Tag: attention

Categories
Aging San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Permission of Fridays

Doug always walked a half-step ahead, which meant he saw things first, which meant I was usually watching him see them — the tilt of his head, the small pause before he brought the camera up — before I ever turned to look myself. Market Street on a Friday morning has its own weather system, independent of the sky: the gray light fog gives even bright colors.

We would set out with no destination, which was the whole method — what Jay Maisel, who died this summer at ninety-five, called going out empty. Leave the plan at home, he taught generations of photographers, so there’s room left in you to see something you didn’t already expect. You cannot plan to be astonished. You can only put yourself in the path of it and hope.

I have thought about those walks more than I expected to, now that they are gone. Not gone dramatically — no falling-out, no single last Friday we knew was the last Friday. Covid arrived and shut the passes between people the way weather closes a mountain road, and by the time it reopened, the rhythm had broken. We still talk. We just don’t walk anymore, and I have never entirely worked out why something so simple didn’t start back up, the way you’d think a habit that good would insist on its own return. It just didn’t come back.

Susan Orlean, in Joyride, writes about being a writer as a kind of permission — an excuse to linger in places past the point a normal person would move along, and then to go back and report on what was seen. She’s citing Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

A camera grants the identical permission a notebook does. Nobody stops a man with a camera on Market Street and asks him what he’s doing there. The camera is its own credential — I have a reason to be looking at you, at this doorway, at the light falling across these particular twenty feet of sidewalk, longer than is socially normal. Doug and I weren’t tourists and we weren’t reporters and we weren’t, most days, even talking about what we saw until afterward, over lunch. We were two men who had given ourselves formal license to pay attention to a city we loved, as if it might not be there next Friday.

It mostly was there next Friday. Until it wasn’t, in the way that most disruptions to a good practice aren’t dramatic so much as quietly permanent — a scheduling gap that never gets rescheduled, a street that starts to feel unfamiliar again because you stopped walking it with intention. I still have the pictures. A woman waiting at a bus stop with an expression I never satisfactorily explained to myself. The chess player’s hands, mid-reset, waiting on the next stranger. Doug, once, caught by someone else’s lens, walking a half-step ahead of a man he didn’t know was photographing him photographing the city.

The third instruction is the one that survived when the walks didn’t. I don’t walk Market Street with Doug anymore, but I’m telling you about it now, on a blog nobody assigned me to keep for twenty-five years. The credential just changed instruments — camera to keyboard. Orlean’s point, I think, is that the excuse and the obligation were always the same thing. You get to be there because you intend to come back and testify, and the testifying is the toll, due whether or not the place is still there when you go looking for it again.

Doug and I are not going to start walking on Fridays again. I’m too old for that kind of recommitment, and pretending otherwise would just be a nicer way of lying to myself. Plus physically it’s just beyond me now. This essay is itself a kind of substitute — the telling standing in for a habit of attending that got interrupted and never fully repaired.

Mary Oliver’s instructions don’t say what to do when the astonishment outlasts the practice that produced it. Maybe that’s the fourth instruction nobody wrote down: keep telling about it anyway, especially after you’ve stopped going. Or at least remembering.

Categories
Creativity Serendipity Walking

Demons Hate Fresh Air

Walking in the Woods

The notion keeps circling back.

Austin Kleon gave it a clean, memorable shape in Keep Going. He was drawing on something Ingmar Bergman’s daughter once said about her father: no matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed.

Demons hate fresh air.

There’s a Peanuts strip of Linus out walking that Kleon paired with the line years ago. The image and the words stuck with me. I wrote a short post about it myself more than a year ago, on a clear May morning when the air felt especially clean.

The idea still feels true.

What I’ve been turning over lately is why.

Steven Johnson offers one way into the question in Where Good Ideas Come From. He writes about the many stories of good ideas arriving while people are out walking. The point is not that walking magically manufactures ideas. It is that something happens when we stop trying quite so hard to produce them.

A good idea rarely comes from nowhere. More often, it is an unexpected connection between things that were already somewhere in the mind. A problem, a memory, a half-formed thought, something we read three days ago and forgot we remembered. At the desk, we tend to keep pushing the same thought around the same small circle.

