Author: tomeri

April 2023

Thomas Erickson

The thread is red. It is more yarn-like than thread-like, a loosely twisted braid of fibers. The occasionally broken, almost-invisible fibers, protruding from the braid, are remarkably effective at thwarting my attempts to thread the needle. A tiny red globe of blood wells from my thumb, jewel-like in its intensity, slightly darker than the thread. No doubt this would have been easy for an accomplished seamstress, but I am not that. What I am is a little bit obsessive. I don’t really view it that way, but others might.

Finally I’ve gotten it.

I think of my day to day life as moving across a landscape. Every week has a topography, which, while it may shift slowly – or occasionally abruptly – nevertheless gives me a sense of being somewhere. For many – those in 9-5 weekday jobs or in school – the weekend looms large, either as a place to slow down and take a breath, or as a place speed up and shake off the cobwebs of mundane weekday life. For me, Mondays are a landmark. I am post-school and post-job, and it is my weekly piano lesson that is significant. I work on the pieces I am trying to master, and as the week goes by I assess my progress relative to how much time I’ve left until I perform them. A sense of urgency may develop, if I am not making the kind of progress I feel I ought, and that changes the tenor of the weekend. 

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The topography of my week has become flatter. My planetary science course is over and so Tuesdays and Thursdays have lost their previous distinctiveness. Now the only event of note (so to speak) is my piano lesson every Monday. That leaves me feeling restless. Towards the end of the summer, the piano lessons will cease for the inter-term period, and I have the sense that I will be living in a sort of eternal present where the days blend into one another with little distinction. I do not find this a pleasant thought. 

When I began to think about retiring, I realized I would lose a lot of structure as well as sources of stimulation that work and related professional activities provided. So I did things like start piano lessons, sign up for courses at the U, become involved in the geological society of Minnesota), and develop plans for an ongoing series of hiking trips. The pandemic has disrupted most of this, eliminating much and altering the rest in ways that dilute their value for me.

I’ve been pondering what it is that makes daily/weekly/monthly life satisfying. For me, I think I need a mixture of structure and stimulation, and the question is how to arrange life so that it has that. That is, if there is a continuum between the doldrums where the days blend seamlessly into one another and boredom is the dominant experience, and chaotic rapids where one is constantly dealing with the unexpected and barely managing to stay afloat, much less navigate, how does one adjust one’s location on the continuum. I certainly don’t want to permanently dwell on either end, but I do recognize that brief periods of doldrums can be nice if one is tired and needs to recharge, as can the exhilaration of rapids when one needs a change. 

So how does one manage to create a life with the right blend of comfort and stimulation? This is something that, for me, work and/or school has always done a lot to contribute to. However, in their absence, I need to figure out how to construct this for myself. I think this is a challenge that more people are facing due to the pandemic. 

I’ve developed a theory – perhaps one that applies only to myself – about how to arrange life so that it is satisfying. My theory is that three things are needed to have a satisfying life: a routine that provides a recurring daily structure, landmarks that help you keep track of where you are in the routine and perhaps provide a sense of progression, and unusual occasional or sporadic events – which for lack of a better word I will call ‘zings’  – that provide variety or surprise or distinctiveness, and that disrupt routines and alter one’s relationship to landmarks. 

I find routine pleasant in that provides a sort of scaffolding for one’s day. And I personally like repeating things, at least if I enjoy them. I have favorite books, for example, that I read again and again, because I know I like them, and also that I will see new things in them, or experience them differently. Same thing for running and hiking – I like going back to places I know (not exclusively, but often), and of course the nice thing about the world is that it changes, so you’re always going to see new things as the season progresses. However, if there is nothing but routine, or repetition of familiar things, the days and experiences blur into one another.

