?

Reasoning from my experience, I suspect it is because words are laborious. When we put words to a thought, we have to compress something that is like a web in our mind, filled with connections and associations going in all directions, turning that web into a sequential string of words; we have to compress what is high-dimensional into something low-dimensional. This has all sorts of advantages, which I will return to, but the point I want to emphasize here is that compression is effortful. It takes intense concentration to find the right words (rather than the sloppy ones that first come to mind), and then to put them in the proper order. As James Joyce said to his friend when he was asked why he looked so gloomy, “I’ve only written seven words today…” “But why then are you in despair—seven words is a lot for you!” “I don’t know in which order to put them…”

If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster.2

But this is a big if. Most people, myself included, have too weak mental models to do this kind of processing for complex problems, and so, our thoughts are riddled with contradictions and holes that we often don’t notice unless we try to write them down. We can move faster in wordless thought, but we’re moving at random. If, however, you have deep expertise in an area, like the mathematicians, it is possible to let go of the language compression and do a much faster search. M, who started his career as a physicist, tells me that when he was 13 and read that Einstein thought without words, he felt disappointed since his mind didn’t work like that; then, “a decade and many thousands of hours of mathematics and physics later,” he reread the passage and recognized himself almost completely. I guess this was because the labor of learning mathematics, done largely through reading and writing his way through complex ideas and problems, had given him deep enough mental models to make words somewhat superfluous.

But even then, as Hadamard notes, writing is a necessary step of the process. The insights arrived at wordlessly need to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical notation and logic, to test their validity. It is a sort of feedback mechanism: unless the intuition holds up on the page, it is a false intuition.

The written results also work as relay results. By writing something down and making sure it is solid, we can offload that thought from working memory and instead use it as a building block for the next step of the thought. Or, to use a metaphor by the mathematician William Hamilton, deep thinking is like building a tunnel through a sandbank:

In this operation, it is impossible to succeed unless every foot, nay, almost every inch in our progress be secured by an arch of masonry before we attempt the excavation of another. Now, language is to the mind precisely what the arch is to the tunnel. The power of thinking and the power of excavation are not dependent on the words in the one case, on the mason-work in the other; but without these subsidiaries, neither process could be carried on beyond its rudimentary commencement.

So writing—and reading, seriously, the writings of others—is a way to collect stepping stones: ideas that have been stabilized enough that they can carry us as we walk deeper into the thought space.

But this stabilization of meaning can go wrong, too, if we stabilize ideas that aren’t ready to be stabilized yet. When writing, there are all sorts of details that need to be specified for our paragraphs to make sense, and if we don’t know what should go into a sentence, it is all too easy to fill in the uncertain parts with guesses. At least my brain has the most miraculous autocomplete function and supplies me with credible endings to any sentence I start—often credible nonsense. But when the nonsense is there on the page, next to thoughts I’ve settled through hard work, it looks respectable! It often takes considerable work to realize I’ve fooled myself.

This was another reason Hadamard’s subjects gave for why they were reluctant to use words: they were afraid of the false precision writing forces onto thinking. They were afraid of premature precision and the confusion it breeds. By thinking in blurry images, or tensions of the hands, or sounds, they could keep their thoughts accurately vague in the areas where there was still uncertainty. They wrote down on paper, as settled, only mostly what was actually known. If you are disciplined, you can write in such a way that you avoid false precision.

To sum up: the relationship between verbal thinking and deep wordless concentration is complex.

• Non-verbal, blurry thinking is faster and can search in a broader way, but it is more error-prone than verbal thought.

• Good writing tends to come from an attempt to capture in words something you understand wordlessly, rather than moving ideas around on the page; but, paradoxically, a generative subconscious is usually one that has been trained by writing and deep reading, which provides the subconscious with relay results and other mental structures necessary for deep thought.

• Writing forces precision, which can fool us into locking in details we have no reason to lock in, but written notes (or drawings) are a necessary aid when thinking long chains of thoughts.

Over the last nine months, as I’ve been thinking about this topic, I’ve become more mindful about when words hinder and when they help. I notice that I spend more time in wordless thoughts than I used to. But I’m also more deliberate about using writing to structure my brain so it feeds me better thoughts.

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As always, a big thank you to the paying subscribers who fund the work on the public essays. I couldn’t do this without you! I also want to thank Johanna Karlsson and Michael Nielsen for discussion about the topic. Esha Rana helped me with the final edit.

I once gave my grandfather a compliment on a knitted sweater he was wearing, only to have my grandmother loosen a thread and unravel the whole thing. “He’s getting too thin for it,” she said. The next time I visited, she had knitted the thread into a sweater my size.

They had both grown up on small farms, in the days before electricity, and began working as children. They farmed, slaughtered, built houses and roads, sewed the clothes for their four children, wired the electricity. Their way of appropriating the world was fundamentally different from mine: everything around them was something they could take apart and put back together. If they didn’t like how the light fell in their living room, they moved the windows. If they needed a lathe, they disassembled a hammer drill and turned it into a lathe. Their world was filled with affordances that I didn’t see. Where I saw a sweater, she saw a thread temporarily shaped as one—it could just as well be a scarf, a pair of socks, a hat, or six gloves. She saw more degrees of freedom than I did, and acted on it.

This capacity to see through objects and notice how they can be reconfigured is closely related to agency. Having learned how to pick things apart and build them back together, my grandparents had a more granular view of the world. They could tinker with and adapt the world around them to better fit their needs. They were, in their circumscribed world, much freer than I was: no matter what they wanted to achieve, they could nearly always find a path.

Despite growing up in poverty, my grandparents and the people of their milieu could do grandiose things. A miner lived next door to my grandmother when she grew up. He was a silent, brooding man and spent his spare time locked up in his barn. This had been going on for 25 years when, one day, during the harvest, when my grandmother was seven, a bellowing sound arose from the barn. He had built a full-size church organ.1

In July, Johanna Karlsson and I wrote an essay about agency, which we defined as a combination of autonomy and efficacy—the capacity to form independent goals and manipulate the world around you dextrously enough to get it done. During that project, we ended up with nearly 20,000 words, of which 16,000 were cut in the final draft.

Hopefully, we’ll get around to finishing a few more essays on the topic, but in the meantime, I wanted to share some excerpts from the full draft.

At the end of today’s post, there is also a collection of links to essays and films I’ve been struck by recently. For previous fragment collections, see here, here, here, and here.

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From Mohn und Gedächtnis, Anselm Kiefer, 2019-2020

1. Sometimes, I read for the pleasure of entering a mental world I hadn’t anticipated; sometimes, I read to be transformed. This essay is about the latter kind of reading.

2. When I want to be transformed, I chase my reading, to use Robin Hanson’s phrase. “Hunting has two main modes: searching and chasing,” Hanson writes. “With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, in contrast, you have a focus of attention that drives your actions.” Searching is when I’m reading without a clear aim and continue to read even if I’m unsure about what the author is trying to achieve. Chasing is when I have a question I’m pursuing.

3. Chasing makes you more active and critical of what you read. This helps you learn more. As Hanson writes, “search-readers often don’t have a good mental place to put each thing they learn. [...] Chasers, in contrast, always have specific mental places they are trying to fill with what they read, so they better integrate new things they learn with old things they know.” When you chase, you continually ask yourself whether what you are reading “is relevant for your quest, or whether the author actually has anything new or interesting to say.” This means you drop books that don’t advance your understanding about the questions that matter to you, so you can find the books that do answer them and transform your thinking.