Walking changes the conditions.

The body is occupied, but not very much. Attention loosens. The mind wanders without being completely idle. Things that had been sitting in separate corners begin, occasionally, to find each other.

Darwin had his Sandwalk at Down House, a path he paced almost every day. Poincaré described important insights arriving while he was out walking after periods of intense, fruitless work at his desk. The examples go on.

Apparently, smart people have been wandering around for a very long time.

I notice it on ordinary mornings.

The first part of a walk is usually just clearing the residual static—the night’s dreams, yesterday’s unfinished business, the little collection of thoughts that somehow followed me into the morning. Then, without any particular effort, something loosens.

A sentence that wouldn’t come the night before appears.

A problem that felt stuck suddenly has an edge.

A connection between two things I had never thought to connect quietly presents itself.

None of it feels like work. That may be the important part.

Sometimes the way to think better is to stop trying so hard to think.

The demons prefer the closed room. They thrive on the spinning, the second-guessing, the feeling that the only way forward is more concentrated effort at the same desk.

Fresh air and steady movement are quietly hostile to that atmosphere.

They don’t defeat the demons through force. They simply change the conditions so the demons have less purchase.

And perhaps that’s why the old advice has survived. Get out of bed. Go for a walk. Then get to work.

Not because the walk makes you more productive.

Because sometimes you have to leave the room before you can see the way forward.

Get up. Get out.

The demons can wait.

Categories
AI Aviation

Buffer Overflow

There is a moment in a stall, before the airplane actually stalls, when the controls go soft. The yoke stops talking back. You can still pull it toward you, and the nose will still come up, but the airplane is no longer answering in the language it used thirty seconds earlier, and if you do not recognize the change in dialect you will keep asking questions in a tongue the airplane has stopped speaking. Pilots have a phrase for the general condition this belongs to, which is broader than stalls and covers weather, traffic, radio calls, checklists, an unfamiliar airport with three runways and no tower: getting behind the airplane. The airplane is still flying. It is you who have stopped keeping pace with what it is doing.

I flew a Cherokee 235 for years, a airplane with enough useful load to make it forgiving and enough control weight to make it honest, and I only got behind it twice that I can remember with any precision, both times on approach, both times because I let a secondary task — a frequency change, a passenger question, a glance at a chart — eat the attention that the airplane needed at exactly the moment it needed it most. What is strange, looking back, is that the airplane never sped up. The airplane was doing what it always does on a three-degree glide path. I was the one who fell behind a constant.

I have started to notice the same falling-behind, unrelated to constants, in conversations with a language model.

It happens on the good days, which is the part that took me a while to understand. It is not the model being slow or confused. It is the model being unusually generative — pulling a thread from something I said four exchanges ago, connecting it to a domain I had not mentioned, offering three candidate framings where I had expected one — and somewhere in the second or third of these, I notice that I have stopped actually absorbing and started merely receiving. The words are still arriving. I have quietly stopped being the kind of reader who can do anything with them.

The name I have for this, mostly because I spent some years around fraud systems and payments infrastructure and the vocabulary never entirely leaves you, is buffer overflow. In a computer, a buffer is a fixed patch of memory set aside to hold data until a program is ready to process it — a loading dock, essentially, sized for a delivery truck of a known dimension. A buffer overflow is what happens when the truck backs in and keeps unloading past the edge of the dock. The classic and dangerous version of this is not that the extra data spills onto the floor and is lost. It is that the extra data lands on the memory sitting just past the dock, and overwrites whatever was stored there — a return address, a variable, something the program needed intact to know where to go next. The failure is not loss. It is corruption. The fifth insight does not politely fall away; it lands on top of the second insight and changes what the second insight was.

This is, I think, the more accurate complaint than “overwhelm,” which is the word I would have reached for a few years ago and which suggests simple excess, more water than the glass can hold. What I am describing is not excess. It is a rate mismatch between generation and integration, and the damage happens specifically at the boundary — not in the ideas that never arrived, but in the ones that arrived and were still being turned over when the next one came in and knocked them loose.

