This parcellated life of ours...

[sawyl]

No-one writes scientists like Kim Stanley Robinson. Somehow, he really gets the mindset in a way other writers don't. Here, for instances, is Frank Vanderwaal, one of the main characters from Science in the City, on existence, loneliness and the pursuit of happiness:

The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spent almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that — even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:

1. the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
2. the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
3. the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week.
4. Then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, or eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank's calculation so far, suggesting that they were all living more hours in a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety, except you yourself.

One could, therefore:

1. pursue a project in paleolithic living,
2. change the weather,
3. attempt to restructure our profession, and
4. be happy,

all at once, although not simulataneously, but moving from one thing to another, among differing populations; behaving as a different person in each situation. It could be done because there were no witnesses. No one ever saw enough to witness your life and put it together.

There's something wonderful about the way that he sets out the inevitable facts of human loneliness and our disconnection from one another, before coming up with a way to work with the system rather than against it. It rather reminds me of the song of the Taoist swimmer from Judith Weir's Natural History:

There was a rock where water fell, and foamed for forty miles; it was a place where fish and turtles could not swim, but in the waves, Confucius saw a man. He took him for someone in trouble who wanted to die; but the swimmer rose out of the water and climbed on the bank with a song on his lips: "I was born in dry land, I grew up in the waves, I go out with the flow, I follow the Way of the water. That is how I stay afloat."

Profundity and pragmatism in perfect balance.