Philip Sugg | Blog

I was walking across the Chicago River at lunchtime the other day. I don’t know what I saw that distinguished this scene to me, but what I see right away in the picture is an unreal quality to the buildings along the water. Is it their too-straight lines along every edge, their sheen, their block-like appearance? Something about these buildings at this moment presents as less factual than they are–as if they could be tabletop decorations that are temporarily gigantified into buildings.

A scene from the book “Free Fall,” by the children’s book author David Wiesner

If you care to interpret the world with the greatest possible freedom and creativity, you must catch your subject at a moment when its reality is less than certain. Interpret that how you will.

This proposition occurred to me in a different context recently, when I took the chance to refresh my mind with a long-running website, Centauri Dreams, that always delights me with its strangeness.

According to Paul Gilster, the site’s creator and main contributor, Centauri Dreams is about “the goal of reaching the stars”–as in, actually going to them, space travel on the scale of light years. The site collects research and scientific proposals on the question, but I find that is most compelling in its more speculative modes, on what it would mean to us if we actually made it to other stars someday. Gilster is not a scientist or even a journalist by training. He’s a humanist, a former medieval studies scholar. I do not know what led Gilster from more conventional academic paths to this seeminly all-consuming topic: now going for almost 25 years, the site has collected thousands of articles on its subject, and at least one book by the same name.

I could not find a widely accessible study about how much the average adult writes in a day.¹ This includes text messages, perfunctory forms or notes filled in at a workplace setting, and other acts of simple literacy–anykind of writing.

In the era of person computing, wide-scale electronic writing has been around long enough to have evolved through several phases. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that the writing of emails was once considered a degrading influence on the writing ability of the average person. Now, the effect of the early internet on writing habits looks–at worst–like a mixed bag. Maybe it was even its own sort of golden age. The period when email was the king of electronic communication has been the subject of favorable postmortems and much nostalgia for more than a decade. In hindsight, the so-called “You’ve Got Mail” era (~1998-2008), when it was more common to write long and intimate communications, shared in the best qualities of the era that preceded it (what the first generation of internet users called the “snail mail” times) while adding the instant gratification and fluidity offered by instant electronic delivery.

What will be said about the everything that has passed since? To skip to the latest development, AI will have such a (potentially) profound effect that we should wait and observe instead of pronouncing.

Most of the consternation about literacy is on the reading side, but it is conceivable that writing, too, could decline to a vanishing point. Imagine a world in which texts are routinely produced by indirect inputs like mood, basic biomarkers (pulse, brain signals), or who knows what other traces in the environment and the datasphere. Writing itself is unlikely to disappear soon, but it could become a byproduct of other processes. The idea of a human “generating” writing herself could become as unusual and artisanal as the making one’s own shoes or clothes.

Often these days, more often than at any other point in my life as an aware adult, I find myself asking if I need to be looking at a screen. This means the phone, the laptop, even the desktop computer that I have designed to be as easy to turn on when I need it and off when–most of the time–I don’t. It’s not that I think I have a specific problem with the virtual world. If I compare myself to a lot others I know, I probably spend less time there. I have a set of responsibilies that keeps me anchored elsewhere, in things more tangible, for a lot of the day. My biggest problem at the moment is that my work requires a screen. There we operate under the presumption that pretty much anything worth knowing can be stored, displayed and worked on within the screen-based view.

But what is the problem with screens? What counts as a screen? Do I write “screen” when, really, I mean anything connected to a computer? Maybe.

Lately, I speculate that I acquired some unspoken, early-in-life faith that what I see displayed¹ is a reproduction of the thing itself. This faith might account for how I could spend so many years looking at things on my monitor and not feel a dread about the unreality of it all. Sure, my eyes might get tired and strained, the rest of my body might start to fidget. But there wasn’t anything inherent to the screen itself that repelled me. How ever much I might dislike (in theory) the glowing two-dimensional representations I look at each day, I am still comfortable with them. I am trying to get less comfortable. Or it’s not a matter of will. I just am getting less comfortable and I am trying to figure out the reasons.

