What Ought to Be

Ideals that beget no meaningful action are worthless clutter. None shall fight for you, and even if they might, count not on them winning, nor on them establishing your rights on your behalf. Ethics cannot be separate from concerns of proximity and personal interest. For these lend context and present a course of action.

So I ask: Does it concern me? Indeed it does, but it does only so far as it concerns the actions I can take to protect my interest. Thus, the compelling question with regard to the actions of my contemporaries and the dynamics of the world about, is not what ought to be, but rather what is and what will be.

For neither what ought my contemporaries do, nor what ought the world become, have any bearing on the actions I might take.

高楼大厦

高楼大厦居其中，自高一望竟呈当初一梦，周风扑面定宜心。昨日所过不时念，险得一生降落一败。今日有所小成就，且欣慰；但迥途未毕，聚神前行，好自为之！

Through Which We Live

Dear Park

I hope that this letter finds you well. The snow is light, but winter is always cold. In the silent confines of my residence, my thoughts have been at liberty to wander. They have returned frequently to the topic of our provoking discussion by the river in early autumn. Indeed it puzzles and amazes me how the nature of our interactions have changed. I say “our”, but really we are quite the exception amidst our more eager contemporaries.

These contemporaries of ours are certainly queer. At any given moment, one finds them staring at these small boxes that they hold in their hands. I must admit that I was surprised upon knowing that you had never used one of these boxes. Nevertheless, perhaps my surprise was not equal to yours when I told you that our contemporaries were using these boxes to communicate with each other. What important matter could there be to require them to be constantly in communication with each other?

Your question was a striking one. Alas, upon closer reflection one is apt to find there nothing of importance. It seems that they use these boxes for communication only because it pleases them. Well then, what could be so pleasing about staring at a box? That is not for us to judge. The moon is out, and I shall take a moment to admire its fine countenance, as I am sure you would be similarly inclined to do.

Sincerely

Stone

 

The Year 2012

The year is 2012. Gangnam Style is overtaking the world in a huge wave. Not too long ago you were serving time as a conscript in the military. You had your freedom restrained, you were forcibly removed from regular society right where the start of your golden years should have been. A meagre existence: for two years, every day was but another to strike off in anticipation of that final day. While you were there, placed in stagnation, the world moved on. In two years people had entirely transitioned to using smartphones, without you. Your contemporaries who were fortunate to have been born of eggs fertilised without a Y chromosome were going through their freshmen and sophomore years in university, securing a vast lead over you, moving ahead of you. Day by day, you gritted your teeth and told yourself that your time would come. What could you do but wait? Your time has come.

The year is 2012. They said that the world would end, but for you it is a new beginning. You have secured a prestigious scholarship your younger self had never dreamt of. Young and idealistic, you are driven by an insatiable appetite for learning. You shall learn and grow as fast as you can. You shall make up for lost time, you shall work hard. Within two months you have become acquainted with over two hundred new people – a flurry of social activity, unprecedented. You are confident – you speak confidently, without restraint, almost brashly. At any time you would encounter some acquaintance or other, and you relished the feeling of knowing and being known to many. Your sparkling new smartphone vibrates every other moment as messages are exchanged in the virtual chat rooms you have found yourself in. You look forward with your chin tilted slightly up, and move with great strides. What could resist this great force with which you find yourself diving forward? Such power. Your time is now.

Dear Huckleberry Finn

Dear Huckleberry Finn,

I hope you fare well after your series of misadventures. Time and again you decided to listen to you heart and not betray your earnest companion Jim. You were brought up in a difficult childhood. Your father lived day by day, with no aspiration beyond coveting that next bottle of whiskey. From him you learned to look after no one but yourself. Then you had a brief period under Widow Douglass’ tutoring, and she tried to instil in you good conduct. But alas, all these would not prepare you, for the difficult choices you would soon make. It pained me Huck, when you felt that you were doing wrong to listen to your heart. Being some years your senior, I feel compelled to guide you, to console you. We failed you Huck, in not bringing you up well. We failed you Huck, that you felt what you had to do was wrong.

I am you, Huckleberry Finn.

I am now a boy. There is so much fun to be had, if only they would leave me alone. They are boring and uncreative; can they not see the fun I am having? They try to educate me, but really I just want to play. Let them not see this, or I shall get a beating once again. I do not like them, but still I would acquiesce; for who else takes care of me? The scoldings and punishments, they all mean to teach me. That I could tell right from wrong, that I could do always the right. Now, I come to associate some behaviours with praise and some others with shame. Do what brings praise, avoid what brings shame–such a straightforward way to think! But one day I find this insufficient. I must think for myself, and do sometimes what I came to think was wrong.

