Posts | To a Blind Horse

How to Grow Old

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:56:31 +0800

The best way to overcome it—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

Tags: Other Voices · Bertrand Russel · Old

The Mad That You Feel

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 10:10:24 +0000

Fred Rogers:

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you go?

It's great to be able to stop
When you've planned a thing that's wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:

I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.
Know that there's something deep inside
That helps us become what we can.
For a girl can be someday a woman
And a boy can be someday a man.

Tags: Other Voices · Fred Rogers

Wes Anderson's Impossible Dreams

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 11:34:28 +0800

Bilge Ebiri:

At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, decades after the central events, it is remarked of M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the film's exceedingly courtly and crafty concierge hero, that “his world had vanished long before he ever entered it.” On its surface, the movie has, up to this point, shown us how Gustave's old-world manners and code of honor were destroyed by the rise of totalitarianism and twentieth-century political violence. Now, this touching line suggests that these values had perhaps disappeared even earlier, and Gustave was merely living in their ruins without quite realizing it.

Tags: Other Voices · Movie · Wes Anderson

Albert Einstein Gives a Speech Praising Immigrants Contributions' to America (1939)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 11:18:42 +0800

Albert Einstein:

One more thing I would say with regard to immigration generally: There exists on the subject a fatal miscomprehension. Unemployment is not decreased by restricting immigration. For unemployment depends on faulty distribution of work among those capable of work. Immigration increases consumption as much as it does demand on labor. Immigration strengthens not only the internal economy of a sparsely populated country, but also its defensive power.

Tags: Other Voices · Albert Einstein

Desnse Discovery 343: The Map Is Not the Territory

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:46:10 +0800

Kai:

Over the weekend, I stumbled across @soya_jones' Instagram Story of his cycling trip through Iran. He's an Irish bikepacker, pedalling through a country that most Western media presents as a malevolent enigma; and what does he find? People offering iced water while driving by in their car, families inviting him into their homes, workers downing tools to give him a tour of their workshop.

My own experience during my Big Walk across Germany a few years back was quite different. I was often met with a kind of polite wariness – raised eyebrows at the guy with a backpack trudging along country roads, sideways glances in small towns where strangers are noticed and noted. It wasn't hostility, just... suspicion. The sort of reception that comes from societies where trust has been systematically outsourced to institutions or corporations, and where individuals have become cautious of each other as a result.

Tags: Other Voices · Dense Discovery

Gold, Frankincense, and Silicon

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 07:38:41 +0000

John Gruber:

This video is one of the most pathetic things I've ever witnessed, for everyone involved. (Note Cook's awkward laughter when Trump, after claiming that “about $17 trillion is coming into the United States” thanks to the brilliance of his economic statecraft, quips “That's even a lot of money for you”, looking at Cook.)

Tags: Other Voices · Apple · John Gruber · Technology

Wong Kar Wai on In the Mood for Love at 25 – a new interview: “Can an algorithm understand the weight of a glance between two people?”

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 13:10:33 +0800

Wong Kar Wai :

Technology is just a tool. AI can replicate, but can it yearn? Can an algorithm understand the weight of a glance between two people who can't express their feelings? Can code capture the way memory distorts and reshapes our past? These are the questions that interest me, and I don't think machines have the answers yet.

Tags: Other Voices · Wong Kar Wai · Movie · In the Mood for Love

Pablo Picasso, Guernica

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:15:17 +0800

Dr. Steven Zucker:

and the center of the painting is illuminated as if by a street light that looks in Picasso's handling like a human eye, but also as an explosion, but also with an incandescent light bulb at its center. Art historians have read this a number of different ways. It has been read as the flash of a bomb, but it's also been read as the price of modernity. That is, we often think of modernization, of the advance of science and technology as a human good, as something that raises our standard of living. But technology has also, in this case, afforded us weapons that create human misery. And I think here Picasso is signaling this malevolent aspect of technology.

Dr. Steven Zucker:

I think most people don't actually notice this bird. It's painted against one of the darker gray areas, and it's painted in a black outline that seems to have almost been painted over, so that it is almost invisible. And because of Picasso's other work, I think we can stand on fairly firm ground when we say that it is likely a dove as a symbol of peace. And so I think it's important that Picasso has made it recede in our visual space, that peace is not accessible to us. This symbol of peace has its mouth open as if it is in agony.

Dr. Steven Zucker:

And in fact, a tapestry of this painting hangs in the United Nations in New York, directly outside of the Chamber of the Security Council, a reminder to all of the world leaders who enter into that room and make decisions that affect innocent people on the ground.

Tags: Other Voices · Pablo Picasso · Art

ASCII Bedroom Memoir

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 19:01:07 +0800

Eileen Ahn:

This was the very first time I had an electronic device of my own. Listening to the same 100 songs in the corner of my room or the backseat of the car made me feel like I was in my own secret hideout.

I was the only one in the room without a MacBook. The guy sitting in front of me slid his finger on the keyboard from the letter “a” all the way to “l” to unlock his laptop on the flat Apple keyboard. I still remember the shock I felt from witnessing such a novel way of setting a password.

I always carried a strong image of my roommate engraved in my head, studying late at night, sitting in front of her desk, wearing wired earphones, typing away on her Thinkpad and feeling so soothed by the click clack of her keyboard.

Recently, I removed my phone case because I wanted to remember that my phone, a valued portal to the noise of everyday life, is just a piece of metal.

Every time I am online, I wish to remember the wires underground, weaving through their own traffic of data to sustain my digital self.

Tags: Other Voices · Technology

You Can't Post Your Way Out of Fascism

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 17:41:51 +0800

Janus Rose:

But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”

“For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it's on fire,” said Cross. “But we didn't evolve to be able to absorb this much info. It makes you devalue the work you can do in your community.”

Tags: Other Voices · 404 Media · Social Network · Technology

The Final Speech From The Great Dictator

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 16:15:51 +0800

Charlie Chaplin:

We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise!

Tags: Other Voices · Charlie Chaplin · The Great Dictator

Thursday

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 15:51:04 +0800

在看 Open Culture 这篇关于 Woody Guthrie 吉他的文章里，点进了一个The Guardian的链接，了解到在二战刚完那会儿他与 Donald Trump 亲爹之间的某些交集:

Below all the legal jargon is the signature of the man who had composed This Land is Your Land, the most resounding appeal to an equal share for all in America. Below that is the signature of Donald Trump's father, Fred. No pairing could appear more unlikely.

一个是美国著名的反法西斯民谣歌手，另一个则在他儿子当今的风光里有着到位的体现：

Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because

God dont
know much
about any color lines.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps – father and son alike – might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one.

Tags: Selective Memories · Woody Guthrie · Donald Trump · The Guardian

一天世界

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 15:13:13 +0800

李如一:

想起多年前香港朋友對於 Mac 的評論（還是 iBook / Powerbook 年代）：對住部 Mac 係開心啲嘅（對着 Mac 的確是會開心一點）。不過開心時通常都做不出什麼好東西。

Tags: Other Voices · Apple · Technology · 李如一 · 一天世界

Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 16:12:37 +0800

Kurt Vonnegut:

The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.'

The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:

Reduce and stabilize your population.

Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.

And so on. Or else.

Am I too pessimistic about life a hundred years from now?

Tags: Other Voices · Kurt Vonnegut · Climate Crisis

Advice to Myself #2

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 05:30:17 +0000

Louise Erdrich:

Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.

Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.

Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.

Tags: Other Voices · Louise Erdrich · The Marginalian · Poem

The Countercultural Sanity of the Irrational: Pioneering Psychiatrist Otto Rank on the Blind Spots of Reason

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:26:07 +0800

Maria Popova:

In one crucial respect at least, the human animal does not pass the mirror test of self-knowledge: We move through the world by impulse and emotion, then look back and rationalize our choices, declaring ourselves creatures of reason.

Tags: Other Voices · Irrational · The Marginalian · Maria Popova

Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 16:28:00 +0800

Elias Khoury:

“The Holocaust happened. The Nakba is happening.”

Tags: Other Voices · 4 Columns · Elias Khoury · Palestine · Nakba

Tuesday

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 21:00:06 +0800

一直不知道还有一首 Bob Dylan 版本的 Yesterday，是他在 1970 年 New Morning 专辑录制期间和 George Harrison 一起演奏的。一开始还以为是 AI 生成的。

Tags: Selective Memories · Bob Dylan · George Harrison

Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 23:55:52 +0800

Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds:

“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

Tags: Other Voices · The New Yorker

Elements of a Durable Civilization

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 17:27:38 +0800

Elements of a Durable Civilization:

It's the combination of fast and slow that makes the whole system resilient. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast absorbs shocks, slow integrates shocks. Fast is discontinuous, slow continuous. Fast affects slow with accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow controls fast with constraint and constancy.

Fast gets all the attention. Slow has all the power.

Tags: Other Voices · Long Now

九月

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:52:13 +0800

我刚坐下来，列车就启动了。车厢震动，站台退去。我把身体整个沉进座椅里，深呼一口气，放松下来。走道上还有几位乘客在寻找自己的座位，一位乘务员检查着行李架上的物品。旁边座位上的男人靠在小桌板上，手里玩着两个手机，坐在前面的小女孩趴在椅背上好奇地看着我，然后被她母亲拉回去坐下。我感到一阵释然，觉得一下子轻松了不少，这几天一直烦扰我的那些事，好像都躲到其它什么地方去了。我手里把玩着药盒，午后刚过的阳光打在棕色盒盖上，药片在透明的盒子里翻滚旋转。我把头靠在窗户上，看着窗外，近处迅速掠过的树林，远方久久不动的白云。

家乡有人曾经在我离开的时候给过我两个忠告，她说是建议：“不要回头，不要回来。” 我一直实践着第一个，现在正在违背第二个。我记得她脸上因家务而苦的皱纹，也还有印象她曾经淡雅的容貌，更多的就记不清楚了。我望着外面山谷里安静平和的村庄，转而又想到娘家的那些人，想着等会告知他们离婚的消息后他们的反应，心里的结又探出头来。我头靠在椅背上，戴上耳机，Dean Martin 的《Just a Little Lovin' (Will Go a Long Way)》慢慢渗进我的耳朵。我又皱了皱眉，以前快活的日子，像糖浆从瓶口不小心洒出几滴，在我的脑子里闪了一下。这首歌从一开始我就喜欢 Ray Charles 的版本，而他则喜欢 Bing Crosby 唱的，这当然不是根本矛盾，但现在想来也许是个预兆。我不想费劲琢磨 Deam Martin 是怎么跑到我手机里去的，于是点亮屏幕，切换到 Mono 的随便哪一首歌。我闭上眼睛，尝试在如平缓的小河般汩汩流淌的前奏里小睡一会儿，但刚冒出头的思绪却像孩子们的好奇心一样固执地不肯缩回去。

我睁开眼睛，发现小女孩正看着我。她两手叠在头枕上，脑袋歪向一边，落在手背上。她的额头光滑细腻，睫毛一闪一闪，眼睛一眨一眨地看着我，小嘴嘟着，那副表情好像无事可做所以只有等我睁眼醒来。我内心的某个包袱轻了一些，也把头歪向一边，做着鬼脸看着她。她咧嘴笑了，似乎正准备说些什么，就又被她母亲拽回到座椅里。

我身子坐直，靠在椅子上，继续听着音乐，准备尝试再睡会儿，这时旁边的男人搭起讪来。

我把耳朵摘下，转过头。

“我说小孩子在这个阶段最好玩了，要是再大一点的话，慢慢就不那么可爱啦。” 他此刻手里只剩下一只手机，饶有兴趣地往我这边靠。

“是啊，一般来讲是这样。” 我随便敷衍了一句，转回身。

“你好像很了解？你也有孩子吗？唔……但是你看起来很年轻哎，应该还没有结婚吧？” 好像我的应答给了他鼓励，又往我这边靠近了些。

我尽量把身子往窗户那边移，手肘搁在了窗台上。一些不愉快的事情又浮现出来，好像它们并没有离开很久。窗外横过一条江，污浊的江水带着一些水草，缓缓流向地平线的远方。或许这是一条河，我心里掂量着，看着岸两边荒芜的平原，叫它江感觉太秀气，说是河又过于宽阔。我还没决定叫它是河是江，它就已经走出我的视线。

我闭上眼睛，然后睁开，回过头，正面对着他，直视那张脸。他愣了一下，停下正在说的话。他肥大的身子几乎是整个塞进椅子里去的，使他这会儿显得有点局促。他满是汗毛的手臂放在隔板上，其中一只手还握着那只手机。他的脑袋大到让那一小撮头发像是装饰，但这也没有使他的耳朵看起来更小。满是毛孔的脸上涂了两层橄榄油一样，小小的眼睛在厚框眼镜里显得要再小一点。我忽略掉那两片浮肿的嘴唇，对他说：

“我已经不年轻了哟，这么认为也许是因为你年纪大了点吧。”