Continuing the previous discussion on the liberal arts. I began with this pessimistic claim that the liberal arts might be removed from the modern university even if they continue to show their educational value in a high-tech era.

But why might the liberal arts might be eliminated even if they remain one of the best options for teaching people how to think? Ross Douthat’s interview a few weeks ago with Jennifer Frey (“A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.”) had a few answers.

Frey made a name for herself a few years ago as as a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa, a private school where she started a prominent liberal arts, Great Books-style intensive track for students of all majors. By her telling, the program was popular–even oversubscribed–and included large numbers of engineers, business majors, and various pre-professional types. These are the students whose paths are taken to be incompatible with liberal study, who are held up as examples of the safe and smart route to take through higher education instead of the liberal arts.

Frey tells a story of a program that managed to sidestep the traditional trade-offs between practicality, future earning power, and curricular silos at the university. When you give students like this a chance to provide for their future as wage earners and think on a higher plane, it seems that there is a population that wants to stretch itself and do both. Nonetheless, it wasn’t enough to save the program, which was dissolved by the University of Tulsa administration after a few years. Frey reflects in her interview with Douthat:

I can imagine a future in which humanistic study and the liberal arts are widely acknowledged to be beneficial for real people, but nonetheless American institutions and American culture turn against them as a form of training for almost anyone, for any reason. I focus on the American context here because it is the immediate situation I see around me. Maybe I have just described the present.¹

If it really is the case that the pace of technological change is accelerating and the shape of the future is harder predict, would you not want to choose an education that prepares you to face change in general, that takes the certainty of transformation as its starting point? A traditional justifications of the liberal arts has always involved adaptability. “Precisely because it is general,” says the economist Ian Deming in 2024, “when it is well-executed, [a liberal arts education] is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon.” To believe this, you would have to accept the claim that there is a version of general education that is the best at preparing you for the unknown.²

There is also a question of whether one believes that the overwhelming pace of specifically technological change that today is comparable to other periods of change from the past. Previous eras have seen change like the movement from an agrarian to urban patterns of living, the rise of mass media and mass culture, and the rise of a class of knowledge workers. But maybe the transformation we are living through now– one where computers and computation mediate almost everything–is different in kind, and requires a different educational approach.

I finished Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, the first of two books in a narrative about walking across the entire island of Inishmore, the largest landmass in the Aran island chain on the west coast of Ireland. Tim Robinson was one of those people whose talents made him impossible to describe in any kind of professional or even vocational sense. It would be good enough to say that he both made maps and wrote essays.

I have never read a book quite like the Stones of Aran, and it raised a thought about language that I’ve had for a while: complex spatial relationships are among the hardest phenomena to describe in any language. This became obvious to me at one point while learning a new language. I could have surprisingly deep conversations about politics and philosophy, but felt like a near-beginner when I had to explain the movement of a malfunctioning bike to a mechanic.

Robinson is a master of spatial prose, and the Stones of Aran is the perfect challenge to show off those skills. A sample:

A bay half a mile wide separates the sequence of cliffs so far described from the loftier range to the west, and corresponds to a valley that breaks through the island’s escarpment ridge here. The valley is broadest to the north-east where it embraces low land between the villages of Cill Einne and Cill Ronain, but as it approaches the southern coast it rises and narrows into a gorge that fades out just short of the cliffs. This gorge must have formed along large joints of the limestone–it shares the general direction of the major set of joints–and these same lines of weakness no doubt have led to the formation of a striking feature called An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, at the point of the coast nearest the head of the gorge and in the centre of the bay’s arc. Here a great mass has come half adrift from the clifftop, and formas an arch between it and a rock-stack based on the terrace below. When you are close to the spot it all looks so firm and long-lasting that its top of green turf invites you to hop over the ragged chasm onto a perfect picnic site. But then when you look back from farther along the cliffs and see how the stack below leans outwards and that weighty fallen blocks are wedging open the crevasses you jumped, you have a vision of the inevitable crumbling of the whole crazy pile, carrying you with it into the foam.