4. Of the roughly 300 books I start each year, I finish about 50. I skim a lot. Books are not sacred. I have to be ruthless in saying no to most of them (as well as to many other things in life) so I can spend an appropriate amount of time on the books (etc.) that really do challenge me and push the edges of my thinking. I once spent more than 100 hours thinking about 40 pages from Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations (at the end of serious meditation like that, I often find myself with notes for an essay about the ideas).

5. A surprising amount of the value of reading comes from stopping to think about what I’m taking in. I say surprising because I often feel like I get things right away. But with good writing, this is an illusion: it keeps getting more and more interesting the deeper I process it. As I read, I often do such things as close my eyes to visualize what the author is saying, reflect on how it connects to other things I know, and come up with counterarguments. I write in the margin. I dog-ear and return to important passages multiple times. A few days after finishing a book, I capture my thoughts in my notetaking system, which is organized along these lines. I also save quotes from every good book I read, as in a hypomnēmata. To be changed by my reading, reliably, I need to process what I read in an active way like this. If I read at a constant speed, page after page, I only half-understand most of it and retain little more than a fuzzy feeling from the book six months later.1 (To retain more, I also make spaced repetition cards, which give you the option to remember something for the rest of your life for the price of ~5 min effort.)

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Finding books

6. Needless to say, most writing does not deserve this amount of attention—I actually struggle to find 50 books a year worth reading. Sourcing good books is often my bottleneck, and I have had to put a lot of work into getting better at it. Here are some things I do:

7. When I get curious about something, I ask myself, “What is the best thing that has ever been written about this? Who has the deepest insight?” I’ll typically ask this in several places: I’ll ask on Twitter, I’ll email people who I think know about this problem, I’ll ask a few different language models—I gather a list of promising books.2

8. Then I interview the candidate books. Authors I deep-read will change me to some degree; they will restructure my brain. This is a big responsibility to give someone, so I think of picking a book as a recruitment process, and I do my due diligence to make sure they are up for the job. In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler gives a comprehensive overview of how to do this kind of evaluation before reading a book. What I do is some combination of (a) reading summaries (on Wikipedia, Goodreads, Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia, etc.) to make sure the book is relevant; (b) checking what knowledgeable people have said about it, to evaluate if it is considered a high achievement in its field; (c) read the index of the book and the first few pages. That is, I spend 5–20 minutes gathering information that lets me evaluate if the book deserves to work on my brain. If I’m still excited, I order the book to my library and start reading it (without committing myself to finishing it if it turns out to be less useful than anticipated).

9. I often cluster my reading and read 5-10 books on the same topic to ensure I get a well-rounded perspective. When I read only one book, the topic seems easy to understand. The same is true if I read several books where the authors’s perspectives are closely correlated (sharing similar values, working in the same intellectual field, and so on). I get a false sense of clarity. But if I read multiple uncorrelated books about the same topic, I get a real sense of confusion. The authors contradict each other! They use different frameworks, so I don’t know if they are talking about the same thing! What is this!? The confusion hurts my head and forces me to wrestle with the material. I have to do such things as reconstruct the arguments and evaluate them. I have to translate between the different frameworks to understand if they are talking about the same things. In this process, I win my own understanding.

10. How do you ensure the books are uncorrelated? I tend to co-read books by authors from different disciplines. An economist, a philosopher, and a cultural anthropologist are going to reason about the flourishing of Ancient Greece in different ways, pulling on deep stacks of mental models and intellectual tools developed in their respective fields. I also prefer to read authors from different time periods. Jacob Burckhardt’s The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1898) has a very different view of Greek culture than H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks (1951), which has a different view than Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (2005). Modern authors have the advantage that they have access to more data. But I find their opinions easier to predict, so I often prefer older authors since they surprise me and therefore expand my worldview more.

11. Follow the citation trees. If I read something good, I always look at the index (or the links if it is a blog post) to see what they have been reading. Good writers and thinkers often have great taste. By moving along these intellectual graphs, you can find your way to some really interesting corners of our intellectual commons. As you map the connections, you tend to converge on the books, essays, and thinkers that are the highest peaks of their domain. I like to think of the first books that I surface when I get interested in an area as small streams that act as entry points to a river system. By tracing their influences, I can make my way upriver and into the mountains.

The habit of reading

12. Reading well is an endurance sport. I sometimes talk to people who want to become serious readers and so pick up Kafka’s The Trial or something like that—it is about as pleasant as running a marathon untrained. They often lose their enthusiasm for reading. You have to gradually ramp up your capacity to handle complex ideas and precise prose. I read a few hours a day, and I mostly read books that are comfortable for me to read, well within my range. It is more important to keep the reading experience easy enough that I keep going and going and going, than to always push myself to that edge. By reading within my comfort zone, I gradually build up my stamina and pick up more and more references, words, and patterns of thought, bringing more and more literature into my comfort zone. I remember reading Dostoevsky as a teenager, and I could do it, but it was a chore; these days his prose sounds like an email from a smart friend. It is thrilling when things that were beyond me become easy like that: the world cracks open. If you want to reach the deepest experiences literature provides, you have to put effort into building the stamina and conceptual understanding necessary for complex writing to become transparent to you.

13. I also do some reading where I actively try to push my limits: the type where I need to learn an entire new vocabulary and work hard to absorb new mental models. I find that this has gotten a lot easier since LLMs, large language models like ChatGPT, got good. These days if I read something that is outside my comfort zone, I often keep one or two language models open so I can ask questions as I read.3 I take pictures of paragraphs and upload them as context. If I’m confused, I ask the LLMs to explain what a paragraph says. This means I very rarely get stuck anymore. I can nearly always probe my way to an understanding that lets me keep reading if I spend a few minutes discussing it with an LLM.4 This has removed a lot of the emotional resistance I have had against reading very hard books, and has therefore expanded my range and made me a stronger reader.

14. The kind of reading I talk about requires plenty of time—I spend 10-30 hours a week reading. Where do you find that time? Well, we can work backwards from the fact that we’re awake some 112 hours a week. So the problem is rarely actual hours (though if you have kids, it sometimes actually is). But one of my blessings is that I never got into the habit of carrying a smartphone around; instead, I put a book in each jacket pocket and read if the kids are playing in the park or if I’m waiting for the ferry. I have a tendency to get stuck reading the internet if I have access. But if we switch off the router at home, as we aim5 to do if we are not doing something that requires internet access, I can carve out two hours at night after we’ve put the four-year-old to sleep. The late evenings alone are enough to read a book a week.

15. Why read with this intensity? Why turn it into so much work and make it another project to manage if you’re happy having it just as a hobby? I suspect this is partly a matter of taste. I value reading things for their own sake, too—without a goal in mind, for the pleasure of being present with a book. But when I treat books like something more than this, I get something deeper. By applying yourself slightly more—and if you are a reading person, what I’ve described in this essay is only slightly more work than normal reading—yes, by applying yourself slightly more, you can retain vastly more from those hours you already put in. Reading seriously changes your brain so that the world that comes at you grows more nuanced and interesting and filled with affordances that let you do things you didn’t know were possible. Serious reading compounds.