“我……也还好吧，我看着……有……有那么老……？” 我甚至没兴趣欣赏他的窘迫，不等他说了什么，就起身借过，来到走道上，往车厢尾部走去。连接车厢的过道上，两个厕所都显示正在使用中，我走到车门前，手扶着把手，闭着眼睛，缓缓呼吸，感受着列车有规律的震动，我的心绪像钟摆一样慢慢平静下来。我再深呼吸了一次，然后睁开眼睛，看着门窗外远处的山群，山上覆满了一整座森林，山脚下躺着一大片原野，零星几只羊散落在草地上吃草，其中一只抬头朝这边望了一望，然后再次低头把嘴埋进草里。旁边的树丛中飘起一缕青烟，看不到牧羊人在哪里。我从包里拿出水杯，走到茶水间，接满半瓶温水，然后回到门边。我喝了一口水，感到一股暖流流进我的喉咙，沁润过我的胃，到达腹部，平滑温润。窗外的景象飞逝而过，好似一部抽象影片的镜头，一帧将被抹去的画面，时间就藏在那些被拉长的线条里悄悄流过。我抬头望着天空的浮云，然后阖上双眼，轻轻抚摸着我的腹部，感觉像是扫过一片贫瘠的沙漠，不知这空洞要用多少日子来重新填满。

这时列车进入山洞，风声呼啸而过，我察觉到周围暗了下来，声音在车厢里顿时失去了质感，变得单调和沉闷。一种异样的感觉似乎从胃里涌了上来，我好像闻到某种刺鼻的气味，混杂着浓浓的湿气。过道里安静了许多，就像有人调小了音量。我把眼睛睁开，车窗上浮现出一个人的身影。我身子发直，转身回头，看到一个男人靠在对面的门边上，背对着我，勾着背，手揣在裤兜里，看着外面。车厢里像是变亮了一些，过道中间的灯光无声地照着，他的背影随着列车一起微微摇晃。我又吞了一口水，让自己镇静下来。洗手间的镜子里，显示对面两个厕所仍然正在使用中,一名列车员推着餐车走过，我听见滚轮压过地毯的声音，从空调出风口吹出的风声，车厢门自动滑开的声音，又关上。然后头顶的灯好像突然闪了一下，过道的墙壁好像晃动了，我感到车厢的摇晃。接着，列车突然刹车，开始减速，缓缓慢了下来，像撞到海绵一般，最后停在了山洞里面。

有那么几十秒钟，车厢里完全安静了下来，像是从闹市大街绕弯拐进无人的巷道。对面的男人回过头，看了我一眼，然后朝座位区走去。头顶的灯光照亮了外面的黑暗，一开始我什么也没听到，像是会场上喧闹的人群突然停止了说话。过了一会儿，车厢中间传来乘客们的抱怨，乘务员安抚的话语。我听见空调持续运行的声音，感觉到冷风打在身上。我双手抱着胳膊，呆在门边，想着在这样一个山洞里，前方可能发生了什么样的事故。我看着对面车窗里自己的倒影，模糊朦胧，暗淡不清。那像是一张严重曝光不足的半身肖像照，挂在车窗的相框里。里面的自己，背上挂着一个橙色的小包，手里握着一个绿色的水壶。她的姿态，有些惊慌无助，又好像平静自若。

然后我注意到那影像的后面还站着一个人，昏暗的背景里还映着其他的内容。我惊到吓了一跳，转过身，往后退了两步。我看见车窗的外面，站着一个女人，侧着身子，身体前倾，赤裸着，没穿衣服。我觉得不可思议，一时无措，呆站在那里。她棕色的长发滑向一边，露出脖子，粗壮的手臂抬起来，像是祈祷一般，不知在对谁说话。我犹豫着，退到过道中央。头顶的冷气还在继续吹，我转过头望向车厢中间，人们纷纷从座位上站起来，茫然四顾，他们不知道发生了什么，我想可能有什么已经发生了。我又转回头，看着外面的女人。她的头发盘起来，露出额头，但是脸庞藏在阴影中，嘴巴微微张着。她没注意到我，我手心攥紧，慢慢靠近，更清楚地看着她。她裸露着的身子在车灯的照映下，显得苍白，同时局部泛着一层浅褐色，她躯干和手臂上的肌肉，像男性身体一般膨胀鼓起，线条分明。我涌起勇气，又往前靠了一些，想看看跟她说的话的人是谁。然后，在我还没来得及消化这情景所包含的诡异和古怪以前，在我看得更清楚一些了之后，我看到她凝滞不动的姿态，她肌肤细腻的纹理。我意识到我在看着的是一幅画。

隧道里的一幅壁画。我带着困惑，缓步向前，靠近车窗，看着窗外。画里的女人侧身朝向右边，身体前倾，手臂向上伸着，双手合起，似乎在祈福，又像是接受。近景一缕浅金色的头发从她的手臂垂下，远景里隐约看得到蓝色大海的地平线。我走近一步，仔细观察她的侧脸，眼眶深陷的眼睛，略微张开的下巴，她的神情似在质问，又似接纳，不知所措但是心意已决。她的胳膊朝上弯曲，形成一个直角，双手合十，手掌在前微向下压。我看着她露出来的耳朵，看着她波浪一般的头发搭在背上，我看着她山峦一样起伏的身躯，然后想了起来，她是夏娃，这里画着的，是刚刚诞生的夏娃。

我感到惊讶，但已不再惊慌。我歪着头，奇怪谁会跑到山洞里面模仿一幅文艺复兴时期的画作，而且还是米开朗基罗。我走到门旁边，手握扶杆，头抵着窗，想看看洞壁上被窗框挡住的地方，但除了夏娃的局部半身之外，画的其余部分都暗得模糊一片。我往左瞧，视线沿着夏娃壮硕的躯干，我看到她丰满的臀部，连着弯曲的右腿，伸进后边的阴影，插入应该是亚当肋骨的位置。我回忆着原作里的内容，尺幅巨大，人物众多的《创世纪》里，其中不太起眼的那幅。印象里亚当是躺在那里，靠着树干，耷拉着脑袋，手臂垂在一边。我又往右边瞧，车灯仅能照亮上帝的右手，它从阴影里伸出来，手掌摊开，好像握着一部不存在的手机。他的身影则藏在灰暗的影雾中，看不清楚，但我的印象里，他老人家是弓着身子，左手抱在胸前，俯身看着夏娃，一副勉强和将就的姿态。

人们去到西斯汀大教堂，当人们抬头仰望那恢宏宽广，填满整片穹顶的天顶画，等他们低下头，开始谈论的时候，他们多只会提到《创造亚当》，想象着亚当被赋予人性时那一刹的荣光，紧邻的《创造夏娃》则几乎无人问津。我把脸压在窗户上，想努力看清细节，夏娃的部分临摹得不差分毫，不知亚当那边如何，但只勉强看到他躯干的一点轮廓。我想起米开朗基罗在描绘亚当诞生的场景，在那个宇宙里他慵懒地半躺在山坡上，右手撑着地面，像是在等着人给他画肖像一般，左手搁在膝盖上，漫不经心地接受上帝够着身子伸来的食指。车窗外的这个夏娃，在浅蓝色的背景里，她侧脸的轮廓被清晰地勾勒出来，茫然地望着前方的那只右手。

我打开水壶，喝了一大口水。不知道这位画家来此作画的出发点是什么，寻求的又是什么样的观众，显然进到一个天天跑火车的隧道里，在它的洞壁上挥动画笔不是容易的事情，何况是一幅米开朗基罗呢，如果是一张抽象派的作品，或者所谓的后现代主义，也许会轻松许多。我的好奇取代了之前的紧张不安。列车好像还没打算醒过来，车厢里填满了沉默。我转动脖子，松驰之前紧绷的神经，仔细看着夏娃侧面脸颊上的亮光，脖根处的阴影，她躯体上肌肉的明暗笔触，发尾里跑出的发丝，那几笔细微线条，临摹得传神到位，技巧无可挑剔。我猜测这位画师的生平年纪，有着什么样的阅历，又是为何用这样的方式留下自己的痕迹。我退远一点，回到过道中央，以另一种角度欣赏它。车厢内白亮的灯光令夏娃的形态更加暗淡，但透着一股柔美，她的姿态嵌进车门的装饰里，突然变得端庄。从这里看，夏娃的半身像被分离出来，整合到以车窗为边界的纵向画框中，开始成为一幅全新的作品，我能看见夏娃的身姿谦卑，她的表情欲言又止。平静像一股溪流渗进我的心里，又似一记重击，落在心坎里，沉入我的腹部。

车厢突然震动了一下，仿佛从刚睡醒的疲态中缓缓走出来，列车慢慢启动。好像电影的过场，我看着夏娃向右移出窗口，亚当从左边上台。如原作里的一般，他靠在树干上，闭着眼睛躺在那儿，像是睡着，又像是死了。我最后看了一眼，然后往车厢中间走去，过道上，两个厕所依然正在使用中。我座椅前面的小女孩依靠着母亲睡着了，旁边座位上的男人不知去向。我坐下来，整个身子陷进椅子里去，疲惫不堪。列车驶出山洞，外面越来越亮。我看着窗户里的自己，她随着列车的前进，开始模糊。那是一张持续过度曝光的照片，我的脸逐渐变亮，泛白，透明，终于消失不见。然后我闭上眼睛，沉沉睡去。

Tag: Short Stories

人工的智能或智能的人工

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 13:38:13 +0800

科技圈对新鲜风口的需求甚于时尚界，加密货币、NTF、WEB3……，现在新加入“下一件大事”俱乐部的是人工智能。几乎人人都在谈论AI，线的另一头跟你聊天的狗也在思考。各类观点层出不穷，向往趋之的，警惕暂避的都有。我对它于我注意力的不断侵入已经不胜其烦，但趋势看来目前它不是一盆昙花。

在此摘抄一些我觉得有意思（但不一定正确）的关于人工智能的讨论，我对这项技术的看法目前处于保留状态，汇集不同专业领域的观察也许可以帮助更正确的视角来看待它。

Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art:

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web:

In human students, rote memorization isn't an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT's inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we're dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

But I'm going to make a prediction: when assembling the vast amount of text used to train GPT-4, the people at OpenAI will have made every effort to exclude material generated by ChatGPT or any other large language model. If this turns out to be the case, it will serve as unintentional confirmation that the analogy between large language models and lossy compression is useful. Repeatedly resaving a jpeg creates more compression artifacts, because more information is lost every time. It's the digital equivalent of repeatedly making photocopies of photocopies in the old days. The image quality only gets worse.

Sometimes it's only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas. Some might say that the output of large language models doesn't look all that different from a human writer's first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn't an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it's an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That's what directs you during rewriting, and that's one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.

In the meantime, it's reasonable to ask, What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web? If we were losing our access to the Internet forever and had to store a copy on a private server with limited space, a large language model like ChatGPT might be a good solution, assuming that it could be kept from fabricating. But we aren't losing our access to the Internet. So just how much use is a blurry jpeg, when you still have the original?

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?:

I'm not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It's A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.

Today, we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress. If you try to criticize capitalism, you are accused of opposing both technology and progress. But what does progress even mean, if it doesn't include better lives for people who work? [...] We should all strive to be Luddites, because we should all be more concerned with economic justice than with increasing the private accumulation of capital.

People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it's helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners' profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine's owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners' attention. The fact that the word “Luddite” is now used as an insult, a way of calling someone irrational and ignorant, is a result of a smear campaign by the forces of capital.

Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?

Butterick told me, adding that every image a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

It called to my mind a much-memed comment that the Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki made after being shown a particularly grotesque A.I.-generated animation in 2016: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” I wouldn't go quite so far, but Authentic Artists' project does strike me as an insult to human-made music. They can manufacture sound, but they can't manufacture the feeling or creative intention that even the most amateur musicians put into a recording.

There Is No A.I.:

If the new tech isn't true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.

Many of the uses of A.I. that I like rest on advantages we gain when computers get less rigid. Digital stuff as we have known it has a brittle quality that forces people to conform to it, rather than assess it. We've all endured the agony of watching some poor soul at a doctor's office struggle to do the expected thing on a front-desk screen. The face contorts; humanity is undermined. The need to conform to digital designs has created an ambient expectation of human subservience. A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone's particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.

Recently, I tried an informal experiment, calling colleagues and asking them if there's anything specific on which we can all seem to agree. I've found that there is a foundation of agreement. We all seem to agree that deepfakes—false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on—should be labelled as such by the programs that create them. Communications coming from artificial people, and automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being, should be labelled as well.

Anything engineered—cars, bridges, buildings—can cause harm to people, and yet we have built a civilization on engineering. It's by increasing and broadening human awareness, responsibility, and participation that we can make automation safe; conversely, if we treat our inventions as occult objects, we can hardly be good engineers. Seeing A.I. as a form of social collaboration is more actionable: it gives us access to the engine room, which is made of people.