Landmarks help me keep track of where I am in the week or the season. Right now I am living in a pretty ‘flat’ topography, except for the ‘peak’ of piano lesson. My piano lesson is significant in that I prepare for it, trying to polish (or sometimes just be able to stumble through) the pieces I am working on. If I do well enough, I graduate from old pieces and move on to new ones, and so that progression is nice. But the point is that I usually know where I am in the week, because I’m peripherally aware of how well various pieces are coming along and how far off the time is when I will play them for my teacher. Courses – at least if they include homework and tests – perform the same sort of role. As do hiking trips – in the sense that I both look forward to them with anticipation, and also (because of my age) need to work to make sure I am in shape for what I plan to do… of course the hiking trips are currently in abeyance. 

One of things I’ve been pondering for some time is how to conduct correspondence via email.  By “correspondence” I mean not just a note and a reply, but a recurring exchange of multiple messages that span months or even years.  It seems to me — although I am thinking far back into my personal history — that correspondence by hand-written letters was much easier to maintain over the long term than correspondence by email. 

There is something about email that is unsuited to an extended, punctuated, reflective exchange. Perhaps it is that, when one receives an email, the tool one needs to respond is at hand, as is the motivation to reply (if, at least, the message was a welcome and interesting one), and so it is easy to respond immediately. In addition to the superposition of tool and motivation, the reply, once composed and sent, will take effectively no time to reach the recipient. 

In the days of written missives things seemed easier. Someone would write a letter to me, mail it, and then days later it would arrive. I would read it, start thinking about how to reply, and in the meantime the letter would sit somewhere semi-obvious where it served as a low-key prompt to reply. Since editing was difficult, I imagine (but do not claim to remember) that the process of composition was more deliberate, and perhaps spaced out over time. There was not any impulse to wrap it up and get on to the next item, as I sometimes feel with email. And of course, over the entire span between X authoring a letter to me, and my authoring a reply, time has passed and milled more grist to be folded into the reply. Perhaps there is an impendence mismatch between the rapidity of email, and the more measured pace of life.

Now, in theory, it should be easy to adapt: don’t reply to the email right away. But then one has the danger of forgetting, which, for me, is exacerbated by the intangibility of email. Paper, letters if my recollection is right, would sit on my desk, or perhaps in a holder or box, where I would occasionally come across them (if only when a letter from another correspondent arrived and needed a place to sit). Their physicality acted as prompt, and just as important, reminded me a bit of who they were from. Letters from my parents did not look like letters from my girlfriend; nor did letters from overseas (now there’s an old-fashioned word!) did not look like those from closer to home. 

But all email looks alike – and there is so much more of it. The physicality and distinctiveness of envelopes has dissolved into a gigantic table of single-fonted text. Your email – because I decided that I wanted to respond to it later – was left in my in-box, and although I am not one of those who has thousands of emails, I do have dozens that are either (1) unread, (2) skimmed but I believe I’d like to read more deeply, (3) have information I need to refer back to, (4) finished with but need to filed, and (5) etc. Since I am pretty diligent about keeping my queue manageable, I do in fact stumble across to-be-replied-to emails, but still it feels too haphazard to be a satisfactory solution. 

I hope that one day someone will design a ‘slow email’ system. Its characteristics might include: The email takes time to get where it’s going, with a bit of randomness thrown in (thus eliminating the expectation of an instant reply). If the email is not deleted or archived, it should occasionally bubble up to the top of one’s queue, or find other ways to be stumbled across. One other idea – to address the problem of quantity of email – is that there should be the equivalent of “first class,” where there is a small charge, perhaps a nickel (what can you buy for a nickel anymore?) – to send it. I believe this would do much to eliminate spam, or at least to separate the possible gold from the likely dross. Once it would have seemed utterly ridiculous to pay extra for slowness, but these days it seems less so. 

My tangent has been far lengthier than intended… if this were a letter, at least a bulging envelope would have forewarned you. 

I am traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico, with Oliver Sacks. 

I’ve been looking forward to it with considerable anticipation, something that would not, normally, be my reaction. I am quite shy and I can think of few things more to be dreaded that that time spent in the close company of strangers. I like my privacy. I am happy by myself. I find books fine companions at dinner. Strangers can be intrusive. They look at one. They may wish to converse. They may very well have irksome habits. But I am untroubled by my journey with Sacks: he’s been dead for eight years. 