16. Good books are compressed thoughts. They are like seeds: when you plant them in your mind, they explode from their casings and shoot up from the ground—growing much vaster than it feels reasonable a little seed like that could possibly grow. In seven hours, I can read a book of thoughts that someone spent two years thinking. There are few ways of spending seven hours that can compete with that.

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Acknowledgments

Johanna Karlsson read and commented on drafts of this essay. Esha Rana did the copy edits. I made the mistakes.

And, as always, a big thank you to the subscribers who fund the production of the free essays.

A drawing of the iron mines where my grandfather grew up, as they looked some 60 years before his birth

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Brioches and Knife, Eliot Hodgkin, 08/1961

1.

When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. Attention is something we “have to protect.” We have to “pay”1 attention—like a tribute. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be. Slowing down makes reality vivid, strange, and hot.

Let me start with the most obvious example. As anyone who has had good sex knows, sustained attention and delayed satisfaction are a big part of it. When you resist the urge to go ahead and get what you want and instead stay in the moment, you open up a space for seduction and fantasy. Desire begins to loop on itself and intensify.

I’m not sure what is going on here, but my rough understanding is that the expectation of pleasure activates the dopaminergic system in the brain. Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon. So when we are being seduced and sense that something pleasurable is coming—but it keeps being delayed, and delayed skillfully—the phasic bursts of dopamine ramp up the levels higher and higher, pulling more receptors to the surface of the cells, making us more and more sensitized to the surely-soon-to-come pleasure. We become hyperattuned to the sensations in our genitals, lips, and skin.

And it is not only dopamine ramping up that makes seduction warp our attentional field, infusing reality with intensity and strangeness. There are a myriad of systems that come together to shape our feeling of the present: there are glands and hormones and multiple areas of the brain involved. These are complex physical processes: hormones need to be secreted and absorbed; working memory needs to be cleared and reloaded, and so on. The reason deep attention can’t happen the moment you notice something is that these things take time.

What’s more, each of these subsystems update what they are reacting to at a different rate. Your visual cortex can cohere in less than half a second. A stress hormone like cortisol, on the other hand, has a half-life of 60–90 minutes and so can take up to 6 hours to fully clear out after the onset of an acute stressor. This means that if we switch what we focus on more often than, say, every 30 minutes, our system will be more or less decohered—different parts will be “attending to” different aspects of reality.2 There will be “attention residue” floating around in our system—leftovers from earlier things we paid attention to (thoughts looping, feelings circling below consciousness, etc.), which crowd out the thing we have in front of us right now, making it less vivid.

Inversely, the longer we are able to sustain the attention without resolving it and without losing interest, the more time the different systems of the body have to synchronize with each other, and the deeper the experience gets.

Locked in on the same thing, the subsystems begin to reinforce each other: the dopamine makes us aware of our skin, and sensations on the skin ramp up dopamine release, making us even more aware of our skin. A finger touches our belly, and we start to fantasize about where that finger might be going; and so now our fantasies are locked in, too, releasing even more dopamine and making us even more aware of our skin. The more the subsystems lock in, the more intense the feedback loops get, and after twenty minutes, our sense of self has evaporated, and we’re in a realm where we do, feel, and think things that would seem surreal in other contexts.

2.

Similar things happen when we are able to sustain our attention to things other than sex, too. The exact mechanics differ, I presume, but the basic pattern is that when we linger on something, our bodily systems synchronize and feed each other stimuli in an escalatory loop that restructures our attentional field.

Almost anything that we are able to direct sustained attention at will begin to loop on itself and bloom.

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To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.

And you do the same thing with joy. If you learn to pay sustained attention to your happiness, the pleasant sensation will loop on itself until it explodes and pulls you into a series of almost hallucinogenic states, ending in cessation, where your consciousness lets go and you disappear for a while. This takes practice. The practice is called jhanas, and it is sometimes described as the inverse of a panic attack. I have only ever entered the first jhana, once while spending an hour putting our four-year-old to sleep and meditating on how wonderful it is to lie there next to her. It was really weird and beautiful. If you want to know more about these sorts of mental states, I recommend José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente’s recent write-up of his experiences, Nadia Asparouhova on her experiences, and her how-to guide.

Here is José, whose blog is normally detailed reflections on cell biology and longevity and metascience, describing the second evening of a jhana retreat:

So I went down to the beach. “Kinda nice”, I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had ‘the right size’, their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up (“Huh? I thought”). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling “It’s... always been like this!!!!” “What the fuck??!” followed by “This is too much!! Too much!!!”. The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what “painfully beautiful” means for the first time in my life.

The fact that we can enter fundamentally different, and often exhilarating, states of mind by learning how to sustain our attention is fascinating. It makes you wonder what other states are waiting out there. What will happen if you properly pay attention to an octopus?3 What about your sense of loneliness?4 A mathematical idea?5 The weights of a neural net?6 The footnotes here take you to examples of people who have done that. There are so many things that we can let bloom inside of us.

One of my favorite things to sustain attention toward is art.

3.

There was a period in my twenties when I didn’t get art. I thought artists were trying to say something, but I felt superior because I thought there had to be better ways of getting their ideas across (and also, better ideas). But then I realized that good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your consciousness in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation. The point isn’t the words, but what happens to your mind when you attend to those words (or images, or sounds). There is nothing there to understand; it is just something to experience, like sex. But the experiences can be very deep and, sometimes, transformative.

In 2019, for example, I saw a performance of Jean Sibelius’s 5th Symphony at the University Hall in Uppsala.

Before the concert began, I spent a few minutes with my eyes closed, doing a body scan, to be fully present when the music began. As the horns at the opening of the piece called out, I decided to keep my eyes closed, so I wouldn’t be distracted by looking at the hands of the musicians. Then… a sort of daydream started up. The mood suggested to me the image of a cottage overlooking a sloping meadow and a thick wood of pines, a few hours from Helsinki. It was a pretty obvious image, since I knew that Sibelius wrote the piece at Aniola, which is 38 km north of Helsinki. But then I saw an old man walking up the meadow and into the house. The camera cut. Through an open door, I saw the man, alone, working at a desk. I saw it as clearly as if it had been projected on a screen before me: the camera moved slowly toward the back of the man.

Through the window above his desk, I could see a light in the distance. Perhaps it was Helsinki? No, it felt alive, like a being—something alive and growing, something that was headed here. But then again, if you were to see a city from space, watching it sped up by 100,000x, it would look like a being moving through the landscape, spreading, getting closer. The old man sat there for a hundred years, watching the light. There was a sinking feeling in my body.

One spring, birds fell dead from the sky. They littered the fields, whole droves of them filled the ditches—blue birds, red birds, and black. The man carried them into his woodshed and placed them in waist-high piles.

The film kept going, and the emotional intensity and complexity gradually ramped up. For the thirty minutes that it took the orchestra to play the three movements of the symphony, I experienced what felt like two or three feature films, all interconnected by some strange emotional logic. In the third movement, a group of hunter-gatherers was living in a cave that reminded me of the entrance to a nuclear waste facility. A girl hiding behind a tree saw men with cars arrive…

The structure of the music was such that it gave me enough predictability and enough surprise to allow my attention to deeply cohere. The melody lines and harmonies dredged up memories and images from my subconscious, weaving them into a rich cinematic web of stories. Guided by the music, my mind could tunnel into an attentional state where I was able to see things I had never seen before and where I could work through some deep emotional pain that seemed to resolve itself through the images.