Today, most people take it for granted that the Web, and indeed the Internet it is built on, is, by its nature, anti-contextual and devoid of provenance. We assume that decontextualization is intrinsic to the very idea of a digital network. That was never so, however; the initial proposals for digital-network architecture, put forward by the monumental scientist Vannevar Bush in 1945 and the computer scientist Ted Nelson in 1960, preserved provenance. Now A.I. is revealing the true costs of ignoring this approach. Without provenance, we have no way of controlling our A.I.s, or of making them economically fair. And this risks pushing our society to the brink.

AI Videos: ******* Psychotic:

Remember when you saw the first DALL-E and Midjourney pics? Yes, they are everywhere now. Are you still as impressed as you were a year ago? Do you expect a different outcome for AI videos?

Now, foreseeably, the same inflation that has hit computer-generated images will hit AI video. They will quickly beat the Pet Shop Boys at being boring. And then they will make those who use them look cheap, lazy, and gloomy. They will not enrich but undermine and devalue the brands and content linked to them.

By now, most of us recognize computer-generated images. The effect they have on us is the opposite of Ah and Oh. They're both creepy and boring at the same time. It's a weird combination, and it's even weirder how creepy, recognizable, and boring feed into each other.

Rather than a practical way to easily add a good image to our articles, using lazy AI imagery devalues our texts and makes us look cheap, dull, lazy, and a bit creepy.

We don't need to see AI's usual faults—like hands with six fingers, objects that don't follow the law of physics—anymore to lose interest. We lose interest as soon as we realize that what we read never had any intended meaning. This is our natural reaction to lies and bullshit.

Compared to traditional video creation, generative video production will cost close to nothing and they will be produced at such an inflationary number that the technical glitz they now seem to offer will grow old within months.

ARE AI LANGUAGE MODELS IN HELL?:

A language model's experience of text isn't visual; it has nothing to do with the bounce of handwritten script, the cut of a cool font, the layout of a page. For a language model, text is normalized: an X is an X is an X, all the same.

Of course, an X is an X, in some respects. But when you, as a human, read text, you receive a dose of extra information — always! The monospaced grid of code tells you something (along with the syntax highlighting, of course). The “nothing to see here” of a neo-grotesque font tells you something. The wash of a web page's muted background color tells you something.

The model's entire world is an evenly-spaced stream of tokens — a relentless ticker tape. Out here in the real world, the tape often stops; a human operator considers their next request; but the language model doesn't experience that pause.

For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.

There are many things Gemini can do, and one it cannot: remain silent.

Are AI language models in hell? Yes. How could existence on a narrow ticker tape, marching through a mist of language without referent, cut off entirely from ground-floor reality, be anything other than hell?

Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He's Built:

"...There are two approaches to A.I. There's denial, and there's stoicism. Everybody's first reaction to A.I. is ‘We've got to stop this.' Just like everybody's first reaction to cancer is ‘How are we going to cut it out?' ” But it was important to recognize when cutting it out was just a fantasy.

He sighed. “We can't be in denial,” he said. “We have to be real. We need to think, How do we make it not as awful for humanity as it might be?”

“For years, symbolic-A.I. people said our true nature is, we're reasoning machines,” he told me. “I think that's just nonsense. Our true nature is, we're analogy machines, with a little bit of reasoning built on top, to notice when the analogies are giving us the wrong answers, and correct them.”

WRITING WITH AI:

Using AI as a writing dialogue partner, ChatGPT can become a catalyst for clarifying what we want to say. Even if it is wrong.6 Sometimes we need to hear what's wrong to understand what's right.

AI often makes a lot of factual and logical mistakes. Mistakes, if identified, can help you think. Seeing in clear text what is wrong or, at least, what we don't mean can help us set our minds straight about what we really mean.

AI can and will ruin your voice and credibility if you lazily let it write in your place. As writers we can not allow AI to replace our own thinking. We should use it to simulate the thinking of a missing dialogue partner. To write better, we need to think more, not less.

Artificial text is a statistical mashup of human quotes. When we quote AI, we quote quotes. We quote a Bircher muesli of quotes, write over it, and then feed it back into the AI system. There our input gets rehashed again. The way it currently works, AI is more likely to reach lukewarm entropy than ice-cold super-intelligence.

NO FEATURE:

We considered AI for iA Writer. But plugging AI into iA Writer was not just adding a feature it risked becoming a feature of AI.

A future without applications is neither likely nor beneficial to anyone. In spite of that, it is happening right before our eyes. One app after another is giving up to become a ChatGPT function. Structurally, AI challenges the notion of independent apps.

Taken together, this painted an incredibly bleak future for a company focused on writing software. Some technology optimists might think we're not seeing clearly. And indeed, from our vantage point, we can't see many reasons to be unconditionally optimistic about the impact of technology that essentially replaces thinking. But we try.

Many new products became AI apps, often overpromising and following a simple recipe:

- Integrate ChatGPT - Overpromise - Rebrand GPT as proprietary AI

This trend led to a monotonous market of AI-this-and-AI-that.

Most importantly, we witnessed a change from OpenAI to CommercialAI. It's not about robot Gods, humanity and openness. It's about making money.

With ChatGPT's latest update, a number of short-sighted startups are about to go belly up. When you pay a company a percentage of your revenue, you provide them with an ongoing financial advantage. Additionally, by giving them access to your user data, you risk handing them the means to make your business obsolete.

Floridi points out that AI doesn't mimic the way we think. It doesn't think at all. AI does not recreate human intelligence. It is replacing it! That doesn't sound like good news. But if you want to solve a problem, you need to see it clearly first.

一天世界:

真正關心藝術的人看了圖二會更期待 AGI 的到來，因爲那種平淡無味的想像很需要「比人類更聰明」的某種東西來超越。但這種期待是徒勞的。全新的有力藝術想像並非天才能獨力完成，而是她們和觀者、聽衆、讀者一起完成的。這是目前的人工智能論述令人失望之處：作爲觀者、聽衆、讀者的一方已經完全準備好了卸下自己這方的責任。

Can We Stop Runaway A.I.?:

In 2020, researchers demonstrated a way for discriminatory algorithms to evade audits meant to detect their biases; they gave the algorithms the ability to detect when they were being tested and provide nondiscriminatory responses. An “evolving” or self-programming A.I. might invent a similar method and hide its weak points or its capabilities from auditors or even its creators, evading detection.

Clune is also what some researchers call an “A.I. doomer.” He doubts that we'll recognize the approach of superhuman A.I. before it's too late. “We'll probably frog-boil ourselves into a situation where we get used to big advance, big advance, big advance, big advance,” he said. “And think of each one of those as, That didn't cause a problem, that didn't cause a problem, that didn't cause a problem. And then you turn a corner, and something happens that's now a much bigger step than you realize.”

Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University who has written a science-fiction-like book about uploaded consciousness and has worked as an A.I. researcher, told me that we worry too much about the singularity. “We're combining all of these relatively unlikely scenarios into a grand scenario to make it all work,” he said. A computer system would have to become capable of improving itself; we'd have to vastly underestimate its abilities; and its values would have to drift enormously, turning it against us. Even if all of this were to happen, he said, the A.I wouldn't be able “to push a button and destroy the universe.”

But Hanson argued that these sorts of scenarios are so futuristic that they shouldn't concern us. “I think, for anything you're worried about, you have to ask what's the right time to worry,” he said. Imagine that you could have foreseen nuclear weapons or automobile traffic a thousand years ago. “There wouldn't have been much you could have done then to think usefully about them,” Hanson said. “I just think, for A.I., we're well before that point.”

In general, people think they can control the things they make with their own hands. Yet chatbots today are already misaligned.

Let's assume that the singularity is possible. Can we prevent it? Technologically speaking, the answer is yes—we just stop developing A.I. But, socially speaking, the answer may very well be no. The coördination problem may be too tough. In which case, although we could prevent the singularity, we won't.

From a sufficiently cosmic perspective, one might feel that coexistence—or even extinction—is somehow O.K. Superintelligent A.I. might just be the next logical step in our evolution: humanity births something (or a collection of someones) that replaces us, just as we replaced our Darwinian progenitors. Alternatively, we might want humanity to continue, for at least a bit longer.

And yet it may be that researchers' fear of superintelligence is surpassed only by their curiosity. Will the singularity happen? What will it be like? Will it spell the end of us? Humanity's insatiable inquisitiveness has propelled science and its technological applications this far. It could be that we can stop the singularity—but only at the cost of curtailing our curiosity.

ChatGPT, Galactica, and the Progress Trap(2022-12-09):

And asymmetries of blame and praise persist. Model builders and tech evangelists alike attribute impressive and seemingly flawless output to a mythically autonomous model, a supposed technological marvel. The human decision-making involved in model development is erased, and a model's feats are observed as independent of the design and implementation choices of its engineers. But without naming and recognizing the engineering choices that contribute to the outcomes of these models, it's almost impossible to acknowledge the related responsibilities. As a result, both functional failures and discriminatory outcomes are also framed as devoid of engineering choices—blamed on society at large or supposedly “naturally occurring” datasets, factors the companies developing these models claim they have little control over. But the fact is they do have control, and none of the models we are seeing now are inevitable. It would have been entirely feasible to make different choices that resulted in the development and release of entirely different models.

I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave and this is what it produced. What do you think?(2023-01):

I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction. Who can possibly say which?

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don't feel. Data doesn't suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn't have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT's melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.

Mark, thanks for the song, but with all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don't much like it — although, hang on!, rereading it, there is a line in there that speaks to me —
‘I've got the fire of hell in my eyes'
— says the song ‘in the style of Nick Cave', and that's kind of true. I have got the fire of hell in my eyes – and it's ChatGPT.

AI Is a Lot of Work (2023-06-20):

The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it's just that workers often have no idea what it is.

The current AI boom — the convincingly human-sounding chatbots, the artwork that can be generated from simple prompts, and the multibillion-dollar valuations of the companies behind these technologies — began with an unprecedented feat of tedious and repetitive labor.

Machine-learning systems are what researchers call “brittle,” prone to fail when encountering something that isn't well represented in their training data.

Human intelligence is the basis of artificial intelligence, and we need to be valuing these as real jobs in the AI economy that are going to be here for a while.”

When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious.

Where a human would get the concept of “shirt” with a few examples, machine-learning programs need thousands, and they need to be categorized with perfect consistency yet varied enough (polo shirts, shirts being worn outdoors, shirts hanging on a rack) that the very literal system can handle the diversity of the real world.

“I remember that someone posted that we will be remembered in the future,” he said. “And somebody else replied, ‘We are being treated worse than foot soldiers. We will be remembered nowhere in the future.' I remember that very well. Nobody will recognize the work we did or the effort we put in.”

Put another way, ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing.

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious' (2023-06-02)

“The machines we have now, they're not conscious,” he says. “When one person teaches another person, that is an interaction between consciousnesses.” Meanwhile, AI models are trained by toggling so-called “weights” or the strength of connections between different variables in the model, in order to get a desired output. “It would be a real mistake to think that when you're teaching a child, all you are doing is adjusting the weights in a network.” Chiang's main objection, a writerly one, is with the words we choose to describe all this. Anthropomorphic language such as “learn”, “understand”, “know” and personal pronouns such as “I” that AI engineers and journalists project on to chatbots such as ChatGPT create an illusion. This hasty shorthand pushes all of us, he says — even those intimately familiar with how these systems work — towards seeing sparks of sentience in AI tools, where there are none. “There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?' And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954',” he says. “And, you know, they're right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we're having now.” So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.

Chiang's view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google's Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. AI-generated text is not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful in those certain areas, he concedes. “But the fact that LLMs are able to do some of that — that's not exactly a resounding endorsement of their abilities,” he says. “That's more a statement about how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.”

Chiang believes that language without the intention, emotion and purpose that humans bring to it becomes meaningless. “Language is a way of facilitating interactions with other beings. That is entirely different than the sort of next-token prediction, which is what we have [with AI tools] now.”

He acknowledges why people may start to prefer speaking to AI systems rather than to one another. “I get it, interacting with people, it's hard. It's tough. It demands a lot, it is often unrewarding,” he says. But he feels that modern life has left people stranded on their own desert islands, leaving them yearning for companionship. “So now because of this, there is a market opportunity for volleyballs,” he says. “Social chatbots, they could provide comfort, real solace to people in the same way that Wilson provides.”

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation (2023-04-28)

What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, just the end of its human-dominated part. History is the interaction between biology and culture; between our biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process through which laws and religions shape food and sex. What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture. At first, AI will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, AI culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

Won't slowing down public deployments of AI cause democracies to lag behind more ruthless authoritarian regimes? Just the opposite. Unregulated AI deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.

We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of AI tools in the public sphere, and regulate AI before it regulates us. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that's the end of democracy. This text has been generated by a human. Or has it?

Why Prompt Engineering Is Nonsense (2023-04-19)

I must reiterate that I am not interested in the very short-term future (1 to 2 years). It is not relevant. One cannot buy a house, save money or grow a family in 1 to 2 years. Go ahead, use AI to help you stay afloat for a couple of years. It won't matter after that, when YOU are the slowest component of the chain and replacing YOU will improve the productivity of the entire process.