The Mind of a Hardcore Gamer

At first, it was purely entertainment. In a game, you interacted with some virtual world, and things happened in response. Instead of messing around with your toys, you messed around with the game. It did not matter what the objectives were. Over time, your childhood brain grew to understand the formal concepts of objectives and strategy, and games started to make sense. There were goals to achieve and ways to win.

There was something charming about entering a different world. It was not so much the sensory stimulation of the graphics and sound, but the believable feeling that this other world existed, with its own rules, story, and society. You were experiencing that world. You were a part of it.

Now all of a sudden, your friends in school started to talk about some game that you never before played. Somehow you tried it, and then you joined them. Why did you do that? Maybe you did not want to feel left out. Maybe, being a gamer, you knew you were good at gaming and at last you could show your friends how good you were. You started late, of course, so you were a complete beginner, and lost your initial games. Slowly though, some part of you, so finely attuned to the precise mechanisms of gaming, drove you to analyse the game and improve your skill and tactics. You started delving into theory: Gaming was not just about what you did during the game itself. It was understanding the workings of the game and how different ways of playing it influenced the outcome. You went to the forums, you read strategy guides, you participated in debates on the theory. Still, you played even more, and got even better. What was it? Were you trying to prove yourself?

You were not alone. One day you entered another world, and in it was this entire community of others. They were playing the game–no, they were all around you: having conversations, fighting monsters, doing quests, and even fishing and cooking. Soon enough, you started interacting with these other people. They were strangers, yet they were not quite strangers. There was something oddly welcoming about their cartoon-like characters. You could talk about whatever you wanted: the content did not matter, so long as you knew then that you had made ‘friends’. Everyday you logged in, someone would say ‘Hi!’ to you and you would proceed in conversation about the latest news in the game. Now and then, you would meet up to fight monsters together or just to chat because you were ‘friends’.

Sometimes you preferred to be alone though. There were worlds that were charming precisely because the characters in them were not real people. You met wizards who spoke like wizards, and Jedi knights that had great conviction for their cause. There were also other games that were just too complex to be played simultaneously by multiple people. You were building an ancient Egyptian city along the Nile river, you were managing the burgeoning Roman empire and its legions, you were plotting the succession and dominance of a medieval dynasty. You relished the obscure complexity of those games, because, having played games for more than half your life now, you knew that complexity was necessary for depth in gaming experience.

You wanted your worlds to be as close to your ideal of a ‘good game’ as possible. Yet, game developers were just not good enough. Game development projects were fraught with rushed schedules, deceptive marketing, and mismanagement. All too often games were released with disappointing bugs and poorly designed game mechanics. It did not matter. Gamers rule the gaming world. Gamers came up with ways to modify existing games, and you used those tools to modify and customise your games to fit your ideal conceptions. You would tweak a little, see if it worked, and examine if you liked the results. Little by little, you tweaked. Often, you would spend more time modifying the game than actually playing it. There was something in you that drove you towards perfecting the game. You wanted to play the game perfectly, but you first needed the game to be perfect.

You chose to escape into this world. The girl that you had a crush on for many months rejected you and was seeing someone else. Numb yourself, perform the systematic motions of the game. Enter this other world. You knew you were capable, so capable that you could fully grasp the fundamental mechanics of the game and play it better than others. Who cared about the real world? You just wanted to be away for a while. Was that not what school holidays were for? Your wish was granted, and you became completely absorbed. You made new ‘friends’ again, and you gained respect. After a timeless eternity spent in this world, you would be ready to emerge and live life again.

Plato’s Just Medicine

When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,–these are his remedies. And if someone prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and he sees no good in a life which is spent nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble.
–Book III of The Republic by Plato (English Translation by Benjamin Jowett)

Plato’s concept of justice resides in an isomorphism between the state and the individual. A just state is a well-ordered state in which each individual is just in so far as he performs a suitable role. A suitable role is one that befits the individual in a way that leverages upon his personal attributes. Through the dutiful and earnest performance of such a role the individual assumes a proper place in the state.

Life is beautiful. Our senses pleasure us to behold fair sights. Our social tendencies draw us towards society and civilization. Our innate curiosity urges us to nurture learning yearnings. Our industrious spirit wills us to create magnificent constructs. In death all dissolves.

When the possibility of death arises, the desire not to lose all that we have compels us to take all possible measures necessary to avoid it. Yet, ought we to fear death so much as to erect protective barriers between us and our station in life? One who fears death may go at length to preserve his subsistence, even if in doing so he loses spirit and forsakes the very things that comprise his existence. One who excessively fears death incapacitates himself, and constrains his industrial and intellectual leanings! In place of biological death resides the dreary state of spiritual death. Do not fear death. We do what we can to be healthy and strong, but where death may strike even so we push on in courage.