When the music stopped, I barely knew where I was.

I opened my eyes and remembered that my brother was sitting next to me.

“What did you think?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I felt kind of restless.”

Like always, the research for this essay was funded by the contributions of paying subscribers. Thank you! We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you. If you enjoy the essays and want to support Escaping Flatland, we are not yet fully funded:

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A special thanks to Johanna Karlsson, Nadia Asparouhova, Packy McCormick, and Esha Rana, who all read and commented on drafts of this essay. The image of the University Hall is by Ann-Sofi Cullhed.

If you liked this essay, you might also like:

I wrote this essay with Johanna Karlsson, so it is a collaboration but I narrate. /Henrik

Every problem cries in its own language
Go like a blood hound where the truth has trampled
—Tomas Tranströmer, “About History”

1.

Like most people, I was really bad at making decisions when I was 25. If I was confronted with a complicated problem, like figuring out what to do with my life, I would pick a solution on a whim, more or less, or, if that was too hard, I would straightforwardly just ignore the problem. This made my life feel less than good at times. But then something fell in place.

Or no, it wasn’t a specific moment like that. It was more the cumulative effect of spending 36 years trying things and failing and learning a little bit here and there, and—mostly over the last four and a half years—having a few conceptual breakthroughs. Most of the insights, interestingly, came after my wife Johanna decided to turn the derelict grounds around our house into a garden. Ambitious gardening, as it turns out, is a good way to get better at dealing with messy problems.

Let me tell you about that and the core thing I learned.

So, in 2021, when our oldest daughter Maud was four and Johanna was pregnant with Rebecka, we bought an old farm on an island in the Baltic Sea. We were able to get it cheaply because there was a glorious total of one single room that could be heated in winter. Also, a large swarm of false spirea shrubs was pushing right up against the house (they were even growing inside the walls, we later discovered—ghostly white trees with leaves like paper; don’t even get me started).

Anyway, it was while removing the tennis-court-sized section of shrubs closest to the house that Johanna got the feeling that this place, despite its appearances, was actually meant to be a great garden. Under the overgrowth, we uncovered stone walls and beautiful differences in elevation with views into the forest, where evening light striped the ground with the shadows of maples and oaks. It was like when you get half an idea for an essay and just know that this thing could turn into something deep and moving if you pour everything you have into it.

The more Johanna thought about it, the more she felt like she couldn’t just plop some flowers down here; she got obsessed with the idea of making a great garden, one that really took full advantage of the landscape. But since she knew nothing about gardening, she had to learn everything from scratch.

And as it turns out, making a great garden (as compared to a good one) is a remarkably complicated project. With so many interconnected parts and considerations, the project would force her to go deep on learning about process and problem-solving.

When Johanna began looking into it, one of the questions she steered toward was how great garden designers, like Dan Pearson or Miranda Brooks, evolve their designs. What is it they do differently from the garden designers that make gardens that are merely good?

Skimming course literature and gardening books to get a sense for the field, Johanna learned about the more obvious things that can go wrong, like planting flowers that need a lot of sun in the shade, or making the garden too high-maintenance for your time budget. But when it came to figuring out how to make a garden look exceptionally right, there wasn’t much to be learned from the handbooks. The books would present tools and techniques you could use (pointing out, for instance, that it is good to work with contrast), but these techniques were used by both ok designers and great ones; the difference was that the great designers always seemed to pick precisely the right kind of contrast in the right place and the ok ones didn’t. And the question was, how do you do that? What did the great designers see that the good ones didn’t? And how can you learn to see it too?

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2.

As a gardener you have to stay on top of an awful lot of things.
—David Lynch

I remember discussing these questions a lot with Johanna and pooling our thoughts—I come up against similar problems every time I’m writing an essay. Faced with endless options, as you are when planning a garden, or writing an essay, or shaping a life, how do you reliably figure out what the right solution is?

I was somewhat happy conceding it was a mystery. Sometimes things turn out well and sometimes not. But Johanna has a lot of what Laura Deming calls the rage of research (“But why????? my brain will scream.”). She absolutely cannot tolerate it when she doesn’t understand something.

So when Rebecka was a baby and only wanted to sleep if her mother was next to her in bed, Johanna filled the bed with books, work notes, and lectures of designers she admired. Studying their processes, she learned many useful things. But it was all a blur of small decisions. She couldn’t discern the underlying pattern of why they chose one thing over another, or how they reached their conclusions.

Until one day, she found a skeleton key. She figured out what they were doing. This insight—which took form during a close reading of the work of the design theoretician Christopher Alexander—was so basic and general that it also helped us figure out how to write better essays and deal with all of the complex, messy problems that we keep bringing on ourselves by acting on our curiosities and convictions.

Compressed to a single paragraph, the core idea was this:

When faced with a difficult problem, don’t try to solve it. Instead, make sure you understand it. If you understand it properly, the solution will be obvious.

This idea has been expressed by many people (the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck comes to mind, as does Einstein), but to me the clearest and most useful articulation of the underlying logic comes from Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form.

It was in Notes in 1964 that Alexander introduced his now-famous idea of form-context-fit. These days, I mostly see it referenced in the phrase product-market-fit—meaning you’ve found a product that consumers are hungry to pay for—but it was originally a broader, deeper, and more interesting idea. Alexander proposed form-context-fit as a way to objectively judge if a design is good. Or, to phrase it differently, form-context-fit is a way for us to judge if a specific solution to a problem is good. And what Alexander said was that a design is good if and only if the form (of the solution) fits the context (of the problem).

Let me illustrate this with a simple example: say you’re buying clothes. Here’s a common way people approach this problem. They go to the store and see a t-shirt with a print on it that they like (perhaps it is a picture of Jimi Hendrix and underneath the picture it says, “Bob Marley”), so they buy that. Or they see someone look good in a pair of white linen pants and go find a pair for themselves. But then, when they come home, they discover that it doesn’t fit with any of the other clothes they have, so it gets hidden at the back of the wardrobe. In this example, the clothes that get bought are the form, and they fail because they do not fit the context (which is made up of, among other things, the rest of the wardrobe).

So what should you do? Well, here’s the useful thing about Alexander’s definition of good design as design that fits the context: it tells us where we should look if we want to find a proper solution to the problem.

We should look at the context.

Let’s stay with the clothes shopping example. What people who are good at picking clothes tend to do, among other things, is that they think in terms of outfits, not individual pieces of clothing. “If you have some clothes you wear a lot, you should buy things that make them look better.” Also, good clothes buyers think about what situations they are going to be wearing the clothes in. “You need lots of clothes for everyday life, and you don’t, normally, need as many fancy going-out clothes.”

In other words, people who are good at buying clothes seek to understand the context that the clothes are going to be in (the shape of the body, skin color, the full outfit, the budget, and so on), and then they buy things that plug the holes they have in their wardrobe.

This is how you arrive at a good solution.

3.

Looking again at the work of great garden designers, Johanna noticed that the flurry of activity that she had seen was, in fact, a systematic probing of the context. The designers were taking actions aimed at uncovering the context bit by bit, until they had figured out what the garden needed to be.