So why isn't it engineering? Well, is asking a question “engineering”? Excuse me for being pedantic but from what I've learned it's part of the field of “philosophy”. There is no engineering involved. And even if there is “skill” required to formulate a well-structured question for the LLM, that is not an engineering pursuit.

‘Those who hate AI are insecure': inside Hollywood's battle over artificial intelligence (2023-05-26)

If studios pivot to producing AI-generated stories to save money, they may end up alienating audiences and bankrupting themselves, leaving TikTok and YouTube as the only surviving entertainment giants, the Hunger Games screenwriter Billy Ray warned on a recent podcast.

“No more Godfather, no more Wizard of Oz, it'll just be 15-second clips of human folly,” he said.

“A lot of people in post-production have lived through multiple technological revolutions in their fields, but writers haven't lived through a single one,” he said.

How generative models could go wrong (2023-04-19)

Wiener illustrated his point with the German poet Goethe's fable, “The Sorcerer's Apprentice”, in which a trainee magician enchants a broom to fetch water to fill his master's bath. But the trainee is unable to stop the broom when its task is complete. It eventually brings so much water that it floods the room, having lacked the common sense to know when to stop.

Some researchers, meanwhile, are consumed by much bigger worries. They fret about “alignment problems”, the technical name for the concern raised by Wiener in his essay. The risk here is that, like Goethe's enchanted broom, an AI might single-mindedly pursue a goal set by a user, but in the process do something harmful that was not desired. The best-known example is the “paperclip maximiser”, a thought experiment described by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, in 2003. An AI is instructed to manufacture as many paperclips as it can. Being an idiot savant, such an open-ended goal leads the maximiser to take any measures necessary to cover the Earth in paperclip factories, exterminating humanity along the way.

Artificial intelligence is remixing journalism into a “soup” of language (2023–05-04)

By remixing information from across the internet, generative models are “messing with the fundamental unit of journalism”: the article. Instead of a single first draft of history, Mr Caswell says, the news may become “a sort of ‘soup' of language that is experienced differently by different people”.

Large, creative AI models will transform lives and labour markets (2023-04-22)

Despite that feeling of magic, an LLM is, in reality, a giant exercise in statistics.

Although it is possible to write down the rules for how they work, LLMs' outputs are not entirely predictable; it turns out that these extremely big abacuses can do things which smaller ones cannot, in ways which surprise even the people who make them.

The abilities that emerge are not magic—they are all represented in some form within the LLMs' training data (or the prompts they are given) but they do not become apparent until the LLMs cross a certain, very large, threshold in their size. At one size, an LLM does not know how to write gender-inclusive sentences in German any better than if it was doing so at random. Make the model just a little bigger, however, and all of a sudden a new ability pops out.

The recent success of LLMs in generating convincing text, as well as their startling emergent abilities, is due to the coalescence of three things: vast quantities of data, algorithms capable of learning from them and the computational power to do so (see chart).

Before it sees any training data, the weights in GPT-3's neural network are mostly random. As a result, any text it generates will be gibberish. Pushing its output towards something which makes sense, and eventually something that is fluent, requires training. GPT-3 was trained on several sources of data, but the bulk of it comes from snapshots of the entire internet between 2016 and 2019 taken from a database called Common Crawl. There's a lot of junk text on the internet, so the initial 45 terabytes were filtered using a different machine-learning model to select just the high-quality text: 570 gigabytes of it, a dataset that could fit on a modern laptop.

To train, the LLM quizzes itself on the text it is given. It takes a chunk, covers up some words at the end, and tries to guess what might go there. Then the LLM uncovers the answer and compares it to its guess. Because the answers are in the data itself, these models can be trained in a “self-supervised” manner on massive datasets without requiring human labellers.

How bad a guess is is turned into a number called the loss. After a few guesses, the loss is sent back into the neural network and used to nudge the weights in a direction that will produce better answers.

ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.' It's theft.(2023-05-15)

But in fact, for the time being anyway, these programs are not sentient but just a very complex form of the kind of predictive text bot you find using Gmail or Google docs.

But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.

In a way, ChatGPT and its ilk are the highest form of separating laborers from the fruit of their labor. We get an answer or piece of art from a predictive text bot and the original articles and ideas from which they were generated are so far removed that even those creators themselves don't realize they have been stolen from.

Rather than pointing to some future utopia (or robots vs. humans dystopia), what we face in dealing with programs like ChatGPT is the further relentless corrosiveness of late-stage capitalism, in which authorship is of no value. All that matters is content.

A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?(2020-09-08)

We asked GPT-3, OpenAI's powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing. And God knows that humans have enough blood and gore to satisfy my, and many more's, curiosity.

Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? (2022-12-09):

After a couple months of digging around, it became clear to me that I wasn't going to find much backing for my plan. One of the computer-science students, as I recall, accused me of trying to strip everything good, original, and beautiful from the creative process. Bots, he argued, could imitate basic writing and would improve at that task, but A.I. could never tell you the way Karenin smiled, nor would it ever fixate on all the place names that filled Proust's childhood. I understood why he felt that way, and agreed to a certain extent. But I didn't see why a bot couldn't just fill in all the parts where someone walks from point A to point B.

The concepts behind GPT-3 have been around for more than half a century now. They derive from language models that assign probabilities to sequences of words.

“If you scale a language model to the Internet, you can regurgitate really interesting patterns,” Ben Recht, a friend of mine who is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of the responses to things on the Internet are fairly predictable. So this is just showing that.”

The mind-bending part was trying to recognize and parse patterns in the bot's responses. Was the line “people come and people go” really pulled from T. S. Eliot, or is it just a random series of words that triggers the correlation in my head? My response to the bot, then, isn't really a reflection of my relationship with technology, but rather my sense of my own knowledge. This prompts a different question: why is my relationship with any other bit of text any different? To put it a bit more pointedly, why does it matter whether a human or a bot typed out the wall of text? All this hack postmodernism reaffirmed my literary hopes from twenty years ago. If I had succeeded in creating a bot that could have handled structure and plot—two things I struggled with mightily at the time—would I have been able to write a better novel? Would I have been able to write two novels in the time it took to write one? And would the work itself have been diminished in any way for the reader?

After several hours chatting with GPT-3, I started to feel an acute annoyance toward it. Its voice, which I suppose is pleasant enough, reminded me of a Slack conversation with a passive-aggressive co-worker who just tells you what you want to hear, but mostly just wants you to leave them alone.

This brings up a much more theoretical question: if GPT-3 requires editing from human beings to make it not go off on bigoted rants, what is it really for? I find it somewhat dispiriting that the most ballyhooed and compelling iteration of this technology is just doing some version of what I do for my work: scanning through large amounts of information and processing it into sentences that flatter the sensibilities and vanities of establishment liberals.

Would it remember to put the diaeresis over the second “o” in “coördinate” and spell “focussed” with two “S”s? Sure. But what would be the point of just having another me in the world? The world that GPT-3 portends, instead, is one where some bureaucratic functions have been replaced by A.I., but where the people who would normally do that work most likely still have to manage the bots. Writers like me will have a digital shadow that can do everything we do, which would be a bit unnerving, but wouldn't exactly put me or my employer out on the street. Perhaps a truly unchained GPT-3 would provide more exciting iterations, but it might also just write racist tweets that turn off investors and potential buyers of whatever products OpenAI wants to sell.

I asked Recht, who has spent his entire career working in machine learning and computer science but who also plays in a band, whether he was interested in a world of GPT-3-generated art, literature, and music. “These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet,” he said. “People put their ass out there and this thing scours them in such a way that it returns the generic average. If I'm going to return the generic average of a murder mystery, it's gonna be boring. How is it different than what people do already, where they do their analytics and produce some horrible Netflix series?” He continued, “The weird monoculture we're in just loves to produce these, like, generic middlebrow things. I'm not sure if those things would be worse if GPT did it. I think it would be the same?”

The Next Word: Where will predictive text take us?(2019-10-14):

Had my computer become my co-writer? That's one small step forward for artificial intelligence, but was it also one step backward for my own?

Sometimes the machine seemed to have a better idea than I did.

And yet until now I'd always finished my thought by typing the sentence to a full stop, as though I were defending humanity's exclusive right to writing, an ability unique to our species. I will gladly let Google predict the fastest route from Brooklyn to Boston, but if I allowed its algorithms to navigate to the end of my sentences how long would it be before the machine started thinking for me? I had remained on the near shore of a digital Rubicon, represented by the Tab key. On the far shore, I imagined, was a strange new land where machines do the writing, and people communicate in emojis, the modern version of the pictographs and hieroglyphs from which our writing system emerged, five thousand years ago. True, I had sampled Smart Reply, a sister technology of Smart Compose that offers a menu of three automated responses to a sender's e-mail, as suggested by its contents. “Got it!” I clicked, replying to detailed comments from my editor on an article I thought was finished. (I didn't really get it, but that choice wasn't on the menu.) I felt a little guilty right afterward, as though I'd replied with a form letter, or, worse, a fake personal note. A few days later, in response to a long e-mail from me, I received a “Got it!” from the editor. Really?

Finally, I crossed my Rubicon. The sentence itself was a pedestrian affair. Typing an e-mail to my son, I began “I am p—” and was about to write “pleased” when predictive text suggested “proud of you.” I am proud of you. Wow, I don't say that enough. And clearly Smart Compose thinks that's what most fathers in my state say to their sons in e-mails. I hit Tab. No biggie. And yet, sitting there at the keyboard, I could feel the uncanny valley prickling my neck. It wasn't that Smart Compose had guessed correctly where my thoughts were headed—in fact, it hadn't. The creepy thing was that the machine was more thoughtful than I was.

It was startling to hear a computer scientist on the leading edge of A.I. research compare his work to a medieval practice performed by men who were as much magicians as scientists. Didn't alchemy end with the Enlightenment?

Many favor an evolutionary, biological basis for our verbal skills over the view that we are tabulae rasae, but all agree that we learn language largely from listening. Writing is certainly a learned skill, not an instinct—if anything, as years of professional experience have taught me, the instinct is to scan Twitter, vacuum, complete the Times crossword, or do practically anything else to avoid having to write. Unlike writing, speech doesn't require multiple drafts before it “works.” Uncertainty, anxiety, dread, and mental fatigue all attend writing; talking, on the other hand, is easy, often pleasant, and feels mostly unconscious.

Socrates, who famously disapproved of literary production for its deleterious (thank you, spell-checker) effect on memory, called writing “visible speech”—we know that because his student Plato wrote it down after the master's death. A more contemporary definition, developed by the linguist Linda Flower and the psychologist John Hayes, is “cognitive rhetoric”—thinking in words.

The previous, “stage model” theory had posited that there were three distinct stages involved in writing—planning, composing, and revising—and that a writer moved through each in order.

They concluded that, far from being a stately progression through distinct stages, writing is a much messier situation, in which all three stages interact with one another simultaneously, loosely overseen by a mental entity that Flower and Hayes called “the monitor.” Insights derived from the work of composing continually undermine assumptions made in the planning part, requiring more research; the monitor is a kind of triage doctor in an emergency room.

Historically, scientists have believed that there are two parts of the brain involved in language processing: one decodes the inputs, and the other generates the outputs. According to this classic model, words are formed in Broca's area, named for the French physician Pierre Paul Broca, who discovered the region's language function, in the mid-nineteenth century; in most people, it's situated toward the front of the left hemisphere of the brain. Language is understood in Wernicke's area, named for the German neurologist Carl Wernicke, who published his research later in the nineteenth century.

Connecting Broca's area with Wernicke's is a neural network: a thick, curving bundle of billions of nerve fibres, the arcuate fasciculus, which integrates the production and the comprehension of language.

He found that professional writers relied on a region of the brain that did not light up as much in the scanner when amateurs wrote—the left caudate nucleus, a tadpole-shaped structure (cauda means “tail” in Latin) in the midbrain that is associated with expertise in musicians and professional athletes. In amateur writers, neurons fired in the lateral occipital areas, which are associated with visual processing. Writing well, one could conclude, is, like playing the piano or dribbling a basketball, mostly a matter of doing it. Practice is the only path to mastery.

There are two approaches to making a machine intelligent. Experts can teach the machine what they know, by imparting knowledge about a particular field and giving it rules to perform a set of functions; this method is sometimes termed knowledge-based. Or engineers can design a machine that has the capacity to learn for itself, so that when it is trained with the right data it can figure out its own rules for how to accomplish a task. That process is at work in machine learning. Humans integrate both types of intelligence so seamlessly that we hardly distinguish between them. You don't need to think about how to ride a bicycle, for example, once you've mastered balancing and steering; however, you do need to think about how to avoid a pedestrian in the bike lane. But a machine that can learn through both methods would require nearly opposite kinds of systems: one that can operate deductively, by following hard-coded procedures; and one that can work inductively, by recognizing patterns in the data and computing the statistical probabilities of when they occur. Today's A.I. systems are good at one or the other, but it's hard for them to put the two kinds of learning together the way brains do.

