The marvels and the flaws that I’ll be talking about are the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a long time, a little over 40 years. I wanted to show you a picture of my collaborator in this early work. What I’ll be trying to do today is to sort of bring this up-to-date. I’ll tell you a bit about the beginnings, and I’ll tell you a bit about how I think about it today.

This is Amos Tversky, with whom I did the early work on judgment and decision-making. I show this picture in part because I like it, in part because I like very much the next one. That’s what Amos Tversky looked like when the work was being done. I have always thought that this pairing of the very distinguished person, and the person who is doing the work tells you something about when good science is being done, and about who is doing good science. It’s people like that who are having a lot of fun, who are doing good science.

What I like about this glimpse of the scientist and the introduction to the essay is the sense of playing within work, and intensely intellectual work as well. The idea that such “science” is indeed fun and perhaps fulfilling speaks beyond just the passion of the individual, but in a very real sense, a spiritual approach to work. The picture on the right brings to mind the cliche of “getting into the zone” or relaxed focus on the task at hand. Good work is done within the confines of joy.

Kahneman’s lecture is fascinating in its own right as is the following discussion. But what struck me like a punch to the stomach was what he said in an answer about the differences of him and his pictured collaborator.

Kahneman: “You’re asking would Amos agree with me? He’s been dead 15 years.”

It took my breathe away. If you watch the video this quick exchange happens about the one hour and six minute mark and is uneventful. But since my first reading, I have not been able to forget this remark. I’ve since started working a fictional story around it.

I’ve explored, for the last two months, why these sentences affected me so much. As an introvert I often feel things more strongly before I can understand them consciously. So I allow my subconscious to work through the thoughts, I pray and write, and try to put it into words eventually. My story is one small attempt. This is another.

I’ve come to this conclusion (along with many others, but I’ll try to stay focused):

Even our life’s work is meaningless.

This is not pessimistic, however, for Amos’ work helped advance the discussion and the science. He was a meaningful part, but at some point everything moves on, the world, the science, the ideas.

And we are left with a man sitting on a couch in pure enjoyment of the work. That is what lasts.

Amos is not left with dusty books and forgotten ideas. He has, eternally, a joy that goes beyond this life, quite mysteriously. And maybe Solomon’s stated all this meaningless-talk before, but our work does more to us than we realize. It’s more than the finished product or project. There’s an eternal, I don’t want to say reward, but something that results from the work itself. This is when we’ve come into contact with the divine, when we’ve collaborated with the Holy Spirit. We are re-created in the act of recreation. And maybe we don’t see it at the start and maybe not even in 15 years, but at some point we will.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamador. The Tralfamadorians ask him if he has any questions and Billy says, Why me? The aliens reply by saying, “There is no why.”

Which to me, is a lot like opening a door that leads to nowhere, not even a closet.

Vonnegut published this novel in 1969. Will still continue asking why. Like, “Why write novels at ALL?“

This is the title to Hallberg’s NYT article that looks at the living writer all other writers are jealous of: Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, and surmises from major threads in their work that the the reason we write novels is so we don’t feel alone. Gauld concludes that if art is to endure this isn’t enough.

Asking why write fiction is like asking why play cricket or baseball?

I say, because it’s fun.

But fun isn’t a lasting art form that transcends time. Or as Hallberg might say, “If art is to endure, fun isn’t quite enough.”

I’m not attempting to answer why we write and why we read. But I can’t help but argue that something which comes from nothing, like a story, is a magical reality with a larger purpose than no purpose as the Tralfamadorians might say. It’s also larger than just for enjoyment, entertainment, or fun. It’s also more than not feeling alone, which Hallberg understands.

“Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?”

“Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

The moments, time essentially, are all equal points on the horizon. This is the philosophical view of eternalism. It agrees with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and what is called “block time,” that time is like inches on a ruler, but struggles to answer why we experience time as linear.