Our interaction has been, and will continue to be, only through the medium of his writing and my imagination. 

I’ve known of Oliver Sacks for years, but it is only in the past two years that I feel I’ve gotten to know him as a person. I first came to know him – as many others have – through his accessible and provocative case histories of patients encountered in the course of his neurology practice. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and Musicophilia are just a few of the publications which made him famous, even as they revived a 19^th Century tradition of publishing medical case histories. However, in the last two years, I’ve discovered that he had a broader repertoire than I knew. He’s written essays on a variety of topics including, as his life entered its twilight period, essays about his life, and ultimately a memoir, On the Move. It was through thislatter tranche of writings that I learned of his crippling shyness, not something I would expected of such a sprightly writer, his largely closeted life as a gay man, his time as a meth addict, as well as a variety of odd and, to me, endearing characteristics, such as his obsession with the periodic table of the elements, or his fascination with the botany of club mosses and other primitive plants. 

It was his last book – Gratitude – that spoke to me, and made me want to know him better. Gratitude is a short book of four essays, three written during the period when he knew that his remaining life was measured in months and weeks; the fourth written a year or so prior to that. I read the book during the time of Covid, when my retirement activities had been muted by the pandemic, and various events such as the passing of parents, the deaths of friends, and shifts in my own health had shifted my awareness of mortality from the purely intellectual to the deeply emotional. Gratitude is an apt title for the book, as that theme wends it way through the essays, regardless of topic. But what attracted me even more were other emotions entwined with gratitude: curiosity, engagement and a quiet sort of joy. 

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“Tom, you’re on a roll with your career!” Thus reads the subject line of the latest email of the day. 

This is fantastic news. Not “fantastic” in its common sense, but rather in its alternative sense of “fanciful; remote from reality.” After all, I am well into my fifth year of retirement, and it is at least three years since my last paper was published, my last patents granted, and my last appearance at a professional conference. While it would be nice to believe that the cumulative mass of my accomplishments has somehow reached a critical point, tipped, and is now barreling along on its own like an ever-growing cartoon snowball, it is not so. 

My ‘fantastic’ career aside, I am curious about the truth value of the statement. Clearly it is not true – I am not ‘on a roll’ but in what way is it not true? One could simply say that it is a lie, but as the statement is no doubt generated by an algorithm, that seems both dubious and overwrought. A lie, I think, requires a degree of intention behind it, something I am loath to attribute to an algorithm. Of course, at some point a programmer constructed the phrase, and decided upon the conditions which would lead to its triggering. But I find it a little difficult to say that the programmer was lying. 

Looking into it more deeply, the body of the email told me that I recently been appeared in 12 different searches. This might be nice if I were just starting out, and particularly if I was searching for a job, but as a person with over a 1,000 connections on Linked-In it is not especially notable – it is just an increase from the more usual 2 or 3 ‘notices’

Reflecting on the matter, there are a large class of algorithmically generated messages that seem similar. My favorite, a message which dates back to the ancient days of the digital age, is “Sorry. I don’t understand the word ‘Sorry.’ ”  This seems to me to embody a deep truth. 

Another example, which amuses me, is “Congratulations on your 462nd fastest run.” It is hard to imagine a world in which such an achievement would merit congratulations. I suppose if it were expressed as “Congratulations, your physical condition is not deteriorating as quickly as we would expect given the increase in your age,’ congratulations might not be completely unmerited. But, to be honest, I don’t think that’s it: I think the programmer never thought about the case where someone would be using their application for a half decade. 

It seems to me that there is a sort of algorithmically generated fantasy world. 

 I don’t believe that that deserves congratulations; nor do I believe that such congratulations are sincere. When I was a child, in what they used to call grammar school, people believed I was a bit slow. What that means, at least in the context of a supportive environment, is that I received a lot of positive feedback for achievements that did not merit it. Although the subsequent discovery that I was myopic and simply needed glasses to address my academic malaise addressed this issue, it left behind an abiding distaste for compliments of any sort. Yet, curiously, the computer-generated flattery does not bother me.