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A continuation of the previous post on the hummingbird. In the weeks since it flew away, the question that keeps occurring to me is some version of this: “Why did I see it? Why did this one flight back to the nest catch my eye?” This bird, hardly larger than a flying insect, could have kept sitting there, invisible in its stillness, for weeks. How many other lifecycles have passed unknown while I was looking right at them? This is surely what happens, many times over, for countless other events that are equally worthy. For a busy person, failing to see might as well be identical with seeing itself. I have to admit that my default powers of seeing are ordinary at best: too purpose-driven, insensitive enough to make me efficient. I can do better if I try, but I rarely give myself the chance.

But even the unobservant see things–startling things, even, that can completely change a life. It’s a question that has a long history: why does what is subtle and rare still break through, even with those who are busy, distracted, and chronically unobservant? Sight has never been fair. These reports–of those who were unfairly gifted a vision–are a form of compensation for those of us who miss most things.¹

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: it’s one of those unclassifiable books, written by a naturalist with a spiritual appetite that has nowhere to go. She writes about the woods around her home in the Southeast US, near Roanoke, Virginia. I don’t remember why I found it worthy of reading in the early 2000s, in high school. The book came out in 1974, and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. Maybe I took to it because she wrote from such an ordinary geographic place: neither well-preserved nor particularly wild, at best moderately scenic, not far from where I grew up in North Carolina².

In the tree outside my window in Chicago, the hummingbird nest is now empty. When I last mentioned it at the beginning of August, the mother was still waiting, getting ready. Since then a hatchling emerged from a single egg, lived entirely off its mother’s efforts while it grew for a few weeks, then flew away at the beginning of September.

From materials gathering to her chick’s first flight, a hummingbird’s nesting period takes place over about two months. This nest happened to be positioned at the perfect spot for watching. Everyone in my household saw it.

But is there anything so unusual and extraordinary that you cannot get used to it with regular exposure? Maybe because it became so reliable to find it there, I was surprised at the feeling of finality that overtook me when the fledgling disappeared. I could see that it was getting stronger, looking more like a typical example of its species:

But there is no warning, no turning back when the baby leaves the nest. No one besides us even knew that it was an event. One hour you walk up to the window and see the familiar, the next the show is over. After the fledgling’s first flight, neither mother nor young returns to the nest–or even shows any familiarity with the location. I haven’t seen any hummingbirds at all since those two left. Most nesting birds choose a different spot every year; I doubt we’ll have such a good view again.

near Castle Rock, Wisconsin

If challenge of the being a writer is a subject that interests you, the New York Times had a beautiful story about the novelist Kiran Desai, and the trials of completing her new book–twenty years in the making!–"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny."

After she won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, Desai arrived at high literary recognition just as she began to disappear into her next book. Alexandra Alter writes of her attempts to make progress:

When she first had the idea for the novel, Desai didn’t realize how thoroughly the story would swallow her life. At times over the years, she feared that she might never finish it.

And:

About seven years into writing, Desai was at a residency in Brussels when she decided to print out the manuscript. She was shocked at what kept spilling out of the printer; she realized she had written 5,000 pages.

What Desai experienced is (almost) the struggle of a lifetime. But the basic problem is one that any writer who has attempted a substantial writing project will have sympathy for–especially one that seems (or is) beyond his or her current powers. After seeing physical proof of her difficulties in the 5000 page manuscript, Alter quotes Desai that she “was horrified,” and “hadn’t understood what a dire situation it was.”

Writing is strange in that way: the writer can drown in her own generative powers. At first I wanted to describe Desai as “unproductive,” but that is not the right description at all. What is the right word for someone who produces, in a mechanical sense, yet has nothing to show for it? Very little of the bottom line in art is subject to being counted. The torture of Desai’s condition is being so talented and prolific, and still finding herself unable to marshal that productivity in service of the work that needs to be written. “The story had no center,” Desai said. The work keeps falling apart until it doesn’t.