For death to succeed life is a certainty, for death to supersede life is a pity.

‘Ne pleure pas, Alfred ! J’ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à vingt ans !’
–Évariste Galois

The Closed Door

‘Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you.’

Knock, I did.

I was knocking, and I was ringing the doorbell incessantly. But the door did not open.

They told me so. They said it was dangerous. What was I thinking, travelling alone and renting a room from someone I had only barely acquainted with online?

He seemed nice enough when I met him earlier. So nice that I felt completely comfortable with leaving my luggage, knapsack, and laptop in the apartment while I left for a quick dinner and beer. He did of course pass me the key. Either the key was not the right one, or there must have been an additional bolt on the inner side of the door, because the door would not open despite turning the key in the keyhole.

I had nothing on me except my wallet, phone, and passport. I did not have a German phone line. Did I mention I also had my comb and earphones? As if those would help. The sensor-activated stairway light turned itself off, leaving me in darkness. Day turns to night quickly. I could still catch a fading glimmer of light on the way back from dinner, but now it was dark.

I was confused. I was in disbelief. I had never experienced such danger in my sheltered life, and I could not imagine it happening to myself. An ounce of hope remained, that perhaps it was merely a mistake. On the other hand, fear started to creep in. Yet, along with it came a sense of excitement. I had an inexplicable tiny desire to be in danger. To be one day left alone on the streets in a foreign place, with nothing to aid me but this personality that defines me and my free will. As inane as it sounds, I almost wanted it to be true.

It was amidst this mix of separate sets of emotions, directed at two distinct possibilities of uncertain probability, that I realised I might still have had a lifeline. I reached for my phone, hoping that I had recharged the battery for long enough the previous night.

Master of Traffic

We needed to get from place to place over the next few days. More precisely, we needed to go to and fro between our homely hostel and the town centre. So there he was, to drive that bus in which we would sit and by which we would happily commute. In our minds he was probably just that. A bus driver.

But he said: ‘I am not just a bus driver, I am a Master of Traffic.’ Thereafter he proudly proclaimed how he was recognised by that title in his hometown and even given a certificate for it. One might assume he was merely jesting to make his self-introduction more interesting for us. But for me, his pride of his profession and trade reached deeper within me. I admired him.

Here in the city of Singapore, and I assume likewise in some other busy commercial centres, we are conditioned to recognise an occupational hierarchy. We see high-level corporate managers, lawyers, doctors, and other high-paying occupations as respectable. The further down the chain and the less pay a job offers, the less glamorous and respectable a person’s occupation is. In such a society, an occupation as simple as a bus driver could never come close to being noteworthy.

But I detest and challenge that notion. Must the worth of a person’s trade and profession necessarily be tied to its financial potential, its authority over others, or its required educational attainment?

Mr. Master of Traffic drove in many countries across Europe, dealt with passengers and places of different cultures, and acquired a wealth of experience in driving safely and efficiently, route optimisation, dealing with traffic, and recognising good pickup and drop-off locations. He would use all that to make all aspects of our bus rides there as pleasant and smooth as possible. He would do all of that without demanding stock options, first-class air tickets, luxurious hotel suites, and whatnot. Moreover, he took pride in what he did.

Cheers to those who hone their trade rather than plot their careers.

–

This post has been translated into Chinese: 中文翻译

Memory and Imagery

There lay two neat rows of trees on both sides on the path, stretching as far as I could see. Endless symmetry–it was beautiful. For a moment my mind activated the cognitive resources required to reach my hand into the left pocket of my pants–for my camera-phone. I hesitated. I stopped.

No.

No, there was something precious about that view–no, that moment–it felt as though taking a photograph would ruin it. As though cutting a small fragment off a little gem. ‘Live in the moment.’ I did. The morning air was fresh and cool. Up above the leaves rustled gently with the breeze. To the side a narrow stream flowed, and in it were some ducks. One was feeding and the other three were still asleep. In the distance I could hear birds cooing every now and then. It was after four days in a Paris filled with flocks of tourists and heavy traffic, and that tranquility soothed me so.

Memory is imperfect. Imperfect in the way it records, stores, and recalls information. But that imperfection comes with our will to make meaning of things. Thus so, that moment became a part of my memory–imperfect yet with meaning. A photograph would not capture it that way.

My shoes crunched softly along the path by the narrow stream, where the north segment of the medieval wall of Provins used to be. Je reviendrai, France!

–

This post was previously titled ‘Memory, Unphotographed.’