Aviation, as it turns out, has more than one name for this family of failure, and the names are not redundant, because they describe different mechanisms. Task saturation is the CRM term — Crew Resource Management, the discipline built in the seventies and eighties largely in response to accidents where a competent, rested, well-trained crew flew a functioning airplane into terrain because attention had been consumed by something lower priority than staying alive. Task saturation is measured, in training, less by how much is happening and more by whether the pilot can still prioritize — whether they know which thing to drop. Channelized attention is the adjacent and opposite failure: not too many things competing for a narrow channel, but one thing filling it entirely, a fixation on the landing gear light while the airplane, unflown, descends into the Everglades. And John Boyd’s OODA loop, developed for fighter pilots and stolen since by nearly every field that has ever needed a name for out-thinking someone under time pressure, describes what it feels like structurally to fall behind: you are not reacting to what the situation is, you are reacting to what the situation was, one iteration back, and every loop after that the gap does not close on its own.

I suspect what I am calling buffer overflow is closest to task saturation, with the wrinkle that in a cockpit the incoming data is at least all real-time and load-bearing — the runway is where the runway is — whereas a model in full flow is producing a mix of load-bearing insight and elaboration that only sounds load-bearing, and no light comes on to tell you which is which. Sweller’s cognitive load theory gives this a cleaner anatomy than aviation does: intrinsic load, which is the actual difficulty of the idea; extraneous load, which is how badly or well the idea is presented; and germane load, which is the effort of building the new idea into the structure of what you already know. My buffer does not overflow on intrinsic load — the ideas themselves are usually not hard. It overflows on germane load. The model can generate connections faster than I can lay the track that would let each new connection actually attach to something.

None of the aviation solutions to task saturation involve asking the airplane to slow down, and this is the part I keep returning to, because slowing down is the intervention that occurs to me first and is also, I think, the least aviation-like response available. A pilot who is task-saturated on approach does not usually ask the tower to widen the pattern. He drops something. He un-couples the autopilot from one axis and flies it by hand so the workload becomes tactile instead of cognitive, or he tells the passenger the question will have to wait, or he reads back only the clearance and lets the weather advisory go unacknowledged for ninety seconds because the weather advisory is not what is going to kill him in the next ninety seconds. The skill is not deceleration. It is triage performed at full speed, which looks, from outside the cockpit, indistinguishable from calm.

I do not yet know what the triage move is for a conversation with a model that is generating faster than I can integrate. I have a guess, which is that it looks less like asking the model to slow down and more like periodically stepping outside the exchange entirely — not to catch up on what was said, but to write down, in my own words, the one thing from the last five minutes I actually want to keep, before asking it to continue. That would make the move not deceleration but discard: choosing, the way the saturated pilot chooses, which incoming data does not get processed at all, on the theory that a buffer with something deliberately thrown out of it still holds its shape, and a buffer that tries to keep everything is the one that overflows.

Or maybe the real answer is the one the checkride examiner gave me in Springfield, on a September morning in 1978, when I came in too fast and too high and asked, afterward, what I should have done differently. He said the airplane had told me everything I needed to know about forty seconds before I noticed, and that the only skill that mattered was noticing forty seconds earlier next time. Not slower. Earlier.

Categories
Stanford

Those Empty Switchbacks

I stopped when I hit this passage in Theo Baker’s new book, How to Rule the World:

“…through the redwood forests so thick with foliage that we couldn’t see the sun… some of the greatest driving roads in the world, with empty switchbacks and hairpins and sweeping corners to test ourselves. Never in my freshman year did I feel freer than on those drives.”

Seventeen years old, newly arrived at Stanford, and already he’d found the loophole. A few minutes off campus, past the ambition and the networking, the road empties out and climbs into redwoods so thick the sun disappears.

I know those roads. I’ve driven them for decades. Skyline on a clear morning, fog still sitting in the valleys. The curves above the coast when the Pacific goes the color of hammered silver. The sudden dark under the redwood canopy, ten degrees colder, the world narrowed to headlights and wet pavement.

Take Skyline up to Mountain House some evening for dinner with friends and you’ve driven the whole argument of this essay without meaning to. A few miles of switchbacks first, the fog closing in and opening up again, and then the parking lot with its redwood out front and the wood carving of Neil Young standing under it, watching you arrive.