With this in mind, Johanna looked at our own garden anew. She began articulating what was important about the context. There was a very strong atmosphere in the landscape that came from the surrounding woods and meadows, as well as a certain moodiness that comes from the old moss-covered dry stone walls. Whatever we introduced in the garden couldn’t disturb this atmosphere, or break it up.

It was this sense of place that we needed to protect. Any mark made on the land would have to be made with a sensitive hand to maintain the mood here. The walls and the land spoke for themselves [...] it was clear that there was not just one mood here—each corner had its own atmosphere. We would have to unpick this place stitch by stitch to know how to put it together again.

—Dan Pearson

And it wasn’t enough to respect the context. What we put in needed to make the already-existing stronger. This also applied to the other aspects of the context, the architecture, the ecology… And it applied to the part of the context that was us—the garden should make us feel more alive and encourage us to engage in the activities we want to engage in. The next thing we put in needed to make the previous things stronger.

As the context came into focus, it became clear what needed to be done.

To refine the atmosphere of the garden, we realized that we needed to get rid of a hedge of hydrangea bushes that the former owner had planted, since their pastel blue had an intense, screaming quality that clashed with the moodiness of the landscape. Getting rid of this would strengthen the wholeness of the place.

So Johanna and the kids took two days to cut and dig the bushes away (the eight-year-old helping, the four-year-old mostly digging for mice), and with the hedge gone, the context flooded us with new information. We’d been confused about what to do with this part of the garden, which is a rather weird rectangular enclosed space, probably an old animal enclosure, with a confusing mood; but with the hedge gone, and the atmosphere thus more coherent, we could see what would pull the landscape in the right direction: a parterre, like the one at Rousham.

The parterre at Rousham gardens, by Andrew Montgomery, House & garden

Finding form-context-fit is like solving a Sudoku. To figure out which number should go into a square, you look at the other numbers in the same row—it can’t be one of those numbers; that’s one constraint. Then you look at the numbers in the same box; it can’t be one of those either. Once you’ve figured out all the numbers that are not allowed, you know the constraints, the context.

You also know what the solution is.

In most situations, there are a near infinite number of potential answers, yet only a few that are good. Luckily, each constraint that you map reduces the search space, making it easier to see what the right answer is.

If you map the context well enough, the solution will reveal itself.

4.

When I was younger and felt lost and alienated by life, I was always stretching for a solution, something that could get me out of my predicament. I applied to university, I switched majors, I started companies. But I wasn’t paying attention to the context. I didn’t see who I was or how the world works, and it didn’t strike me that I could map this systematically. So my solutions never fit.

Now that I see the landscape more clearly, I can see that I was standing inches from good solutions to many of my problems for years before I saw them. (It is unnerving to observe someone being so close and yet so far away.) I was too stuck in my head, too stressed about finding a solution to see what was in front of me, too narrow-minded to see the gradient I had to follow.

I often got fixated on a solution before I’d actually understood the details of the problem. This is a common and strong human tendency: to distort our understanding of the problem to make our preconceived solution look like the right answer. Obviously, this makes it harder to see what the right solution is. You won’t be as attentive to the landscape if you hide your face behind a badly drawn map.

But when I think in terms of understanding the problem, or mapping the context, rather than solving it, I’m put in a state of mind that makes it easier for me to get it right. Being curious about the problem counteracts my confirmation bias and helps me see through to the deeper layers of the context where the better solutions hide.

How to do this, practically speaking, will be the topic of the next part, which we hope to finish in the next few weeks.

As always, a big thank you to the paying subscribers who fund our work. We wouldn’t have been able to keep going for so long without you. If you want to support Escaping Flatland, we are not yet fully funded. /Henrik and Johanna

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Gala "Flowers and Butterflies", Salle des Ambassadeurs du Casino, Cannes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1935

Above my writing desk, I have hung postcards of paintings by artists who lived within walking distance from our farm. They were naturalists, all of them, so they painted in the field. They spent their spare time looking at their canvas and then back at nature, gradually learning to see what was there, while capturing their seeing on the canvas. I don’t know why it felt so important to them—if they felt exhilarated by the layered richness of reality, the way I do when I feel compelled to write, or if something else drove them. But it feels good to look at the results of their labor. Studying what they looked at, it is like they are teaching me how to see my landscape.

As I go for my midday run, I pass through a field that one of my postcards depicts. Before I saw the painting, this field used to just be a grey, flat plane, but now it vibrates with the vision of the autistic farmhand who stood out here for hours in 1943, looking. That is a gift.

The artists I have hung above my desk didn’t belong to a scene. They didn’t know each other; they were all outsiders of one kind or another. Apart from the autistic farmhand, there was also a homosexual German art collector hiding here from the Nazis, and a guy who made a quarry on his farm and spent 40 years carving giant phalluses of stone. Most of the painters I’m drawn to were not friends with the other painters working in the area, and they didn’t know that anyone would ever see their art: it was a purely personal need that drove them out into the fields, a need to look at the world around them and to capture what they saw in words or sculptures or paintings.

Did they feel alone? Did they feel strange for having this need to look for hours at fields and barns, contemplating their lifeworld, when others seemed fine just driving across the fields, or locking their tractor in the barn? I would think so. I do.

But though they never found communion in a scene, I can’t help but think they are a constellation. Like stars, they looked isolated up close—but seen from over here, they are a pattern in the sky. They were a constellation of lookers. Standing in a rainy field in 1913 or by a green pond in 1984, they looked up as the night fell and they saw stars, thousands of them. But all of them seemed far away, cold, and out of reach . . . there was no way for them to know that some of these distant stars, spread randomly across the sky, were actually part of the same constellation as them. But from where I sit, in my old woodwork room turned writing studio, in April 2025, I see their pattern.

That is perhaps a sentimental image. But on days like this, when rain hammers the window, and my decision to live out here and spend my days thinking about pear trees and unknown painters makes me feel more than a little odd, I like to imagine that I’m a part of their constellation, and it feels good. Contemplating your lifeworld is a deep human need; it connects us, somehow.

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In this post, I’m going to collect some scraps and fragments that I cut from essays over the last six months. (The above was one of the fragments.)

There will be a long fragment about love as a skill that you can practice and a shorter one about essays as a space where “truth plays out,” rather than a medium of knowledge transmission.

At the end, there is also a collection of links to essays and films I’ve been struck by recently. For previous fragment collections, see here, here, here, and here.

Love is a skill

I have to admit that I don’t remember the precise date, but sometime in June, Johanna and I will have been a couple for 12 years. We’ve always been pretty casual about things like that (we have, for instance, been married for five years but haven’t yet gotten around to buying rings1). But we’ve never been casual about the relationship itself: it feels like our life’s work, in a way, and a craft.

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Of all the ways this blog have changed my life, the most exciting was in December 2021 when I wrote a post about Ivan Illich that ended up, to my utter astonishment, to get read by almost a hundred people. Social media has made us a bit numb to things, so having a hundred readers and two likes sounds like nothing, but if you’d walk into a café and sudde…

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Birch in a forest, Gustav Klimt, 1903

Last May, when our oldest daughter Maud turned seven, I wrote:

I wish I had a book that I could put in her hands, and it helps her learn what many never learn, or learn too late, namely, that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply, and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and to handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly.

It is late May again, Maud is eight now, and I’ve decided to write down a glimpse of the book I imagined.