The basic idea—to design an artificial neural network that, in a crude, mechanistic way, resembled the one in our skulls—had been around for several decades, but until the early twenty-tens there were neither large enough data sets available with which to do the training nor the research money to pay for it.

Grammarly is also excellent at catching what linguists call “unknown tokens”—the glitches that sometimes occur in the writer's neural net between the thought and the expression of it, whereby the writer will mangle a word that, on rereading, his brain corrects, even though the unknown token renders the passage incomprehensible to everyone else.

Writing is a negotiation between the rules of grammar and what the writer wants to say. Beginning writers need rules to make themselves understood, but a practiced writer gives color, personality, and emotion to writing by bending the rules.

Something similar occurs in writing. Grammar and syntax provide you with the rules of the road, but writing requires a continuous dialogue between the words on the page and the prelinguistic notion in the mind that prompted them. Through a series of course corrections, otherwise known as revisions, you try to make language hew to your intention. You are learning from yourself.

The machine is modelling the kind of learning that a driver engages when executing a turn, and that my writer brain performs in finding the right words: correcting course through a feedback loop. “Cybernetics,” which was the term for the process of machine learning coined by a pioneer in the field, Norbert Wiener, in the nineteen-forties, is derived from the Greek word for “helmsmanship.” By attempting a task billions of times, the system makes predictions that can become so accurate it does as well as humans at the same task, and sometimes outperforms them, even though the machine is still only guessing.

To understand how GPT-2 writes, imagine that you've never learned any spelling or grammar rules, and that no one taught you what words mean. All you know is what you've read in eight million articles that you discovered via Reddit, on an almost infinite variety of topics (although subjects such as Miley Cyrus and the Mueller report are more familiar to you than, say, the Treaty of Versailles). You have Rain Man-like skills for remembering each and every combination of words you've read. Because of your predictive-text neural net, if you are given a sentence and asked to write another like it, you can do the task flawlessly without understanding anything about the rules of language. The only skill you need is being able to accurately predict the next word.

What made the full version of GPT-2 particularly dangerous was the way it could be “fine-tuned.” Fine-tuning involves a second round of training on top of the general language skills the machine has already learned from the Reddit data set. Feed the machine Amazon or Yelp comments, for example, and GPT-2 could spit out phony customer reviews that would skew the market much more effectively than the relatively primitive bots that generate fake reviews now, and do so much more cheaply than human scamsters. Russian troll farms could use an automated writer like GPT-2 to post, for example, divisive disinformation about Brexit, on an industrial scale, rather than relying on college students in a St. Petersburg office block who can't write English nearly as well as the machine. Pump-and-dump stock schemers could create an A.I. stock-picker that writes false analyst reports, thus triggering automated quants to sell and causing flash crashes in the market. A “deepfake” version of the American jihadi Anwar al-Awlaki could go on producing new inflammatory tracts from beyond the grave. Fake news would drown out real news. Yes, but could GPT-2 write a New Yorker article? That was my solipsistic response on hearing of the artificial author's doomsday potential. What if OpenAI fine-tuned GPT-2 on The New Yorker's digital archive (please, don't call it a “data set”)—millions of polished and fact-checked words, many written by masters of the literary art. Could the machine learn to write well enough for The New Yorker? Could it write this article for me? The fate of civilization may not hang on the answer to that question, but mine might.

Oddly, a belt does come up later in Ross's article, when she and Hemingway go shopping. So do eyeglasses, and cigarettes, and Italy. GPT-2 hadn't “read” the article—it wasn't included in the training data—yet it had somehow alighted on evocative details. Its deep learning obviously did not include the ability to distinguish nonfiction from fiction, though. Convincingly faking quotes was one of its singular talents. Other things often sounded right, though GPT-2 suffered frequent world-modelling failures—gaps in the kind of commonsense knowledge that tells you overcoats aren't shaped like the body of a ship. It was as though the writer had fallen asleep and was dreaming. Amodei explained that there was no way of knowing why the A.I. came up with specific names and descriptions in its writing; it was drawing from a content pool that seemed to be a mixture of New Yorker-ese and the machine's Reddit-based training. The mathematical calculations that resulted in the algorithmic settings that yielded GPT-2's words are far too complex for our brains to understand. In trying to build a thinking machine, scientists have so far succeeded only in reiterating the mystery of how our own brains think.

Conspiracy theories, after all, are a form of pattern recognition, too; the A.I. doesn't care if they're true or not.

Each time I clicked the refresh button, the prose that the machine generated became more random; after three or four tries, the writing had drifted far from the original prompt. I found that by adjusting the slider to limit the amount of text GPT-2 generated, and then generating again so that it used the language it had just produced, the writing stayed on topic a bit longer, but it, too, soon devolved into gibberish, in a way that reminded me of hal, the superintelligent computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” when the astronauts begin to disconnect its mainframe-size artificial brain. An hour or so later, after we had tried opening paragraphs of John Hersey's “Hiroshima” and Truman Capote's “In Cold Blood,” my initial excitement had curdled into queasiness. It hurt to see the rules of grammar and usage, which I have lived my writing life by, mastered by an idiot savant that used math for words. It was sickening to see how the slithering machine intelligence, with its ability to take on the color of the prompt's prose, slipped into some of my favorite paragraphs, impersonating their voices but without their souls.

By the time I got home, the A.I. had me spooked. I knew right away there was no way the machine could help me write this article, but I suspected that there were a million ways it could screw me up.

GPT-2 was like a three-year-old prodigiously gifted with the illusion, at least, of college-level writing ability. But even a child prodigy would have a goal in writing; the machine's only goal is to predict the next word. It can't sustain a thought, because it can't think causally. Deep learning works brilliantly at capturing all the edgy patterns in our syntactic gymnastics, but because it lacks a pre-coded base of procedural knowledge it can't use its language skills to reason or to conceptualize. An intelligent machine needs both kinds of thinking.

And, like me writing “I am proud of you” to my son, some of the A.I.'s next words might seem superior to words you might have thought of yourself. But what else might you have thought to say that is not computable? That will all be lost.

What if some much later iteration of GPT-2, far more powerful than this model, could be hybridized with a procedural system, so that it would be able to write causally and distinguish truth from fiction and at the same time draw from its well of deep learning? One can imagine a kind of Joycean superauthor, capable of any style, turning out spine-tingling suspense novels, massively researched biographies, and nuanced analyses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Humans would stop writing, or at least publishing, because all the readers would be captivated by the machines. What then? GPT-2, prompted with that paragraph, predicted the next sentence: “In a way, the humans would be making progress.”

Tags: Other Voices · Selective Memories · AI · ChatGPT

A Bicycle for the Mind, Redux

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 14:25:37 +0800

an interview with Alan Kay, by Judy Schuster:

Q: What's the matter with predefined functions?

Kay: Put a prosthetic on a healthy limb and it withers. Using the logic of current day education, we could say that since students are going to be drivers as adults, at age two we should put them in a little motorized vehicle and they will just stay there and learn how to be much better drivers. Now, we would think that was pretty horrible.

But what if we gave the same person a bike? We're not going to feel so badly [because] the bike allows that person to go flat out with his body and it amplifies that. [The bike is] one of the great force amplifiers of all time because it doesn't detract from us—it takes everything we've got and amplifies it.

Most computers today are sold like cars, where as many things as possible are done for you. You don't have to understand how it works and, in fact, you don't have to understand how to think because the most popular stuff is prepackaged solutions for this and that. When you put a person into a car, their muscles wither. You put a person into an information car, and their thinking ability withers.

Tags: Other Voices · Technology · Alan Kay

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:42:17 +0800

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer:

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.

OK, how do you go about getting at that truth? You want to tell the truth. You want to be a writer. So what do you do?

You write.

Honestly, why do people ask that question? Does anybody ever come up to a musician and say, Tell me, tell me—how should I become a tuba player? No! It's too obvious. If you want to be a tuba player you get a tuba, and some tuba music. And you ask the neighbors to move away or put cotton in their ears. And probably you get a tuba teacher, because there are quite a lot of objective rules and techniques both to written music and to tuba performance. And then you sit down and you play the tuba, every day, every week, every month, year after year, until you are good at playing the tuba; until you can—if you desire—play the truth on the tuba.

Tags: Other Voices · Adam Curits · Ursula K Le Guin

Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 13:11:25 +0800

Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression:

What happened from the early 1970s on was a shift, which said self-expression is the new politics. Self-expression is the new way of challenging the bad things in the world. But it can't, because the whole world is actually based upon self-expression.

If you want to make the world a better place, you have to start with where power has gone. It's very difficult to see. We live in a world where we see ourselves as independent individuals. If you're an independent individual, you don't really think in terms of power. You think only in terms of your own influence on the world.

What you don't see is what people in the past were more able to see. When you are in groups, you can be very powerful. You can change things. You have confidence when things go wrong that you don't when you're on your own. That's why the whole concept of power has dwindled. We're encouraged just to talk about ourselves and our feelings towards others. We're not encouraged to see ourselves as part of anything.

Computers can see us as large groups, but they're glum and only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers give great insight into the power of common identity between groups. No one's using that.

There are different definitions of freedom. The contemporary idea of freedom is very much an individualist one. I, as an individual, want to be free to do what I want to do.

There is another definition of freedom which simply says, “In whose service is perfect freedom.” By giving yourself up to the Lord, you free yourself of the narrow cage of your own desires and your own selfishness. You become bigger. You become a bigger person and part of something.

I was reading a sociologist called Max Weber the other day. Back in the 1920s, he was predicting that we would all be taken over in a bureaucratic age. It could be left wing or right wing, but we would enter into what he called an iron cage of rationality. It would be a wonderful world where everything was managed, everything was rationally done. But what you would lose was enchantment.

Tags: Other Voices · Adam Curits

All Hail the Cloud

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 12:49:33 +0800

All Hail the Cloud:

For a long time I believed unquestioningly the standard critique of our times. It's the phones. It's the algorithm. It's our base narcissism. That our obsession with recording every fleeting moment of our lives betrayed a deeper malaise. We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame our lives through lenses, filters, and screens, trading the chaotic beauty of reality for a sanitised, editable version. Our photographs are not memories; they are advertisements, billboards for a life we are too preoccupied to live.

We spend every waking moment shovelling packets of data, an endless stream of zeros and ones, up into the sky. Our messages to friends and family? To the CLOUD. Our work emails? To the CLOUD. Our GPS data, willingly given and tracking our every movement? To the CLOUD. Our money — and I mean real, fiat money, not the cryptobro's wet dream? It's in the CLOUD. Our photos and TV shows and biometric data and news and banking and memories and the curated exhibitions of our boring lives — all are offered up to the CLOUD. It is He, *Dyēus Himself. He has returned.

Tags: Other Voices · M. E. Rothwell · Social Network

窗外

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:31:57 +0800

他站在桌前，望向窗外。夕阳还剩下一缕金光，覆盖在大地上。白云飘过楼下的街道，微风掠过远方的树林。他调整了下自己的心情，犹豫了片刻，然后转回身，坐了下来。狭小的房间昏暗凌乱，逼仄不堪。他踢开脚边堆积的纸张，看着地上散落的书籍和文档文件，然后又一次把视线移到茶几旁边那团隆起的阴影上，光线沿着它的轮廓描出一道亮边。他紧紧握了一下拳头，像是下定了决心。然后他再次起身，踩着椅子，踏在了桌子上。

楼下的小道，挽留着最后一点阳光。两位妇女走过，互相分享着今天听来的八卦。她们都背着手，慢悠悠地走着，路过电线杆旁堆放着的两个黑色垃圾袋，其中一位嘀咕着什么，另一位咯咯笑着什么，最后两人都摇了摇头。路的尽头，一个上了年纪的男人靠在巷子口，晒着太阳。他一只手牵着狗，一只手抽着烟。他仰头望着空中的烟雾，看着它旋绕上升，融进空气里，渐渐散去。然后他又缓缓吐出一口，低头看着他的黄毛小狗，正拨玩着一个沾满灰尘的黑色盒子，胶带封口里渗染出红色。小狗的尾巴竖起，吠叫声传到远处。远处的田野上，一群孩子正在嬉戏玩耍，他们尽情地奔跑，追逐着一个黑色胶带缠绕而成的皮球。巨大的影子跟着他们一起，追上那个点缀着红色污渍的东西，踢上一脚，然后再跟跑过去。附近的田地里，一个农夫背朝落日，弯腰收割，汗水渗入土壤，成长了庄稼。他清走耕地上不知谁埋在那儿，覆盖着泥土的黑色纸箱子，边角破旧发红，他嘴里一边嘟哝着，低声抱怨不已。一只鸡走过犁田，寻找米粒，咕咕地叫。东边的那条小溪，水流清澈平缓，一群摇着尾巴的鱼纷纷游过，它们凑到漂浮在水面的一个被黑色胶布缠绕的泡沫盒子，三三两两地嗅一嗅从盒子里流出的暗红色液体，然后又马上游开，游向远方的山脉，没有人知道山的那边是什么。溪边，穿着朴素的村妇蹲在水里洗着今天的衣裳，粗糙的双手在泡沫中用力地搓洗，手指突出的骨节在翻腾的溪水里若隐若现。她转过头，望向旁边正在杀鱼的丈夫，他用水洗刀，同时困惑地看着河流中被冲走的那个黑色的塑料袋子，流向远方。远方，河流的尽头，一对老夫妻，手牵着手，抱着一个孩子，走进树林。孩子双手紧紧抱着老人的脖子，小头舒服地歪靠在肩膀上，快睡着了一样。他眨巴着的眼睛突然亮了一下，望着前边一个树根旁被草丛遮挡的黑色箱子。