What struck me wasn’t nostalgia. It was that Baker had gotten the feeling exactly right. The phone in the cupholder, the next meeting, the slow arithmetic of a life — gone, for the length of a few good corners. Just you, the machine, the light.

I felt an early version of it as a boy, in the back of a blue Dodge Dart, summer of 1960. Every evening my father spread the day’s map across the hood and studied tomorrow’s route. By noon the thin red lines were real places under our wheels. I never lost that. Decades later, living a few miles from the campus Baker writes about, the same lift still comes when the road opens and the hills start to roll.

The switchbacks demand attention and punish you for withholding it. In return: the rare feeling of being exactly where you were, with nowhere else to be. These days I find myself more protective of those pockets, not less.

The roads are still there. The redwoods still offer the same deal they offered a seventeen-year-old freshman. And at the top of the hill, under the big tree, Neil Young keeps watching the cars come up.

Categories
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.

Categories
Living New York City Serendipity

The Grammar of Looking Up

The apartment was across from Penn Station, which meant that for one stretch of months in the mid-1970s, the architecture of my days was decided by trains I never took. I walked east instead, every morning, toward the United Nations, where a man named Frank Smith ran a personal development course that IBM SRI had decided its young people should sit through. I don’t remember most of what Frank said in that room. I remember one thing he said about the street outside it.

He told us we should start looking up. Literally — on our walks back and forth across midtown, Penn Station to the East Side and back, twice a day, rain or not. Not all the way, usually. Mostly it was a floor or three: the window line just above the awnings, the cornice on a building you’d never once registered had a second story, let alone a sixth. The full climb to the rooflines — gargoyles, setbacks, terra cotta lions — was the occasional reward. Almost no one looks up in New York, he said, not even a little. The city trains you out of it. Too much at eye level demands your attention — the cabs, the steam, the man asking for change, the woman walking too slowly in front of you — so everything above your own eyeline disappears by consensus, not just the tops. Habits can be replaced. Look up enough times, even just a floor or three, and you’ll see a different city than the one everyone else is seeing.

I tried it. Walking up past the Pierpont Morgan stretch, or wherever the route took me, chin lifted some small number of degrees, feeling slightly foolish. Most days that was the whole of it — a window line, a row of air conditioners, a sign painted directly onto brick decades before anyone called that vintage. Every so often the chin would tip back further, and there’d be something up there worth the extra degrees. A gargoyle with its mouth open mid-roar, forty years before air conditioning made gargoyles decorative rather than necessary. But that was the rare find. The habit was the floor or three. Nobody else on the sidewalk was seeing any of it, because nobody else on the sidewalk was looking at all.

The chin came back down on its own a couple of times a week, somewhere around a street corner with a slice joint on it, because New York seems to put one on every corner whether you need it or not. You smelled it before you saw it — that specific combination of tomato, oregano, and hot grease that has no name I’ve ever found. Looking up was Frank’s discipline.

The pizza smell required none. It just reached out and took your head by the chin and turned it level again, toward the window with the steam on the glass and the guy folding a slice in half before he handed it over.

It is a small thing Frank Smith said in a room near the UN fifty years ago, and I have carried it around since the way you carry around a key to a house you no longer own. I don’t know what happened to the course, or to IBM SRI’s faith in such courses, or to Frank himself. I know what happened to the habit. It outlived the year, outlived the apartment across from Penn Station, outlived several cities I’ve lived in since that didn’t have the same vertical drama to reward the looking. I still do it. I did it last week on a walk that had nothing to do with midtown at all, tilting my head back on a street in California to find whatever was up there worth finding, and catching myself mid-gesture, thinking: that’s Frank’s, that one, still running fifty years later on the program he installed.

Most of what we’re taught to notice, we’re taught by people who wanted something from us — a sale, a vote, a grade. Frank wanted nothing, as far as I could tell, except that we see more of the city than we’d been seeing. It’s such a small ambition for a teacher to have. Look up. That’s the whole curriculum. And it’s the only thing from that course, the only thing from that whole strange year of being instructed in personal development by a man whose face I can no longer quite reconstruct, that I still do, unbidden, on every street I’ve walked since.