Last year, when I talked about learning “how to handle being sentenced to freedom,” a phrase I borrowed from Sartre, I meant roughly what people these days call “cultivating high agency.” But I need to define my words, since some ways the phrase high agency is used feel foreign to me, and depressing.

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

1. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I was getting at when I said “authentically, and responsibly”).

2. Agency also requires the ability and willingness to pursue those goals. It requires the “will to know,” the drive to see reality as it is, so you can manipulate it deftly and solve the problems you want to solve, instead of fooling yourself that certain problems are “unsolvable.” In other words, efficacy (“handle it effectively”).1

Or phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are “supposed to do,” playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems (assuming your problems can’t be solved, that someone else should solve them, or working on things that do not in a meaningful way address the problem.)

I wrote about ways of figuring out what you genuinely care about in this post:

Agency is often framed as a hard-edged, type-A, aggressive approach. But over the last year, as I’ve been thinking about writing this essay, I’ve talked to a lot of highly agentic people, and I’ve read biographies about and interviews with people whose agency I admire and . . . hard-edged does not fit what I’ve seen. Often, agency is almost gentle—an attunement to the world and the self, a feeling out the details of reality, and a finding of the path of least resistance. There is sometimes considerable force involved, hard work, but it is like the force of a river being pulled toward the sea.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll mainly use examples from the life of the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, but the patterns I choose to focus on recur in most of the lives I looked at.

Problems are solvable

Werner Herzog started writing screenplays and submitting proposals to producers and television stations when he was “about 14.” I also wrote screenplays at that age, and dreamed of making films, but it didn’t even strike me that I could actually attempt what Herzog did.

I would read about him in the encyclopedia at the local library, and I would read about Tarkovsky and Kubrick and Cassavetes, but I thought of them as near-mythical figures; it didn’t strike me that I could look at what they did and do it myself. I thought what I wanted to do wasn’t doable, so I didn’t even try.

Now, 22 years later, I’ve lived long enough to have learned that most things are actually doable if you care enough. I rarely feel blocked in the way I did when I was younger. But it is interesting that it was something I had to learn: that problems are solveable; that if I direct my attention to the problem and learn to understand it, and act on what I learn, the problem will, sooner or later, cave in.

I think the main reason I didn’t realize my problems were solvable was a lack of imagination. I’d never seen anyone solve problems in an agentic way, and I failed to imagine that things I hadn’t seen done could be done by me.

I’m not sure why Herzog, at 14, growing up among the ruins of a bombed out Munich, could imagine himself directing a film, but he could. He was agentic enough to realize that the fact that kids until then had never been allowed to make films was just a problem, and thus could be presumed solvable. Herzog’s puberty was late—he looked like a young child until he was sixteen—so he assumed the producers would never take a bet on him if they saw him; he would have to make and negotiate deals over letter and telephone.

After three years of trying this again and again, he managed to get two film producers interested. They liked one of his proposals and were willing to accept Herzog as a first-time director. A meeting was booked.

Herzog recounts the meeting in Paul Cronin’s A Guide to the Perplexed:

When I walked into their office, I saw the two of them sitting behind a huge oak desk. I remember it second by second. I stood there as they looked beyond me, waiting, as if the father had come into town with his child. The first one shouted something so abusive I immediately wiped it from my memory, while the other slapped his thigh and laughed, shouting, “Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make film nowadays!” The entire encounter lasted fifteen seconds, after which I turned and left the office, knowing full well I would have to become my own producer.

Just imagining these sorts of reactions is painful and a big reason people hesitate to try things. But for Herzog, it was information that helped him get clarity on which strategy to try next.

Werner Herzog:

Two days later I filled out the necessary paperwork, paid a few dollars to register the company, and founded the Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

Compare this reaction with how I behaved when, at 22, I realized that I wanted to write essays. I stumbled into essay writing after a friend asked me to write a piece for a poetry journal he edited, and I fell in love with it right away; it took me only a few hours to realize that thinking on the page was much more exhilarating than film or music or poetry or programming or anything else I had tried up until then.

This was in 2012/13, around the time I started dating Johanna who is now my wife. And she told me that, given how alive I seemed to feel when I wrote essays and given how alive the result was, I should consider writing more of them. But I said there was no point doing that. I was involved in the literary world in Stockholm at this point so I knew how it worked—there are no magazines that pay for essays in Sweden. “No one has ever made a living as an essayist,” I said.

Johanna likes to tease me about this, now that we pay our bills by writing essays. And I wish I could say that I listened to her back then, but I didn’t. I was sure I knew which problems were solvable and which weren’t—it is almost arrogant if you think about it. I gave up writing essays and instead wrote novels, because that was what publishers seemed to want. But I never cared for novels enough to get good at it. My writing fizzled out.

What made my decision especially unagentic is the fact that what I wanted to do wasn’t even hard: I could have found a decent-paying day job and used that to fund my essay writing. It was as simple as that. And then I could have iterated on this first solution until I found a better one (perhaps if no one reads essays in Sweden, I shouldn’t write in Swedish?). The American composer Philip Glass funded his music by starting various companies where he could work intensely for two weeks, then take two weeks off to write—a moving company, a plumbing business. After his international breakthrough, the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), the 39-year-old Glass spent two years working as a cab driver in New York to pay off the debts from the tour. That is as good a way as any to do it.

Herzog, after founding his company at 17, spent the final two years of high school working the night shift at a steel factory to save up money for productions:

I did Punktschweissen, the kind of electrical welding that doesn’t require the precise skills of a welder — which is much trickier and takes years to master. [...] I can scarcely remember my last two years at school; I was so tired, working every night until six in the morning, saving every penny. They threatened to throw me out because occasionally I would sleep through class. “It would be justified if you kick me out because I can’t translate a phrase from Latin,” I told my teachers, “but it would be a scandal if you did so because I’m working harder than anyone else.”

The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and force it to decide your fate. If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That’s all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is. Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film.

Why didn’t I see that it would be easy to fund essay writing in this way? It was, as I’ve said, partly a lack of imagination, partly a fear of looking stupid. But it was also that my thinking was bundled. I had conflated “being a writer” with “having a publisher” and “getting a salary from my writing.” These are not the same thing.

If someone had pointed this out, it would have been clear to me that the part I cared about was thinking on the page—I would have never picked having a publisher or getting paid to write over getting to write interesting things. But I didn’t realize I needed to get clarity around what precisely I was trying to achieve; hence, I had a fuzzy bundled picture of my goal which made me miss the obvious solution. Without a clear idea of what it would mean to solve the problem, it was hard to evaluate options and make consistent progress.2

Overcoming this sort of confusion is one reason why I’ve come to value thinking-through-writing, which I write about here:

Most problems are solvable. But that doesn’t mean the solution will look like you hope it will; there will be trade offs. While Herzog made Signs of Life (1968), Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), Fata Morgana (1971), Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), he had to live at home with his mom to afford making the films. He was 31 years old when he moved out. Most people would never consider a solution like that, but sometimes, that is what high agency looks like. You have to keep your eyes locked on your values so that you don’t sacrifice the wrong thing.

Looking at the problem

At the heart of agency lies a willingness to question defaults. To be agentic, you have to treat “how things are supposed to be done” as just one option among many.