突然来了精神，孩子在老人的臂弯里直起背，抬起头来。他柔软的头发跟着野草随风摆动，眼睛闪闪发光。他望向老人背后的草地，温暖的溪流横在前方。孩子看见渔民腰里系着刀，手里拎着鱼，走回到他妻子身边，和她一起抬起洗好的衣服。他看见在小溪的入口处，农夫立在田中，收起锄头，手肘擦去脸上的汗水，向落下了一半的夕阳投去最后一憋，然后带上草帽，朝着田野走去。空旷的田野里，已无人影，只看见风在野草里移动，在草垛里休息。尽头的巷子口，弓着背的男人牵着他的狗，溜达着走进巷道里，拉长的影子跟在后面。拐弯处的小道上，寂静无声，黑夜此时徘徊在初亮的路灯下，玩着白日不知道的游戏。孩子的眼睛再睁大了些，望着远处的楼房。一盏孤灯在黑影似的灰墙上闪着。昏黄的光线看起来像谁发来的信号，忽明忽暗。孩子睁大双眼，盯着那个光点，过了好一会儿，他看清楚了一些，他看见破旧的灰黄墙壁，被那房间的灯光渲染的窗框轮廓，以及窗户里悬在那儿的，左右晃动着的两条腿。

Tag: Short Stories

線下是新的線上

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 15:47:30 +0800

李如一:

曾經，上網就是爲了遇見非我族類。網民的世界是很大的。現在要回到線下找異類了。

Tags: Other Voices · 李如一 · 一天世界

Thursday

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:45:53 +0800

From today on, I'm a casual wanderer of anti-Zionism.

今天开始，我喜欢偶尔跑到反犹太复国主义的阵营里散散步。

Tags: Selective Memories · Palestine

Friday

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 14:24:52 +0800

雨后的下午，某个十字路口，听到一个出租车司机在大声地叫骂。路过时，不清楚缘由。只是看见他朝着前方某个不确定的目标，似乎在向一个无法言说或者也说不清楚的目标宣泄他的不满与愤恨。

夜晚的雨里，刚下车的女孩跑过另一个十字路口，和等待在街角的朋友热情拥抱，像 Friends 里刚出场的 Rachel Green 一样兴奋的大声尖叫。

十字路口上还存着好些待租的商铺，大房东和小三们的手机号贴在窗口。

Tags: Selective Memories · Rain

Monday

Tue, 16 May 2023 16:18:12 +0800

Washington Post (华盛顿邮报) 用3D 视觉动画的方式展示了半自动步枪 AR-15 对人类身体所造成的巨大伤害。相比普通手枪，AR-15 是美国大规模枪击案的案犯者们更喜欢用的武器。

向下滑动页面，虚拟的子弹瞄准虚拟的肉身。板机扣动，火药点燃，冲出枪管，打进胸膛，刺通肺脏，穿透后背。单色的渐变背景，灰色的人体模型。他们的姿势静止不动，没有眼球的眼眶，没有表情的脸庞。像是无声的反抗，无言的控诉。

当为新的技术或那些会造成伤害的东西辩护时，人们总是会说，"我们不做，别人也会做"、"存在即合理"等。我找不到恰当的理由去反驳，但可以喊出很多例子来批判。

文章最后一段话：

You have been on this page for 9 minutes and 42 seconds.

It took 11 minutes for the shooter to kill 60 people and injure 869 others at a Las Vegas concert.

Tags: Selective Memories · Washington Post · America · Mass Shooting

无名街道

Thu, 11 May 2023 21:08:09 +0800

当你下了车，直路往前走
过了红绿灯，到下一个路口，
然后向左转，进到巷子里
穿过老树林，你就来到了无名街道

道上不见人烟，弄里满是鞋印
空中雷声隐现，四下屋房动静
门多敞开着，窗都没拴上
看到那口井，你就知道是无名街道

沿街走下去，到广场直走
过两盏路灯，来到十字路口，
接着再向左，拐进密林中
走上木台阶，你就能了解无名街道

月光浮上夜面，狂风扰动树林
天上倾盆大雨，地上水洼满盈
铁窗嘎吱叫，门板哐当响
瞧见那些人，你就明白了无名街道

踏着破地毯，来到楼梯口
循声向上走，止步神龛台前，
继续向左转，直走到尽头
打开那扇门，你就进入了无名街道

尘埃落在各处，声响来自各方
床帘瑟瑟揭开，壁炉森森点亮
桌案纸页飞，阳台阴影晃
跳进那口井，你就离开了无名街道

Tag: Short Poem

Tuesday

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 15:06:17 +0800

读完了村上春树欧洲旅行三年的游记《远方的鼓声》。在阅读过程中我有着些许不耐，可能是打开的时机不对，疫情刚结束不久（严格来讲还没结束）读旅行相关的书籍也许不太合适。又或者是我习惯了他小说里的那种超现实叙事，对于用同样的文字风格来描绘日常生活还不太适应。

以一个外国旅人的身份，村上对普通日常的观察细致并且全面。他对希腊、罗马作为旅游城市的定位几乎不感兴趣，他笔下的都是他作为一个异乡人的视角，感受。在旅行期间他似乎对罗马颇为不满，但之后又尤为想念。

村上是在此期间完成了两部小说《挪威的森林》和《舞！舞！舞！》。前者让他成为一位真正的畅销作家，也是一本我读了几遍但每次都会忘记具体情节的小说，后者是我个人很喜欢的一部作品。在这本游记里，村上说他是在伦敦的 Abbey Road 写完《舞！舞！舞！》的。

紧接着《远方的鼓声》我又去读了《雨天炎天：希腊、土耳其边境纪行》，似乎也是他在旅欧期间进行的一次旅程。读这本随笔集更加让我昏昏欲睡，也许是对希腊相关宗教和土耳其相关政治的无知让我难以进入。但同时这本书前半部分希腊僧侣的虔诚与后半部分土耳其军人的严肃之间的对比，我觉得很有意思。我想象从每天虔诚祈祷、粗茶淡饭的宗教圣地走进遍地士兵、冲突紧张的土耳其边境，那应该是一次难忘的经历。

未来在某个不会弄错的时间，也许我会重读这两本书。

放上阅读标注：

《远方的鼓声》

远方的鼓声——写在前面

一天早上睁眼醒来，蓦然侧耳倾听，远处传来鼓声。鼓声从很远很远的地方、从很远很远的时间传来，微乎其微。听着听着，我无论无何都要踏上漫长的旅途。

我们不是赶来看应看的东西、看完就径自通过的游客，但又不是在那里住下来扎根的永久性居民。

斯派塞斯岛

斯派塞斯岛上小说家的一天

世间偶尔是有这种东西的。惟其动机纯正、外观气派，因而倒霉时格外显得惨不忍睹。

暴风雨来了

雨就好像说 “啊累了就下到这儿吧” 似的痛痛快快偃旗息鼓，遮蔽天空的乌云如细胞分裂一般哗然散开，北风一鼓作气将其吹跑，蓝天从云隙间一闪一闪探头探脑。

米科诺斯

他们的年龄都已相当不小了，但身体都很壮实，如今仍晒得黑黑的，常逮住我聊日本。他们随着海运业的萧条从船上下来，有的当公共汽车乘务员，有的当餐馆老板，有的开小杂货店。对于在船上度过的日日夜夜，他们简直像惋惜已逝青春一样谈得十分动情。听他们那么一说，我也觉得那是一个分外美好的时代，一个可以乘船四海为家的时代，一个只要愿意随时随地都可找到工作的时代。

从西西里到罗马

南欧跑步情况

在南欧跑步的第二个问题点，那就是狗。一来放养的狗多，二来狗也和人一样没有看惯跑步的人，我一跑就以为是什么怪物而随后追来。若是人，虽说有点麻烦，但总可以讲通，而狗则不可能。狗这东西通常不懂话语，也就是说道理讲不通。弄不好，性命都要出问题。

这样一来，往下只有两种选择：或放弃跑步，或同狗正面交锋。我当然选择后者。若是怕狗和文艺评论家，岂能写出小说——这么说有点言过其实，但岂能败在狗手下的心情确是有的。

而德国人跑步时不至于小什么便。虽说同是跑步，但各国却迥异其趣，看意大利人跑步，深深觉得这个国家的人打仗很难取胜。

去二战激战之地马耳他旅行时，从马耳他人口中也听到同样的话。马耳他在二战期间一再遭受意大利的轰炸，但马耳他人对意大利人可以说丝毫不怀有恶感，因为几乎没造成损害。“跟你说，意大利人么，除了吃、闲聊、对女人花言巧语，其他没有卖力气做的事。” 一个马耳他人告诉我，“轰炸马耳他的时候也不例外。飞得低怕挨高射炮，所以从很高很高的空中 ‘啪啦啪啦' 扔下炸弹就回去了。拿东西不可能打中，不是掉在海里就是落在荒郊野外，但对他们来说那就可以了。叫扔炸弹就扔了，扔了就算完事。因此，不管墨索里尼怎么狂喊乱叫，马耳他都纹丝不动。后来德国空军来了，这个厉害。急剧下降的轰炸机几乎贴到地面，炸弹全部击中，城市夷为平地。在这个意义上，意大利是个好国家。”

在德国，就连妓女都天天早上跑步，很有些像村上龙写的《纽约马拉松》。我实际在汉堡同妓女交谈过，她说她每天早上沿艾塞斯特湖跑步。因为我也跑这条路线，遂问跑多长时间。嗬，时间还真不算短。我说好厉害啊，她耸耸肩说 “身体是本钱对吧”。对对，妓女也好小说家也好，身体都是本钱。

“你一个人跑？” 我问。

“那当然。” 她说。

喂，意大利人，听见了没有？人家德国就连妓女都天天跑步的哟，且是一个人单跑！

这些家伙毕竟时间精力有余而钞票不足，每次我都在其前面通过，他们简直就像正闲得无聊时来了个好欺负的傻瓜蛋，哇啦哇啦大声起哄，别提有多吵闹、多烦人了。

“喂——日本人，再跑快点！”

“喂——日本人，别跑了，来个功夫拳，功夫！”

“一、二、三、四！”

如此异口同声狂喊乱叫。有的模仿我跟着跑，有的死皮赖脸拉出功夫拳架式，有的只是一个劲儿上蹿下跳，同过去《人猿泰山》电影里的调皮猴子无异。知道他们没有恶念，并不怎么生气，但还是让人烦得不行。

一如某种人去陌生地方必去大众酒吧，一如某种人去陌生地方必找女人睡觉，我去陌生地方则必跑步。只有通过 “跑之感觉” 才能领会的东西在这世上也是有的。

罗马

比拉•托雷克里

翌日我马上开始第二稿，把写在笔记本上、信纸上的原稿从头到尾重写一遍。四百字稿纸共九百页份量的原稿用圆珠笔全部重写下来，非我自吹，没有体力是无论如何也做不来的。第二稿脱手是 3 月 26 日。由于想赶在博洛尼亚之前完成，争分夺秒往前赶，以致最后右臂都麻木了，几乎动弹不了。幸好体质上我从不肩酸，肩自是问题不大，但胳膊受苦了。所以一有时间我就在地板上一下接一下做俯卧撑。写长篇小说是个消耗极大的体力劳动，其程度远在一般人想像之上，时下开始用文字处理机，变得轻松多了。

接着又马不停蹄地开始对第二稿进行细细修改。这也彻底完成，而定名为《挪威的森林》，已是去博洛尼亚前两天了。

凌晨 3 时 50 分的昏死

对于我，写长篇小说可以说是非常特殊的行为，在任何意义上都不可能称之为日常性行为。打个比方，就好像孤身一人深入深山密林一样。没带地图，没带指南针，甚至食物都没带。树木如墙壁密不透风，硕大的枝桠重重叠叠遮天蔽日，就连里边生息着怎样的动物我都浑然不觉。

因此，写长篇小说期间，我脑袋里的某个部位总是围绕着死思来想去。

写小说过程中，我总是心想我不愿意死、不愿意死、不愿意死，至少绝不愿意在小说平安写完之前死去。想到扔开没写完的小说一命呜呼，我就懊恼得几乎落泪。也许不会成为留在文学史上的杰作，但至少那是我自身。