Vonnegut’s novel moves through blocks of time, to moments trapped in amber with no why. Eternalism implies that we will live forever and continue after death. So moments, to me, whether experienced in a linear progression or like inches in space (moments that hop back and forth to Billy Pilgrim), are sacred, and to tell of those moments–or to create a story from nothing that tells of moments–then carries a sacred duty.

This is all very subtle, I understand. I’m assuming too much. Not all of you are creatives and not all creatives believe in the mysterious power of words and stories and moments. Not all believe we live forever, or that time, the 4th dimension, could be like the other three. And not all even take it so seriously. Like Heath Ledger’s Joker asks, “Why so serious?” Because there is such a thing as play, which might be the greatest moments of all. Where duty and sacredness and mysterious-God-like-darknesses aren’t factors of writing or reading a damn story.

And even Vonnegut understands this play-thing. The novel is described as satirical, which means he’s having some cheeky fun with a story that has no purpose.

But the funny thing about stories is that regardless of what the writer wants, the story contains a power of its own. Which is why atheist writers like J.M. Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year or even Ian McEwan in Atonement write beautiful stories empowered with an overwhelming sense of the divine.

Fortunately, a writer cannot escape this burden if he’s dedicated to his craft. So regardless of Vonnegut’s philosophical argument, we can say with aplomb that the story is worthy of high-regard and reaches into the mysterious darkness where the Holy Spirit broods.

To create is to partake in communion with the Holy Spirit, to co-create from tohu vavohu.

The story might say there is no why. But the story proclaims there is a why.

This gets to the heart of the matter. “People need stories in order to grasp the inexplicable, to cope with their fate,” Mak wrote. “The individual nation, with its common language and shared imagery, can always forge those personal experiences into one great, cohesive story. But Europe cannot do that. Unlike the United States, it still has no common story.”

[...] The European Union has constructed common institutions, laws, and even a currency. It has created all the symbols of a nation-state, including a burgundy passport that places “European Union” above one’s own nationality, and a flag, even if it is only voluntarily waved at the Ryder Cup golf championships. It even has an anthem: Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” though it doesn’t have lyrics and most Europeans don’t know it is their anthem. What it lacks is a people who share a common culture, language, or narrative — or at the very least are able to identify with the political construct that has been created in their name.

–(Gareth Harding)

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. (Neal Gabler at NYT)

Susan Cain, in the following piece, argues that the reason great ideas aren’t exploding into our world is because creative individuals aren’t being allowed to come up with ideas on their own (at least in the corporate world, a little bit in academia). Instead of creating ideas in solitude like many great idea makers, there’s a fad called “groupthink.”

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted…

…Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process. Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, we’ve seen a profusion of myths about the company’s success. Most focus on Mr. Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in Apple’s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer. (Susan Cain at NYT)

I like these articles because I’m an introvert and come up with genius ideas in solitude all the time that can change the world.

NPR also has a piece on “What to think about think tanks” which looks at how often even NPR reporters don’t know what think tanks are about. 

Where do you come up with big ideas?

Now, as you read, some memory has come back to you. Now, in your own mind, you are inventing a story.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes described the studium and punctum of a photograph. There are elements of composition and subject matter the photographer chooses consciously or deliberately. This is the studium.

And there are elements that pierce the frame by chance. For instance, the photographer is “shooting” Nicaraguan soldiers, and two nuns pass by in the background. This is the punctum, the unplanned, unchoreographed moment the photographer sees (gasping, no doubt, in wonder) and records. Barthes says the “adventure” of this photograph comes from the co-presence of these disparate elements.

Now, as you enter the adventure of your own memories, leave space for the unplanned, the unexpected, the piercing impressions that shatter the frames of individual lives.

Every story offers you the possibility of transcendence, the opportunity to imagine, to love the ones who have stepped into your frame and forever altered your experience.

We speak because we will die; but while we breathe on this earth, every moment is eternal.

