The Vista is Not The Terrain

hill elegy

It’s hard to evaluate online pictures of places like the lowlands of New England; satellite images don’t do justice. One, you can’t smell the air. Two, you can’t hear the sounds: birds, peepers, the highway. And three, you’re always seeing views from above. Whereas in the terrain where I grew up, you’re looking at everything street view, head-on.

In San Francisco, where for a while I spent most of my time, you’re always peering off a hill, or looking out from the bridge or the top floor of a Victorian or the Salesforce Tower. All you can see is scapes. In most of New England we don’t really have that: we just have stuff. We don’t even have the wide vistas of Utah canyons or Kansas prairies. There are meadows, trees, streets, and buildings you tilt your head up at.

In San Francisco everybody wants to get up high where they can see more: to abstract the cars into insects into traffic patterns, the faces into ovals into social graphs. They gaze from cliffs out onto the Pacific, though they don’t venture in. Sometimes they cross its most desolate strait on a red marvel of civil engineering, not sure whether there’s anything to see in the desperately cold water. They stand on the dunes of Ocean Beach, which is a beach next to the ocean. Not much washes up.

In conversation, at parties, people ask the big questions. About your depths – if they’re too polite to ask about your traumas or your insecurities, they’ll ask about what resonates with you or what makes you feel alive, or about your hopes and dreams. To the extent they like to talk about work, it’s because you’re supposed to work on something that resonates with you. There are 17 approved subjects: space, transit, energy, longevity, therapy, travel, applied AI, theoretical AI, dating, community, human flourishing, social media, New York, education, startup logistics, psychedelics, and housing.

One the one hand, they’re right. These really do constitute items one through seventeen on the list of pluralities of what’s making the future go. On the other hand, they don’t constitute anything near a majority, and probably never will. A nectarine can never be the most important thing, but the most important thing is composed of stuff like nectarines: chickadees, kisses, pebbles, bus rides, rumors, coins, baths, elbows, guffaws, turnstiles, hats.

Abstraction is removing the parts that are different to examine parts that are the same. An abstraction is a thing, too, as holy as any other. But one cannot live on abstractions alone, because they’re silent and scent-free. One suffocates for lack of an instance. To remove the parts that are different is to have to remember to put them back.

You stand at the top of a hill. You see everyone’s role and no one’s eyelashes. May I give you a gentle push to roll you downhill? You can always hustle back up.