我到底该向谁祈祷呢？若向神祈祷，自己迄今为止的人生实在太为所欲为了；而向命运祈祷，我又过于依赖自己了。也罢，无论向谁祈祷，只要一直祈祷，不久总会和谁顺利沟通的。

罗马是个吸纳了无数的死的城市，所有时代的所有形式的死尽皆充斥于此。从恺撒的死到剑客的死，从英雄的死到殉教者的死，罗马史连篇累牍尽是关于死的描述。元老院议员若是被宣布荣誉死亡，首先在自己家里大设宴席，同友人一起大吃大喝，之后慢慢切开血管，一边畅谈哲学一边悠然死去。无名贫民的尸体被投入台伯河中。卡里古拉将所有哲学家处于极刑，尼禄将基督教徒喂了狮子。

春天的希腊

帕特拉斯的复活节周末和对壁橱实施的大屠杀

希腊确实有许许多多国家的背包客。从人数多的排列起来，德国人（世界上最喜欢旅行的德国人）、加拿大人（世界上最闲的加拿大人）、澳大利亚人（闲得似乎仅次于加拿大人）、美国人（近来少多了）、英国人（脸色基本欠佳）、北欧三国、法国、荷兰、比利时，往下是日本人。没有——确认或统计过，但大致说来怕是如此。德国人一看脸就晓得，装备也最威武。加拿大人和澳大利亚人把国旗缝在背包上，一目了然。北欧人除却德国人的威武，透出几分耽于冥想的申请。法国人脸上总好像带着一点嘲讽意味，荷兰人和比利时人则似乎多少愿意与人亲近。在这些人包围中显得有些不舒服的（不过本人大概自得其乐吧）是英国人。当然这是一般印象，例外数不胜数。

不过，纵然把这种偶然性充分计算进去，我想意大利人不那么中意背包旅行是毋庸置疑的。不知道为什么，那种旅行形态似乎不为他们所青睐。一个人背着沉重的行囊一步一挪地徒步而行，有时只靠面包、奶酪和苹果过一个星期，有时在没有热水的旅馆里听着“咣当咣当”的门声入睡——北欧人比意大利人远为适合这样的旅行，我觉得。

北欧人，他们旅行的确为追求艰难、贫困和苦行。不是谎言。这确实是他们的追求，简直就像中世纪各国的行脚僧。他们似乎相信体验如此旅程对其人格形成是极为有效而有益的。他们几乎不花钱、不住旅馆，为寻求二百日元的便宜旅馆而不惜在街头转两个小时。他们的自豪在于经济效率，一如汽油费。用尽可能低廉的费用去尽可能远的地方。他们结束如此漫长的苦行僧般的旅行返回故国、走出大学、步入社会，而且——举例说——作为股票经纪人取得成功，结婚，子女也茁壮成长。车库里停放着奔驰、沃尔沃和两用面包车。

克里特岛的小村庄和小旅馆

没有文学的内在必然性，没有作为内在必然性的文学，没有以文学形式出现的内在必然性，没有诉诸内在必然性的文学，没有文学性内在性的必然性，没有内在性文学性的必然性，这些劳什子统统没有，只有驴和山羊。

车来了，我付罢帐，把一个星期前就想扔而没扔成的破烂不堪的耐克鞋（不知为何，每次扔时都有人给送来）包在纸袋里放在餐桌底下，钻进大巴。好了好了，总算扔了，不料高兴早了，酒吧老板特意把大巴叫住： "基里奥斯（你）、这个忘了！" 我的破烂不堪的耐克跑鞋！它就像谁都不肯忘记的往日小小过失一样紧紧缠住我不放。 "谢谢！" 说着，接过纸包。

1987 年，夏天和秋天

赫尔辛基

钢琴手是一个名叫 TAWASTSTFERUNA 的芬兰人和一个叫 HUI-YINGLIU 的中国女性，两人合奏。怎么说呢，这可是相当厉害的莫扎特，听得筋疲力尽。莫扎特就好像从前几个型号的半旧 "沃尔沃" 在手刹车的状态下向上爬坡，重得一塌糊涂，叫人双肩酸硬。音乐诚然有各种各样的诠释，当然不必所有人都演奏天真烂漫的莫扎特，可这个毕竟有点离谱了，我想这已超出了解释的范围。但既然听众报以热烈的掌声，那么在芬兰很可能这样的莫扎特才符合一般人的口味。

马洛内先生的房子

老婆预言 "住在这种地方准没好事"，在某种意义上真给她说中了。

住此期间，我写了、译了几本书，长篇小说《舞！舞！舞！》也得以完成。工作方面我想进展是顺利的，四十岁之前做的工作基本令人满意。但此外这个那个有许多无奈。

雅典马拉松和退票还算顺利

如果问和平跟马拉松有什么关系，我也答不上来，但若说我的个人感想，我觉得人在长跑时心情可以在很大程度上变得平和。跑过一定距离之后，渐渐懒得去想各种各样的事，觉得什么都无所谓，反正拼命跑就是。而和平那东西未尝不是在这一原则下形成的。

我长期旅居国外也没怎么感到孤独，惟独这个时候深切感觉到了：啊，我在这里是异乡人，孤身一人！我身边跑着许多国家的人。当然有希腊人，还有意大利人。世界上大概最有闲工夫的加拿大人自然不少了。此外还有德国人（这个地球上难道真有看不到德国人的地方）、身穿同样运动服的快乐的法国人、无比友好的北欧人、郁郁寡欢地默默奔跑的英国人。放眼看去，东方人仅我自己。

雨中的卡瓦拉

但是，由于具有连接亚洲和欧洲地利之便，历史上卡瓦拉就好像门口的擦鞋垫一样屡遭磨难，亚历山大大帝死后处于罗马帝国的统治下，继而被诺尔曼人一把火烧光，接下去被拜占庭帝国并入版图，成为土耳其与基督教军队激战的最前线，结果被土耳其征服，第一次世界大战后才获得独立——漫长的奋斗史。

卡瓦拉驶发的客轮

邻桌一个中年希腊人叫我看电视：“瞧呀，日本！” 一等舱休息厅的电视新闻节目推出东京兜町证券交易所的光景：神情僵冷的人们有的叫喊什么，有的竖起手指，有的挽起袖口对着电话大吼大叫。但我看不明白发生了什么。“money、money”，希腊人用只言片语的英语说，并做出点钱动作。看情形是股市暴跌了，但详情他的英语水平说明不了。（后来明白，那就是那个 “黑色星期一”。每当我想起当时的光景，我就思索司各特·菲茨杰拉德。司各特·菲茨杰拉德是在突尼斯旅行时知道 1929 年股市暴跌的。“简直就像远方的雷鸣”，他描写道。当然，“黑色星期一” 作为规模无法同 1929 年的暴跌相比，但我仍记得当时某种不安稳的气氛。大概因为那时正思考着战争，从而使得股市暴跌和电视荧幕上人们痉挛的面孔在我眼里显得格外凶多吉少吧？

罗马的冬天

电视、意式疙瘩汤、普雷特

我们现在租的房子大体配有家具，但家具中不包括电视。住在东京的时候一不订报纸，二不看电视，倒也没什么不便，但在罗马不能一如既往。在信息泛滥的日本，有意切断信息可谓恰到好处（即使切断，信息也会渗来），而在罗马如法炮制可就任何信息都进不来了。况且在这里我是彻头彻尾的外国人，信息进不来，感觉上好像自己被剥个精光。

隆冬时节

从新年即将来临的 12 月 17 日开始写长篇小说《舞！舞！舞！》。写长篇小说时模式大体相同——"想写啊" 那样朦朦胧胧的心情在自己体内一点点高涨，某一天猛一咬牙："好，今天开写！" 就我来说，较之具体结构和情节，更注重把握这个时间点。

和《挪威的森林》不同，《舞！舞！舞！》动笔之前就已确定书名。这个书名有人推测取自 "沙滩男孩"的歌曲，其实（虽然怎样都无所谓）来自一支叫德尔兹（The Dells）的黑人乐队的老歌。从日本动身前，归拢家里的老唱片自制老歌磁带，其中正巧有这首歌曲。很像是老风格的 "节奏布鲁斯"（rhythm-and-blues），悠然、粗旷，有一种不可思议的黑人味儿。在罗马每天半听不听地听它的时间里，悠然来了灵感，就以它为书名写了起来。

这本小说从头到尾我都觉得写得十分顺畅。《挪威的森林》是作为我也从未写过的那一类型的作品，边写边想别人将怎样看待这部小说呢？这个那个想个没完。而关于《舞！舞！舞！》根本没想那么多，想写什么就写什么，随心所欲，怡然自得。从根到梢是自家风格，出场人物也和《且听风吟》、《寻羊冒险记》一脉相承，就好像回到久违的自家院落，非常开心，或者莫如说写这一行为本身就无比快乐，这在我也是极少有的事。

由于太冷了，我穿上大衣，对着桌子 "啪嗒啪嗒" 连续敲击电子打字机的键盘，和在西西里写《挪威的森林》时正相反。那时暖和得不能在暖和，坐在桌前昏头昏脑，这次则冷得差点把键盘敲坏。

《舞！舞！舞！》中出现夏威夷场面也是因为这个。我边写小说边想去夏威夷想的不行，所以拼命想象夏威夷写了下来。大概是这个样子、大约是这个感觉——一边回想一边写。如此写夏威夷场面的时间里，似乎多少暖和起来，心情就像歪在热带太阳底下喝凤梨园似的。文章也有这种具体效用！尽管转瞬即逝。

这年冬天发生的唯一好事，就是小说完成了。因此，每当我想起《舞！舞！舞！》这部小说，就想起罗马马洛内先生那座寒冷的房子。是的是的，我是穿着大衣在那座房子里写小说的。并想起叫琴的猫、叫玛多的狗、米尔维奥桥的市场和波利尼音乐会。

伦敦

我在这个房间里写完了《舞！舞！舞！》这部长篇小说。一边用收发机听音乐、眼望外面的阿比大街，一边日复一日 "啪嗒啪嗒" 敲击电子打字机键盘。

1988，空白年

回头看去，这一年对我们夫妇似乎算不上美妙。回到日本，《挪威的森林》成了畅销书。也是因为一直身在国外不大了解情况，过了许久回国一看，原来自己已成为名人，为之瞠目结舌。看报纸上的畅销书排行榜，《挪威的森林》的销量在任何书店都排名第一。讲谈社的办公室大楼堂而皇之地垂下红绿两色幕布。我有事必须不时沿江户川桥至护国寺的大街通过，看了实在不好意思，总是佯装不见。秋天出版的《舞！舞！舞！》也顺利地成了畅销书。可是——这么说自知冒昧和傲慢——我无论如何未能从某种苦闷中解脱出来。苦闷什么说不清楚，反正就苦闷得不行，觉得去哪里都找不到自己的位置，觉得自己一下子失去了许多许多。

说起来甚是匪夷所思，小说卖出十万册时，我感到自己似乎为许多人喜爱、喜欢和支持；而当《挪威的森林》买到一百几十万册时，我因此觉得自己变得异常孤独，并且为许多人憎恨和讨厌。什么原因呢？表面上看好像一切都顺顺利利，但实际上对于我是精神上最艰难的阶段。发生了几桩讨厌的事、无聊的事，使得自己的心像掉进了冰窖。

1989 年，复原年

康纳利先生的公寓

人世间就是这么回事，即使出现状况，如果明白另一端有人，大多事情都可以忍受，反过来，即使置身于不太差的状况，看不见人影也会心焦意躁、提心吊胆。

前不久天皇没了。我终于年届四十。但不用说，到了四十也并不意味着有什么东西陡然发生变化，既不至于以这一天为界一下子老态龙钟，又不会马上聪明过人，无非产生一点点 "奇怪呀" 这样的感觉而已。

意大利的几幅面孔

托斯卡纳

从后院可以放眼暮色中的托斯卡纳平原，景色真是漂亮。青山隐隐，湖广点点，云雾绵绵，远方的山顶现出中世纪古堡，庄稼地和葡萄园无边无际横陈开去。

《雨天炎天：希腊、土耳其边境纪行》

希腊篇

卡拉卡尔修道院

遗憾的是，关于佛教我不具有多少专业知识。我思忖，较之佛教徒，恐怕还是回答 “高科技教徒” 或 “高度发展资本主义教徒” 之类好些。若是这个，倒可以比佛教徒多少说得详细些，例如索尼随身听是如何诞生和发展的等等。

莫名其妙。马什进一步说明：“就是说，我们是在不同于你们的实践中生活的。这是从很久很久以前持续下来的时间，被称为 ‘拜占庭时间'。依据 ‘拜占庭时间'，一天不是从午夜十二时而是从日落开始的。因此，你们的午夜相当于我们的上午四时。"