Or, no, that formulation isn’t deep enough. When I think about friends of mine who struggle to be agentic, the problem isn’t precisely that they do the default thing; it’s that they fail to understand their problems and the solution space. They act in incoherent or ineffective ways because their mental model of the situation is too limited to show them a way out. They are not attuned enough to figure out what they want and how the world works. To be agentic, you have to really look at the problem and at the solution space and accept the responsibility of learning what is necessary to make the problem go away.

If you forget about how your problems are “supposed to be solved” and just look at the goal—what is the shortest path from here to there? What is the fastest way to get the information you need to find that path?

If you have a clear understanding of the goal, there are often paths that lead there that are much shorter than the default path. A good question to ask is: what is the simplest solution that could possibly work?

If you read interviews and biographies of people with high agency, you can get plenty of examples of them asking the equivalent of this question and finding simple, creative solutions to complicated problems. Since it is hard to say anything general about what it means to find a simple solution, I recommend looking at plenty of examples to get a feel for what it means to act in this way.

For a sample of that, I recommend (apart from the Herzog books I’ve quoted from) this piece (~28,000 words) about how Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and a group of people on a Discord server in 2021 became “the clearinghouse for vaccine location information for the United States of America.” That piece is filled with hard problems solved with simple solutions.

The reason the Discord server was set up was that it had been revealed, in January 2021, that the bureaucracies involved with the vaccination program in California had lost track of the vaccine doses that had been sent to the state: only 27 percent of the doses had been administered—73 percent were in a freezer, somewhere, and people often had to make “40, 50, 60 phone calls” to find a pharmacy that could give them a shot. (It is interesting to consider that tracking the vaccine stock was such a complex problem that the state couldn’t handle it, yet a group on Discord was able to solve it by being agentic.)

During the first day of the project, the team needed to figure out how to get information about which pharmacies in California had the vaccine in stock. The definition of success, in other words, was clear: they wanted to track down where the vaccine doses that had been sent to California were now.

(If you want to practice, stop here and think about how you’d go about setting up a system to track the vaccine inventory in California.)

Patrick McKenzie:

I resolved this ambiguity in a very startup-y way: I googled for the phone number of the Walgreens at Fourth and Townsend in San Francisco. I have been to San Francisco on business before; that Walgreens is right next to the city’s main Caltrain station. (Like everyone living in Japan, I assume that a city is centered not at its geographical midpoint but at the train station. [...]) I called at 9:30am and asked to speak to the pharmacist. Without identifying myself or giving any preamble I asked, ‘Could a 65 year old get the Covid vaccine, and, if so, how?’ The pharmacist told me that they didn’t have it but to check back in two weeks.

I reported to the team that the US healthcare system would happily give vaccine inventory information to literally anyone calling. We immediately started calling the healthcare providers in the spreadsheets we had compiled overnight.

There are several good things about looking for the simplest solution that could possibly work. The first is that the types of problems that require agency are often hard, so if you make the problem any harder than necessary (as we can assume the state was doing, by insisting that they had to follow “process”), you might not make it. Or you make it, but you spend so much resources that you have to sacrifice something else (like, in this case, human lives).

If there is a “default solution” to a problem, that solution is often one of the costly solutions that needs to be avoided.

This is because the “default solution” usually has all sorts of bells and whistles that are not necessary for the concrete outcome you are looking for. When I was thinking about making films, for example, I thought that to do so I had to go to film school—this is the default solution. But film school tries to be a general preparation for all sorts of filmmakers, meaning you’ll have to spend time learning things that aren’t necessary for your specific projects—and so it takes years. That seemed too costly to me, so I gave up filmmaking.

Herzog, on the other hand, realized that film school was just one option among many. And the better solution, given his goals, was to take the money he had saved up by working as a welder and fund his own films, then send the films to festivals and use the prize money to fund ever more ambitious projects. He did the actual work and got rapid feedback from reality, learning precisely what he needed to solve his current problems. This was faster.

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Herzog:

If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations.

Put another way: Herzog mapped the actual landscape and found the shortest path to his specific goals. (And his goals were very specific. He never wanted to be “a filmmaker,” he wanted to make this film and then that film.) Working in a goal-directed way, he gathered the information he needed; he found people who could help him; and he learned the necessary skills,3 duct-taping one solution after the other until he had the film he wanted. Then he went on to the next project.

People with high agency tend to be obsessed with finding simpler solutions, to the point where normal people think they are idiots. As a case in point, consider the impression Herzog made on the team of Hollywood professionals who were sent to assist him during the production of Rescue Dawn (2006):

At every turn, crew members let [Herzog] know that they considered his directing habits strange, impulsive, even amateurish. They couldn’t comprehend why Herzog insisted on grabbing the machete himself when the sound crew wanted to capture the sound of slashed reeds. [...] They were irritated when Herzog declared that someone’s unfinished makeup looked “good enough,” and that he couldn’t wait for it to be perfect, because he liked the way the tropical light was filtering through the treetops.

Herzog had his eyes clearly locked on the goal, capturing the images he knew the film needed, and he didn’t care if the way he did that was “unprofessional.” Doing it “the proper way,” as the team insisted, would have been too expensive and time consuming—he would never have been able to amass a body of work so rich and beautiful as he has if he had followed the Hollywood process. The professionals, having too many preconceived ideas about how to go about things, wasted resources and missed the light in the trees.

Herzog:

The Americans were always nervous, telling me I wasn’t shooting sufficient coverage. I took my assistant aside and asked, “What do they mean by coverage? I have insurance coverage for my car, but coverage when making a film?” They want me to get a range of intermediate shots, close-ups and reverse angles, all for safety’s sake. But I have always filmed only what I need for the screen, and nothing else. When you do open heart surgery, you don’t go for the appendix or toenails, you go straight for the beating heart.

Epilogue

Earlier I painted myself as an unagentic person, but that doesn’t feel quite true anymore. Let me end by saying a few words about what changed. There have been a series of experiences that have helped me realize more of my agency, but I think the most important one was becoming a father (which is ironically circular since I started this essay by thinking about what I wanted to tell our daughter Maud about agency—and I end up realizing she was the one who made me agentic).

The reason having Maud in my life made me more agentic was that it was the first time I experienced what it means to surrender to my values. I had a lot of idiosyncratic opinions and values when I was younger, too, but I held onto them in a rather flimsy way. Whenever things got too hard or people disapproved of what I was doing, I tended to give up and do the normal thing instead.

When Maud was two, Johanna and I decided that we wanted to homeschool her. This is not only illegal in Sweden, but also seen as something akin to child abuse. So when we told my parents we were going to leave the country to homeschool their grandchild, they were shocked, afraid, heartbroken, embarrassed, and did what they could to talk us out of it. I remember lying on the sofa, reading their emails, and thinking there was no way to ever repair this. If I had experienced it before Maud, I would have caved in after 30 seconds. But in this case, caving in was unforgivable; I must never fail Maud. So I had to sit through the experience of having nearly everyone I knew either quietly disapprove of what we were doing or actively try to talk us out of it, crying. This was very empowering. Because I got to experience what it was like to stand my ground and do what I knew needed to be done, and see how good the outcome was.