–From “The Heart Breaks, and Breaks Open: Seven Reasons to Tell a Story” by Melanie Rae Thon (via Glimmer Train)

When the officer passes the man pulls out a four-inch blade and sets it in his lap. Then he unrolls a packet of tobacco and fills slits of paper, licking the edges, and making four cigarettes. He places the cigarettes in a jacket pocket. With the knife he trims his fingernails. He returns the knife to his jean pocket and the tobacco to his backpack. He leaves.

Visitors walk on marble floors to the tip-tap click of heels and boots rising toward the open ceiling. Security officers in brown and tan uniforms patrol the aisles of bums and vagrants wearing black jeans and overstuffed backpacks with the prolonged smell of body odor drifting above the shelves and computer monitors.

The library is full of men, homeless or in school. Defeated men, cold and aching. They browse and skim the books. Nothing is ever what they need. They are not here for the books and neither am I. They are here for warmth, to pass time, for safety and sleep.

I sit at the corner of a long table with an open, dusty dictionary in the middle. The man who left was sleeping upright with the book on the table of dazzling lights and explosions of colors and gas.

It’s library-quiet with coughing and clearing throats and muffled conversations and the flipping of pages, but most of that is imaginary, what I expect to hear. Instead it’s all computer keys clicking, the blast of music when someone accidentally pulls out their headphones and then the silence as they re-enter the plug.

I am here for the quiet and for the meditation and to mourn our life . We are at a funeral, the bums and the men in suits studying government files. The women behind the counters, who answer questions from us confused ones, guide the procession: “Military is that way, DVD’s are downstairs, sign up for a computer at the lobby desk.”

To the left of me are rows of books about tiling, roofing, masonry, carpentry, and trim work. The books are old and full of information all available on the computers. The books take up space one foot wide and six feet high and one hundred feet long. Both the books and the men inhabit a public space. Outside the library the information is sent as data, wirelessly and through miles of cables, as the books sink farther into uselessness and obscurity. Us men, we’ll have not made our mark, unremarkable and failures perhaps in many ways. We will turn to dust and fall asleep forever. We will disappear into the evening rain.

I’m at home in the ancient artifacts, silent unless opened, immovable in bulk, policed and directed simply. A world slipped behind the present, catching up in decades.

I come to see what we were.

For we are all stories and words: Created, Once, in a wild haste. A burst of joy.

But that means it must use words, which is why Web 3.0 will be about semantics, and not the ad-driven semantics that ask me if I want a Quiznos coupon after lunching at Subway, but the meaning-guided semantics that make sense of the endless connections I don’t see or realize or begin to comprehend. Which is also the job of the writer, I presume.

The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader.

As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe.

A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art.

They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words.

This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share.

The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.

–Gary Lutz

As Dubus put it in my interview with him, “I think most writers quit between the ages of twenty and thirty for various reasons. They are alone then unless they have exceptional parents; even if they have very loving and tolerant parents, they still know in their heart of hearts that their parents wonder about what in the fuck they are doing. Unless they live in a community of writers, like at a graduate school, they don’t have friends who really understand what they are doing. They don’t get published. They work and of course, don’t get money for it. There is no one to set the alarm clock for. There is no one who cares whether they get there to work, no one who can threaten them with firing or reward them with money, and you put all that on one poor young man or woman’s back, and it takes an awful lot of courage, because it comes down to that person believing in him or herself and saying, I will do it. While having a job that supports me. And you finally do publish in something as lovely as Tendril or Ploughshares, for example, and you call your mother or father and tell them, and they say, ‘What’s that?’ I think that is why young writers can be persuaded so easily to change things to be in The New Yorker. Not for the goddamn money. What’s three thousand dollars going to do? You can’t live in Mexico on it and write. Not for long anyway. Won’t change your life. I think they do it because it takes care of those blank faces when you say, ‘Yes, I’ve published,’ and they say, ‘Where?’ and you say, The New Yorker, and they say, ‘Ooh! You must be real!’ “

–Thomas E. Kennedy