Clippings

It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one’s senses play, drank full at the primitive mother’s breast – which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life – then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one’s freedom, scope, lust for life. …

Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one’s senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible?

The road was long and lined with decay, wilting, and dying. Sadly he journeyed on, intoxicated by the song of death, open to the loudly screaming misery of the world, sad, and yet glowing, with eager senses.

Midori responded with a long, long silence—the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. Forehead pressed against the glass, I shut my eyes and waited.

I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.

Take capacity. The standard residential elevator is designed to accommodate 12 passengers, all of whom we assume to be of average weight and form. This is the Occupant’s Fallacy. The number 12 does not consider the morbidly obese, or the thin man’s convention and necessity of speedy conveyance at the thin man’s convention. We conform to objects, we capitulate to them. We need to reverse this order. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect. Nothing we create works the way it should. The car overheats on the highway, the electric can opener cannot open the can. We must tend to our objects and treat them as newborn babes. Our elevators are weak. They tend to get colds easily, they are forgetful. Our elevators ought to be variable in size and height, retractable altogether, impervious to scratches, possessing a mouth. The thin man’s convention can happen at any time; indeed, they happen all the time.

When [the philosopher Morton White] had been on the faculty at Harvard, he had been instrumental in having Gödel invited to deliver the prestigious William James series of lectures and had been chagrined when Gödel declined. This would have been in the 1960s. When White himself came to the Institute as a permanent member in 1970, he remembers having asked Gödel why he had turned down the invitation. Gödel’s answer had come in two parts.

First of all, he’d said, the Harvard department was too “empiricist,” and he thought they’d have been critical of what he had to say. Second of all — and this part of the answer, White told me, had really interested him — Gödel felt he would have been doing an injustice to the ideas themselves, because he hadn’t yet completed them; to expose them prematurely to an unsympathetic audience would be acting unjustly toward them.

So it seems, at least from this story, that his reluctance to voice his unfashionable intuitions in any form that fell short of a proof was not only a matter of his own distaste for intellectual wrangling but also connected with a perceived ethical obligation toward the ideas themselves, which is appropriate for an impassioned Platonist.

[The] economist Oskar Morgenstern, who had known Gödel back in Vienna, confided in a letter: “Einstein had often told me that in the late years of his life he has continually sought Gödel’s company, in order to have discussions with him. Once he said to me that his own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely um das Privileg zu haben, mit Gödel zu Fuss nach Hause gehen zu dürfen,” that is, in order to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel.