Here are some initial shots from my time cycling through the Flemish part of Belgium:
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Charles Yu
"The only free man," he would say, "is one who doesn't work for anyone else." In later years, that became his thing, expounding on the tragedy of modern science fictional man: the desk job. The work week was a structure, a grid, a matrix that held him in place, a path through time, the shortest distance between birth and death.
- Charles Yu - how to live safely in a science fictional universe
Finding something, or more accurately, not finding something seems to be a consistent theme of Charles Yu's writing. Most of the time it's not even clear what Man, 35, is looking for in Yu's stories. There is a vague concept or emotion perhaps, and it is this quest of Man, 35, that is so identifiable, so ingenious, so obvious, but is so difficult to express. The search is often complicated by Man, 35,'s analytical mindset; a viewpoint that demands connections, diagrams, and equations to explain his existence. Man, 35, knows all too well that these tools of research won't help him one bit, but he has nothing else and insistently hammers away with the same approach he would use to solve partial differential equations. Ironically, just like these PDE's, an analytic solution is usually impossible due to the complexity of the problem. The best we can hope for is a numerical approximation of the answer. A numerical approximation of longing; of contempt; of a thousand different emotions. Would Man, 35, give up his world of complex domains and eigenvalue problems to understand these things? Does he have to?
Maybe Man, 35,'s mindset isn't the problem. Maybe he just needs a new perspective, a new method. A Feynman diagram for Love, Hope, Despair, and Regret.
- Charles Yu - how to live safely in a science fictional universe
Finding something, or more accurately, not finding something seems to be a consistent theme of Charles Yu's writing. Most of the time it's not even clear what Man, 35, is looking for in Yu's stories. There is a vague concept or emotion perhaps, and it is this quest of Man, 35, that is so identifiable, so ingenious, so obvious, but is so difficult to express. The search is often complicated by Man, 35,'s analytical mindset; a viewpoint that demands connections, diagrams, and equations to explain his existence. Man, 35, knows all too well that these tools of research won't help him one bit, but he has nothing else and insistently hammers away with the same approach he would use to solve partial differential equations. Ironically, just like these PDE's, an analytic solution is usually impossible due to the complexity of the problem. The best we can hope for is a numerical approximation of the answer. A numerical approximation of longing; of contempt; of a thousand different emotions. Would Man, 35, give up his world of complex domains and eigenvalue problems to understand these things? Does he have to?
Maybe Man, 35,'s mindset isn't the problem. Maybe he just needs a new perspective, a new method. A Feynman diagram for Love, Hope, Despair, and Regret.
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