Categories
Cooking Cooking Tips Recipes

On Cooking Backward

I have been thinking about a steak, and about Charlie Munger.

Munger liked to say, “invert, always invert,” meaning that some problems give up more easily if you turn them around and look at them from the back.

I don’t know that he ever cooked a steak in his life, but the advice applies to one anyway. There is a method called reverse searing, and it works like this: you put the meat in a slow oven first, so it warms through gently and evenly, and only at the very end do you give it a hard, fast sear in a hot pan, just long enough for a crust.

This is backward from how most of us were taught — sear first, finish low — and it turns out the old way was mostly wrong, or at least less reliable. The middle of the meat and the outside of the meat have different jobs, and trying to make one method serve both has always been a small, forgivable mistake.

Tri-tip is a peculiar cut of beef — the grain runs one way across part of it and then quietly changes direction, so that if you slice straight through without noticing, you end up with something tougher than it needed to be. You have to find the place where it shifts and turn your knife with it. It isn’t hard, once you know to look. There’s usually a faint seam where the change happens, almost like a crease in fabric, and once you’ve found it you’ll find it every time after.

I don’t want to make too much of this. It does seem true, in cooking and in other things, that the order you do something in matters more than people let on, and that the patient, unglamorous part — the slow oven, the waiting — usually deserves more credit than it gets.

The sear is what you remember. The low heat is what made it possible.

Categories
Aging Atmosphere

The Atmosphere Business

There are some rooms you just want to be a part of. A restaurant critic wrote that recently in the Financial Times, and I’ve been turning it over ever since. Not because it’s surprising — anyone who loves restaurants already knows it’s true — but because it named something I’ve been experiencing without quite having the words for it.

I’ve been paying more attention to rooms lately. Not to what’s happening in them, but to the rooms themselves. The light temperature. The materials. The way a space settles around you when you walk in.

There’s a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto called Evvia that I’ve been going to for years. It has no modern feel whatsoever — no reclaimed industrial aesthetic, no Edison bulbs performing nostalgia, no carefully curated emptiness. Instead: a wall of jars and bottles filled with colored liquids, honey-blonde wood, light that feels like it was chosen by someone who understood that warmth is not a design choice but a form of hospitality. I couldn’t tell you what era it conjures. I just know that when I walk in, something in me slows down. And the food is superb. That matters too — not as the reason you came, but as the room’s final kept promise.

I don’t think I would have noticed any of that at 35.

At 35 you move through rooms. You’re pointed forward — toward the person across the table, the evening’s agenda, whatever brought you there. The room is backdrop. At 35 I was probably thinking about the wine list before I’d finished reading the menu, planning the next thing while the current thing was still happening.

Something shifts. I can’t name the moment it happened, because there wasn’t one. Just a gradual noticing — that I was paying attention differently. That the room had become as interesting as the reason I came.

The word that comes to mind is savor. Which has an interesting relationship with time. You’d think that with less of it ahead, you’d move faster, extract more, optimize. Instead the opposite happens. Each thing becomes more worth inhabiting fully. The scarcity makes you slower, not faster. More permeable.

The FT writer talks about wanting to be held by a room. That’s a passive construction — something done to you, not by you. I think that capacity to be held requires a surrender that younger people can’t quite manage. Too much forward momentum. Too much else to get to.

What comes with the savor, I’ve found, is peacefulness. Not contentment exactly — contentment can be a kind of settling, a lowering of expectations. This is different. Peacefulness has knowledge in it. You’ve seen enough to know what a good room is worth. You’ve been in enough bad ones — too loud, too bright, too eager to impress — to recognize when a room is simply, quietly doing its job.

Evvia does its job. The honey-blonde wood absorbs the evening. The jars catch the light. The atmosphere, as an old restaurateur once put it, is what they’re actually selling.

Later in life, I know how to buy it.

Categories
Writing

Still Learning

I never thought about rhythm in my writing. Not once.

A lifetime of writing. More essays than I can count. One book. And the sonic quality of my sentences — the way they moved, or failed to move, through a reader’s mind — simply wasn’t something I considered. I was too busy trying to say something true. I thought that was enough.

