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#philosophy

a note№ 034

It seems like plenty of great thinkers have arrived at the same paradoxical conclusion that the capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. I think this makes sense when you take a little time to analyze it: if you need the other person, you are turning the other person into a possession/resource. If you are “full” independently, then that turns love into a gift. You can grant the other absolute freedom because whether they stay or leave does not affect your core. I will not cite the exact hadith, but the Prophet made it clear that true riches is self-contentment. What you don’t receive from the other, the other cannot take. Two solitudes protect, touch and greet each other.

a seed№ 029

Borrowed certainty is the heaviest thing to carry, because you cannot put it down without an argument.

an essay

On the honesty of clocks

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.

  1. Borges, J.L. (1946). A New Refutation of Time. ↩︎

a note№ 021

A good question survives its first answer. If the answer closes the subject, I was probably asking about a fact; if the answer opens three more rooms, I was asking about something worth carrying.

an essay

On tools that teach

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.