#philosophy

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river. ¹

I keep returning to this line. The river image only works because the water is moving — a still river is just a pond. The honesty of a clock is the same: it refuses to let the moment pool.

A good tool does two jobs. It finishes the work in front of you, and it changes what you believe the work is. The first job is the one we shop for. The second is the one that shapes us.

A hand plane teaches grain. A debugger teaches that a program is a sequence of states rather than a paragraph of intentions. Neither lesson appears in the manual, and both survive long after the particular task is forgotten.

So I have grown suspicious of tools that finish the work without teaching anything. They are not evil; they are simply expensive in a currency that does not show up on the invoice. When the tool leaves, the understanding leaves with it, and I am exactly as capable as I was before I began.

The test I apply now is small: after using this thing for a month, will I know something I could explain to another person? If the answer is no, I try to keep the tool at arm’s length, and do at least one pass by hand.

For a while I measured reading in books per year, which is a little like measuring travel in airports. The number rose and my memory of the books did not, and eventually I had to admit that I had been collecting completions rather than ideas.

Slow reading fixed less than I hoped and more than I expected. The pages take longer, obviously. What surprised me is that the book begins to argue back. There is time for objection, and objection is where the reading actually happens; agreement, by contrast, leaves almost nothing behind.

So the tally is smaller now, and my notes are much larger. I can still tell you what I thought of a book from two years ago and where I think it was wrong, which I could not do when I was finishing thirty of them a year.