And not only that. The decision to leave Sweden to homeschool also made me agentic in another way: there were so many problems that we just had to solve. We had to find a new country to live in and learn the language. And since the move pushed us down into relative poverty for four years, we needed to become self-reliant and learn how to renovate old windows and start companies and wrestle with bureaucracies that threatened to force us to sell the farm and so on and on and on—endure an endless barrage of challenges that I did not think I was capable of enduring. And though there were moments where I feared that the stress would break me, there was something very profound about experiencing, again and again, that problems that seemed unsolvable and overwhelming to me were solvable, always solvable. It changed my priors.

I remember when we discovered that the brick wall in the kitchen was in bad shape and needed to be redone, and I was like, “I can’t do this. I can’t hammer a hole from the kitchen straight out to the garden. We have to sell the house.” But then I just did it and it completely changed my view of what a wall is—it is something understandable, something I can take apart and put back together and manipulate to better fit our needs.

And everything is like that.

Everything can be learned, everything can be understood and reshaped to fit our values.

Looking up, five years later, I can’t believe how much my life has changed and how much more open the world feels, how much more filled with possibility and beauty. I see Maud and her little sister Rebecka (who was born after we moved to the island) playing on the trampoline on the edge of the meadow. And I think about the fact that Johanna and I are now actually, somehow, feeding our family by writing essays, and that brings a wetness to my eyes. I look at the beech trees and I think about how much beauty this world is capable of and how much possibility there is out there and how much more I can still do to nurture that beauty and that possibility.

It was there all along, that possibility; I could have reached for it all these years. The thing that kept my hand from rising was in my head. What I needed was to let my care grab hold of me and pull me away like a river—or like a drop of water running down the trunk of a beech tree, feeling out the details of this world, the bark, the lichens, looking for the path of least resistance, running down, down, into the dark wet earth we call home.

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For more on this topic, see “6 lessons about agency I learned working at an art gallery” and “Thoughts on agency.”

Acknowledgements

This piece was written in collaboration with Johanna Karlsson. Esha Rana did the copy edits. The essay also benefited from conversations and comments from Celine Nguyen, Sasha Chapin, Ha Tran Nguyen Phuong, Alexander Obenauer, Gena Gorlin, James Giammona, Alexis Gauba, Adhitya K R, Catherine Brewer, Yashvardhan Jain, Amit Parekh, Philip Chin, Tim Rutherford, Sindi Stefanova, Kiri McCrory, Tam Minh, Matt Joass, Julius Henning, Tom Critchlow, and Alexandra Heller.

Roy Gold, Our War Baby and Arthur Rimbaud’s Reliquaire

An earlier version of this was published in the waste book on January, 25, 2025

A surprising number of my favorite books were not meant to be published. They were private notebooks, or fragments from works-in-progress that never got finished: among them Pascal’s Pensées, Simone Weil’s private essays, Lichtenberg’s waste books, Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, Kafka’s diary, Joubert’s Carnets, Wittgenstein’s Brown and Blue Notebooks, and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book.

One reason I like this genre is that people censor themselves less when they are writing in private. I don’t mean that they are saying things that would get them ostracized in print (though that happens). I mean uncensored more generally: they allow their mind to be as it is on the page, however odd their thoughts are and however random the connections between them. They are not second-guessing if their thoughts are interesting to others, or trying to frame them in a certain way.

And, paradoxically enough, this is more interesting to read. Lichtenberg wrote a note about this in his private waste book (posthumously published 1800–06):

An alert thinker will often find more that is instructive and delightful in the playful writings1 of great men than in their serious works. The formal, conventional, ceremonial is usually omitted from them; it is amazing how much wretched conventional stuff still appears in our way of narrating in print. Most writers put on airs, just like many people when they are having their portraits painted.

For a more contemporary example of a similar phenomenon, Michael Nielsen says that the old bookmarking website del.icio.us had a “network” feature that

(a) hardly anyone knew about; (b) let you follow other people; but ( c) because no one knew, people just bookmarked unconsciously what they were really interested in. It was so much more interesting than twitter etc…

I think this is because our genuine thoughts (and interests) are more detailed and alive than the simulations we have of what we should say (or be interested in). When we think no one listens, we relax into the genuine. I’ve been told, repeatedly, that I hide my most interesting thoughts in the footnotes.2

Browsing through private notes feels more like participating in a happening than reading a piece of literature: this is what happened, more or less in real time, inside another human. Their beauty has more in common with the beauty of nature than the beauty of art. It is sprawling, strange, tangled, and confusing—but the overall work has a deep structure to it that art can’t imitate. It is not the result of a plan, but a generative process. I’m reminded of being in a pine forest, surrounded by large beings that stretch up from the ground.

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Another thing that attracts me to private notes is how they talk at two levels. There is the content and then there is what Schopenhaur called the style, namely how a particular mind processed the content. All writing operates at both levels (and published works often deal with the content in a more systematic way3), but the style comes through more strongly in private notes.

In published works, the style is nearly always somewhat fake and didactic—there might be rhetorical questions and so on to give the impression that the writer is thinking on the page, but really it is all arranged and tidied up, with all the false starts cut. Instead of tentative definitions that the writer probes and refines, you just get the final thought, where all the reasoning steps are baked in, hidden. It is a simulacrum of thought. But in the private notes, you get the trembling, confused, groping real thing45—and even if the writer arrives at nothing, there is something intimate about seeing how another person thinks.

If the writer is intelligent, original, or sensitive, it is also highly instructive: to see how Kafka, when he is dissatisfied with a story, doesn’t edit it, but starts over from scratch with the same prompt and goes off in a new direction; how Ingmar Bergman scribbles in his work book, again and again, versions of this line: “(I will write as I feel and as my people want. Not what outer reality demands.)”; or how Darwin collects unprocessed observations for years before a theory arises, and how he keeps special track of everything that confuses and contradicts him, since he knows that he forgets those facts faster than average.

In the 1980s, before he went into hiding, the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck began writing his research in the form of diaries. Pursuing Stacks is a 600-page-long manuscript on category theory, homotopy theory, and algebraic topology, containing letters, diary notes, and also some remarks about the birthday of Grothendieck’s grandson.

In Récoltes et Semailles, a 1,500-page-long autobiography meant as a preface to Pursuing Stacks, Grothendieck explained the decision to do mathematical research in this diaristic way:

[I wanted it to] read rather like a “travel log”, in which the work is carried day after day, in plain sight and as it is actually happening, including all the mistakes and mess-ups, the frequent look-backs as well as the sudden leaps forward [...]

It is this part of the work which, albeit puny looking - not to say (often) harebrained - is often the most delicate and essential part of the process: it is truly there that something new becomes manifest, through intense attention, solicitude, and respect towards the fragile and infinitely delicate thing about to be born. It is the most creative part of all - that of conception and slow gestation within the warm shadows of the maternal womb ... [It is] stupefying once one stops to think about it: namely, that this “most creative part of all” within a work of discovery [...] is reflected almost nowhere [...]in textbooks and other texts of a didactic nature, in articles and original memoirs, as well as in oral lectures, seminary presentations, etc. It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding these “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea . . .

This is, I think, at the root of why I like reading private notes so much. There are so few places where we get to be close to other people and see the messy humanity they carry behind the identities they have polished for society life. There are so few places where we can apprentice ourselves to the unspeakable labors of thinking and feeling that precede the birth of a rich inner life. But here, we can.

Acknowledgements

Thank you, Esha Rana and Michael Nielsen for discussions and feedback.