What changed was reading differently. Not for pleasure anymore, or not only for pleasure. David Perell conducts long interviews with writers about how they actually work — not what they believe about writing, but what they do, physically, at the desk, in the dark, before anyone sees it. He asks the same structural questions of very different writers and the patterns emerge slowly, the way patterns always emerge: first you see it once and think nothing of it, then you see it again, then you can’t stop seeing it. Rhythm came up constantly. Always in different language. Pacing. Breath. Music. Momentum. Always pointing at the same thing.

Then I found this from Susan Orlean:

My new preoccupation was on the sonic quality of my writing — the rhythm and tone of the sentences. I began reading all my work out loud, listening for places that lagged and dragged, that didn’t sparkle. I knew it was unlikely that anyone else was reading my stories out loud, but I was convinced that you do “hear” writing in your head as you read, and this pushes you (or stalls you) through the piece. I wanted the music — that is, this subconscious tonal effect — to match the subject.

I stopped. Read it again.

Because she was describing something real — something I had been doing wrong for twenty-five years without knowing it was wrong. You don’t know what you can’t hear. That’s the whole problem. The silence where the knowledge should be is itself silent.

I don’t read my work out loud. There’s something strange about it, something that breaks the spell — you stop being a writer and become an actor, hearing your own sentences hanging in the air, too exposed. But I do read and read again, more carefully now, looking for the wobble. Orlean’s point holds regardless of method: you hear writing in your head as you read it, and that hearing either carries you forward or it doesn’t. The ear that matters is the one inside.

George Saunders has a practice he describes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: he reads from the beginning of a piece over and over, and the moment something feels off — a word, a rhythm, a single syllable landing wrong — he stops and fixes it before moving forward. Never skips the trouble spot. Never tells himself he’ll come back. His opening pages accumulate dozens of passes before he ever reaches the end. What he’s really doing, underneath the technique, is training himself to feel the exact microsecond when a reader’s attention would start to drift. To catch the loss before it happens.

That’s not craft instruction. That’s building a new sensitivity where there wasn’t one before.

John McPhee works from the other direction entirely. His famous boxes — index cards, sorted into piles, piles arranged into sequences, nothing drafted until the structure is known — are about architecture before a single word is written. He’s deciding which rooms exist, and in what order, before he furnishes any of them. Where Saunders builds outward from one true sentence, McPhee builds downward from a blueprint.

But they’re asking the same question. McPhee: is this section in the right place? Saunders: is this word in the right place? Both listening for the moment the piece loses its hold on the reader. Both doing triage on something most writers never even examine.

What I’m still learning — slowly, and late — is that rhythm isn’t decoration. It isn’t the thing you tend to after the real work is done. It’s structural. A sentence moving at the wrong speed for what it’s carrying fails the thought itself, not just the ear.

There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. If rhythm is the thing that’s hardest to hear in your own work — if the ear takes years to develop — then maybe the most useful writing tool isn’t a grammar checker. Those are solved. What isn’t solved is the rhythm problem. An editor who listens for the wobble, explains what’s failing and why, and works through the fix with you rather than just patching it. Not a red pen. A teacher.

I’ve been experimenting with exactly that. An AI editor I call Clark. His job isn’t correctness. It’s the sonic quality of prose — the rhythm — the same thing Orlean was describing, the same sensitivity Saunders spent years training. Clark finds what’s working as hard as what isn’t. And when something fails, he explains what the reader’s inner ear is hitting and why. Helpful.

I didn’t know much about rhythm in writing when I was fifty. Didn’t know it at sixty.

I’m not entirely sure I know it now. But I know it more than I did, which might be the only kind of knowing that’s real.

A lifetime of writing. Still learning how to listen.

Categories
Living Serendipity

The Infrastructure of Accident

I had a ham shack when I was in high school. A tight corner of my bedroom, a transceiver, an antenna wire running out through the window frame to somewhere up on the roof. Late nights mostly. The ritual of it: power on, headphones on, find a frequency, make sure it’s clear. Then send CQ. CQ. CQ. A call to no one in particular, to anyone, to whoever happened to be listening on that frequency at that moment anywhere on earth.

