Andy sent me a link to a video of Ruwan’s on YouTube. This I saw after looking at the new, make-your-own-maps feature at Google, where the map at the top of my list was put together by Andy (though maybe not that Andy). Nathalie’s knitting and embroidering. Timothee’s figuring out songs on the piano. Emma and Diane give me drawings and collages they make. Mom now weaves so much she’s doing it under contract.

Most people feel at least some need to create stuff. Will enough monkeys banging long enough on enough keyboards produce The Library of Babel?

Infinite sets trick the mind. At least one of the Library’s books contains the text of Borges story. Another holds the perfect translation into English. Innumerable imperfect copies of the original abound, though they are essentially impossible to find.

Saturday spent most of the afternoon in an agonizing haze. Usually depression goes through slower, shallower cycles. Instead I felt okay by afternoon on Easter. Saturday night I explained to Nathalie how little of what even accomplished authors write is of truly high quality.

Today, I would add that even masterpieces of language hardly carry more than a couple of hundred years into the future. The King James Version fell out of fashion by the time I was a child. We could not make heads or tails of Shakespeare, but had to take on faith that he was a great author. Reading Shakespeare or Montaigne is not a struggle like running a marathon. It is a struggle like taking a beating without crying out.

We are stuck most of the time in mediocrity, which explains the success of television, trashy novels, junk food, and pop music. Creation is a reaction to mediocrity, as a pearl is a reaction to a grain of sand in the soft tissue of a mollusc. How many pearls have captivated your attention, unveiled some enthralling new facet each time you return to view them again?

Philip K. Dick gave us some hope, however, in VALIS. Don’t look for gems. After watching the B-movie discovered by Kevin in the book, the protagonists realize the savior shows up at the trash stratum. We only have to spend all eternity searching the Library of Babel.

Greg told me the other day that he had been reading Schopenhauer. I have not read Schopenhauer, only tidbits of his thought as seen by Nietzsche. Schopenhauer has been pegged as a pessimist. Apparently he concluded that will leads to frustration and unending suffering.

Yesterday several smoke detector batteries reached the low power threshold. They set themselves off so that we would know the batteries need changing. In my experience, smoke detectors sound nearly an order of magnitude too loud. Even a relatively quiet phone ring is hard to ignore, despite the number of callers who turn out to be telemarketers. How much more immediately is the attention drawn to a sound meaning, “Uh, excuse me, I think your house is burning down.”

Instead, the smoke detectors shriek requiring immediate attention. Batteries no doubt reach their coolest temperature during the night. Their chemical reactions slow, rendering

That led my thoughts where they usually go when I cannot get to sleep: in a vicious circle. I wondered if the German idealists arrived at their disdain for the world through their philosophy, or vice versa. I have the poison in my head. Even after having worked closely with engineers for years, I remain more interested in broken smoke detector design as an instance of a class of problems.

In the meantime, I had taken the batteries out. Whoever designed these smoke detectors, attached both to a battery and to electricity from the house, did not want the smoke detector to turn off merely because it had been unplugged from the wall and the battery removed.

After gathering all the detectors, I took them outside into the garage and closed them in the car where the ongoing screeches would be muffled.

The tainted mind thinks by analogy, rather than observing the situation at hand. Analogy, mathematics, allegory, parables, German idealism, these are the products of the sick mind. Maybe Thomas Mann understood that. I can barely remember Death in Venice.

The healthier mind is that of the engineer, the builder, the creator. He tries things out, makes mistakes, stumbles across alternatives. It is as though God came to the same conclusion in creating the universe that we have heard from Keynes about capitalism. The worst system there is, except for all the alternatives.

Of course, you would have to be an engineer to agree with that.

Engineers often use the term pessimal, although often ironically. It is the antonym of optimal, which literally means “as good as it gets.” Pessimal, therefore, is “as bad as it gets.”

Source: Wikipedia article on Pessimism (not Schopenhauer)