Sometimes nothing came back. Sometimes someone answered from a place I had no reason to expect — a voice, or rather a pattern of dots and dashes that resolved into a voice, from a callsign I didn’t recognize, from a grid square I’d have to look up on a map afterward. We would exchange signal reports and names and locations and often we talked longer. Our gear. What we did that day. Ordinary things, transmitted at forty words a minute across a great distance to a stranger I would never meet.

I did not know then that I was practicing something. I thought I was just playing radio.

We have decided, sometime since, that luck is a system. That serendipity is an architecture. That the people to whom good things happen have engineered the conditions for good things to happen, and that the people to whom good things do not happen have, at some level, failed to present the right surface to the world.

I am not sure when we decided this. Sometime after we stopped believing in fate and before we started believing in algorithms, in that narrow window when we still believed, provisionally, in ourselves.

The self-help literature on luck is a literature of verbs. Expand. Broadcast. Reframe. Sabotage your algorithms. The verbs are always active, always transitive, always aimed at a future in which the random becomes, retroactively, inevitable. You will look back and see the architecture. You will understand that the flight delay was an opportunity, that the canceled meeting was a gift, that the stranger in the adjacent seat was not a stranger at all but a node in a network you were already, without knowing it, building.

What the literature cannot account for is the canceled meeting that was simply a canceled meeting. The flight delay in which nothing happened except that you sat in a molded plastic chair in Terminal B and ate a sandwich that cost fourteen dollars and thought about everything you had not yet done. The stranger who remained a stranger.

I have been thinking about a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, at the corner of Dwight. Shakespeare & Co. It smelled the way all serious used bookstores smell — dust and possibility, which are not always different things. The shelves ran floor to ceiling and were not organized in any way that rewarded efficiency. You found things there the way you find things in dreams: without looking, and then suddenly they were in your hands.

I found a paperback copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem there. Someone else’s margin notes in blue ink, a handwriting I did not recognize and have never been able to stop thinking about. Whoever they were, they had underlined the same sentences I would have underlined. They had written yes in the margin next to things I did not yet know I believed.

I have no way of knowing whether that was luck or whether I had simply been the kind of person who wandered into bookstores and stayed too long. The kind of person for whom that particular door was already, structurally, open.

Buildings have architects. Someone drew the plans. But I cannot find, looking back, the moment I became that person. I can only locate the book.

The word serendipity was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, who derived it from a Persian fairy tale about three princes of Serendip who were always making discoveries by accidents and luck, of things they were not in quest of. Accidents and luck. The word has always contained both. What the contemporary literature has done is quietly eliminate the accident and keep only the luck — reframed now as preparation, as readiness, as optimized openness. The princes were not prepared. They wandered.

Anymore we are often uncomfortable with just wandering. Wandering has no metrics. A waste of time.

There is a thing that happens when you pick up a physical newspaper, one you did not choose from a menu of personalized recommendations online but simply lifted from a rack at the library because it was there. You read stories you would never have clicked on while reading on an iPhone. Not because you lacked interest but because no algorithm had yet determined that you had it. The story finds you before the system can decide whether you are the kind of person who would want to be found.

I go to the library some days for precisely this reason. It is a considered refusal — the same one the princes of Serendip were practicing, though they had no word for what they were refusing. The library does not know what I clicked on last Tuesday. It cannot optimize my morning. It can only offer everything, indiscriminately, and trust me to wander.

Life feels richer on those days. I have tried to understand why and have arrived, after some time, at this: on those days the world is larger than my prior assumptions about it. That is not a small thing. That may, in fact, be the whole thing. Here comes the sun!

Shakespeare & Co. closed in June 2015, after fifty-one years on Telegraph Avenue. The owner said the past few months had been unsupportable. He taped a note to the door and served his last customer and locked up around eight in the evening and that was that. Someone who worked there was quoted saying that the serendipity of finding a book that changes your life doesn’t happen on Amazon. Indeed. He meant it as an elegy. The infrastructure of accident had to be built by someone. It had to be maintained. It had to be, on some Tuesday evening, locked for the last time.

The owner locked up around eight. He had served his last customer. There was nothing more to do.

The margin notes are still in the book.