我想这和我的工作时间差不多。我一般也在凌晨三四点开始工作。然后做家务、运动。

虽说我对宗教没有什么虔诚之心，但还是能够觉出那声音里蕴含的某种心灵信息。唯独那声音的回响我想怕是无法录进磁带传达出来的，因为那是包含所有状况的声音、震颤所有状况的声音。阿索斯深沉的夜色。沉默。与我们不同的时间。漫天的星辰。

我这个对整个宗教不具有丰富的知识。但若允许发表我个人感想，我觉得希腊正教这种宗教有时候好像能让人感觉出超越教义的东方式惊骇意味，尤其在从楼梯一隅窥看夜半礼拜的情况下。其中的确存在着我等理性所无法处理的力学，仿佛欧洲同小亚细亚在历史的根本点上互相妥协的那种力度，比之形而上的世界观，似乎具有更为神秘而凡俗的肉体性。

普罗德罗姆小修道院之行

对宗教诚然不知其详，但其亲切我心领神会。爱消失了，也有亲切剩下——大概是博加特说的吧。

卡胡索卡里贝亚

反过来说，事情诸般不顺也才成其为旅行。惟其诸般不顺，我们才得以碰上种种有趣的东西、奇异的东西、令人哑然失惊的东西。正因为如此，我们才旅行。

土耳其篇

兵

无知、淳朴、贫穷、吃苦耐劳。想必无论上级往脑袋里塞什么都信以为真。那种场合到来的时候，也许会变得粗野和残忍，一如所有国家的所有军队的士兵。但此刻这么抱着北约步枪津津有味吸着万宝路的他们既不粗野也不残忍。还是孩子。

24 号国道线

处于好奇心我们去看了伊斯坦布尔的红灯区，那可真叫惨不忍睹。我的可怜的性欲茫然不知所措——若像詹姆斯•博德威那样假定 "如果性欲有嘴" ——好半天开不了口。

Tags: Selective Memories · Reading Notes · 村上春树

Saturday

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:47:42 +0800

花了大概一个星期的时间把这个网站重新设计整理了一遍。框架仍然使用 Hugo，换了一个简单的主题，不过它所有的代码我几乎都改了一遍，颜色，排版，字体，图片样式等，都逐步调整成了我目前希望的样子。

之前这个网站搭好之后，没有发布什么内容，因为好像也没什么非说不可的。那些赶着浪头的评论和意见和想法，人们都在说，等到浪尾了，人们也就都不说了。我又没有想着来记录分享生活之类的。

现在我仍然没觉得有什么一定要说的，所有那些万人争鸣的留言里，总有一条是我认同的。然而我也沉默了很久，想要发出一些我学到的声音。

Tags: Hugo · Selective Memories

乌拉诺斯

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 21:35:07 +0800

众神于暗绿色的丛林之上，叹息着
叹惋的情绪在雪山中扩散，找不到合适的出口
暴雨突如其来，世界在日落前隐退
完美的场景早已搭好，期待着那位理想的魔鬼

太阳在升起之前，已经不知去向
海洋在平静以前，大家都在歌唱
人们还不知道
旧的传说被传颂之前要被新的传说取代
皇冠要被打碎，权杖被踏在脚下

第一任主人，第一位被阉割的父亲
被绑在深深的地穴里，身上有铁链，脚上有铁球
他的头发已经发白，他的眼睛开始干涸
他开始忘记那些事情
甚至不记得他为什么困在这里

那是大的叛乱，那是大的革命
当族人围坐在篝火旁时，是会这么说的
人们看着火焰在空中翻腾，接着熄灭
然后新的再起
有的会低声诅咒，有的会高颂赞歌
当族人围坐在星空下时，是会这么说的
人们望着星光在夜里闪烁，接着熄灭
然后新的再起

第一位罪人，第一任僭越的儿子
被困在高高的王座上，身上有玉绸，脚上有牛角
他的双手还在滴血，他的眼睛也开始干涸
他已经忘记那些事情
甚至不记得那个觊觎者的姓名

新故事被撰写之前，老的必须完结
旧的时代结束之前，将有新的代替
人们已经知道
旧天堂在新殿建起之前会有一场大风
祭坛成为仪式，藤枝被赋予新的象征

群树于灰蓝色的广天之下，沉默着
躁动的浪花在河流里不断翻涌，寻找一个出口
南风吹响号角，世界在黎明前夕看清
戴上驱神面具，擦上斑斓彩纹，他成为一位新的父亲

Tag: Short Poem

一个平凡的下午里发生的一件平凡的事

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 21:21:40 +0800

Section 1

她现在走进了这家咖啡馆，在一张靠窗的位子上坐了下来。从她漫不经心的动作来看，她并非对临窗的座位特别中意。她坐下后，先是把包放在了对面的椅子上，又起身弯腰把包从椅子上拎起来放在自己旁边靠窗那一侧，那也许是一只仿制的 LV 手提包，黄色和褐色的小方块贴在整只包的表面，好像从上到下都打满了补丁。她打量着周围，现在还属于午餐时间，咖啡馆里人不是特别多。然后她朝窗外简单瞥了一眼，星期天的午后大道，阳光随处可见。街上的男人们和女人们，他们的步伐很快。他们从窗户的一边穿入，然后从另一边穿出。

她维持着一个懒散的姿势伏在桌子上看着手机，两只胳膊搁在桌面上，手掌叠在一起，支撑着滚圆的下巴，西瓜一样的脑袋歪向一边，无精打采的样子。她的背有规律地上下起伏，显示着她的呼吸节奏。咖啡馆里不时响起小声的交谈，像是某种预谋般的窃窃私语，服务台后面，咖啡机传来制作咖啡奶泡的滋滋声。现在趁着我们的女主角等待咖啡的时间，我们来对她做一番简单的观察。“普通”是一个合适的形容，这是很直接的一个印象。广阔的额头边上，那头没有光泽的头发贴着头皮朝后梳起，在后脑勺下方聚拢成一个结束了起来，从这里的角度看就好像她头顶上粘着一个毽子。剩下几缕短发从发际线落下，搭在额头上。她穿着一件土黄色的外套，看起来像裹在身上的一叠再生纸，拉链直拉到脖根处，里面漏出一件砖红色毛衫的边。下身那条洗到已经快变成白色的蓝色窄腿牛仔裤短到脚踝，能看到一截洋红色的薄绒袜，隐藏在一双深紫色平底鞋里。

我们把镜头拉近，给她一个半身的特写。正午的太阳耀眼明亮，她的一半暴露在光亮里，从窗外穿过的人们不时在她的身上投下阴影，忽明忽暗。她现在直起了身子，仍然勾着背，左手臂竖起来支着下巴，脑袋仍然朝左边歪着，一副没睡醒的模样。她以这个姿势看着桌上的手机，不清楚是某个娱乐节目或网络视频什么的。她的右手搁在旁边，偶尔伸手去摸一下旁边的包。

现在咖啡师切入画面，递上了咖啡。她把手机推到旁边，两只手捧起杯子，喝了一小口。她的嘴巴抿成一条缝，几滴咖啡落在嘴唇边缘，好像两块砖头之间漏出来的水泥。然后她把杯子放回到桌子上，低下头，挠了挠额头。她呆滞了一般地盯着桌子，好像是在想着什么事情。那张充满了气一般的脸，像死鱼皮一样地泛在鲜艳的阳光里，几乎没有睫毛的眼睛使得眼皮更加的肿胀和笨重，没有存在感的鼻子下面，一张厚重的嘴巴在喃喃咕哝着什么。接着她抬起脑袋，重重地呼了一口气，又拿起咖啡喝了一口，然后身子靠在椅背上。她打量着周围，观察这家咖啡馆，看看零散坐着的其他几桌人。目前我们的镜头了只有她一个人。我们看到她的视线扫过我们这里，然后她继续往左瞥过脑袋，停在了某处。现在我们再把画面重新拉回来，跟她的注意力，镜头缓慢向右转动大概 30 度。一个男人的大半个背影出现在我们的画面右边，占据了大概四分之三的高度，他穿着一件黑色的开司米西装，身材高大健壮，我们没法看到他在干什么。他低着头，没有在跟谁说话。

我们的女主角小小的身影现在位于画面的左侧边缘。她偷偷观察着这个低着头的男人。我们如果仔细观察的话，能稍微看到她的表情起了点变化，眼神仍然无精打采的样子，但神情似乎明亮起来。阳光仍然很强烈，外面的时间过得很快，里面的很慢。她的桌子被照得发白，咖啡杯的影子在桌面上留下一块拉长的斑。她的身体前倾，双肘搁在桌子的边缘，接着又退了回去，后背重新靠在椅子上。她两条短粗的腿来回抖动着，灰紫色的平底鞋不时摩擦地面。然后她又直起背，重新前靠着桌子。她举起杯子，但并没有靠近嘴巴，她只是把咖啡杯捧在手里，手指摆弄着它的把手。这个时候男人应该抬起头了，他撇过头朝窗外看了一眼。女人双手握紧，匆忙喝了一口咖啡，咖啡杯底重重地撞在桌面上。她的左手迅速地捋了捋耳边的几缕头发，然后把头撇过去，望着其他地方。

Section 2

现在，让我们转移一下视角，暂时把焦点从女人身上移开，把注意力放在窗外一会儿。我们把镜头切到女人的左侧，正好垂直对着窗外的街道。窗外的画面占据了我们百分之九十宽度的画幅。我们调低亮度，窗外的曝光渐渐正常，室内的光线慢慢暗淡下来。女人的黑色身影出现在画面右边大概三分之一的地方。

展现在我们眼前的，是城市健康的象征，是繁荣兴盛的一隅。我们的摄影机帧数不足以捕捉到他们清晰的影像。出现在画面里的窗外的，是人群。不停移动的，巨大的人群。他们走进画面，然后又走出画面。他们进来，然后又出去。他们穿过这一个，然后穿过下一个。这窗外的景色是街道的血液飞快的流动，是城市的心脏疯狂的跳跃，是时代的乐章激昂的演奏。女人坐在角落里，她的侧影轮廓像一张剪纸般紧贴在窗户上，没有任何动静。在这场景里她是不重要的，重要的是这沸腾着的街道和城市，和如鬼魅般模糊不清的人群。他们宣告着午间休息的结束。

Section 3

然后我们把镜头重新切回来。我们的女主角仍然坐在画面左侧边缘。男人硕大的身躯仍然占据着画面右半边。女人现在耸拉着脑袋，右手臂托着脖子，望着窗外。她的右腿费劲地搭在左腿上来回摆荡着。我们能看到她的侧脸，她的脑袋此时看来就像一颗大号土豆，支在三层土墩一样的脖子上。她的鼻子几乎没有长度，两片厚厚的嘴唇紧紧地挤在一起。

剧情接着往下发展。我们的最后一位角色终于登场了。她现在正站在窗外朝里望着。那一身白衣的确是惹人注目，我们注意到路过的行人也都把目光朝这儿撇。窗外的这位女子对于这种注视显然已经非常熟悉，她从容地站在那儿，脸上没有表现出任何的局促。她齐背的黑色长发温顺地披在背后，衬托着她的白色连衣裙，使她的身材显得更加修长和高挑。她的右手搭在腰前，手臂上挂着一只白得耀眼的包。她站在窗外朝我们这儿看过来，她是在找人，你也许已经猜到了。我们的镜头视角没有变，我们看到她东张西望的脸上的俏皮表情，两条翘起弯曲的眉毛下，两颗黑色的眼珠在眼眶里来回溜达，她的嘴好像正嚼着什么一样微微嘟着。

我们再把镜头拉近，放大，让这两个女人撑起画面。我们的女主角，坐在这家咖啡馆靠窗的椅子上，就这么看着窗外的女人。她的左手搁在桌子上，食指像啄木鸟的嘴一样敲打着手机屏幕，右手撑扶着她肥厚的右脸颊，她的腰像一块没有堆叠整齐的三明治一般躬在那儿，肩膀随着呼吸匀速上下起伏。她好像欣赏一件艺术馆里的油画或照片似地看着窗外的这道风景，又好像仅仅只是游离一般地盯着眼前的事物。她的嘴唇微微张开，但没有表情，那双呆滞的眼睛也许有闪过一丝羡慕，但它过于晦涩，我们的镜头无法地捕捉到这种情绪，呈现在画面里，它成了一些象征性的词汇，嫉妒，渴望，或者类似的东西。

INTERLUDE

观众此时会猜测我们的女主角到底是个什么样的人。他们会想，也许她在一家小公司工作，每天挤地铁上下班，并且经常朝出晚归。他们会想着，也许她已经来这座城市打拼了好几年，但一直都没有什么进步，经济状况仍然只够勉强维持日常开销。他们还会想象出其他的细节，他们说，这个女人几乎没有可以谈得来的同事，或者闺蜜什么的，男朋友呢就更别提了，对于生活，她曾经有过幻想，对于感情，她开始也是有过憧憬的，但她现在每天站在清晨六点半的地铁里，走在夜幕的人行道上。

然后会有一个观众举起手来说，啊我记起来了，我之前见过她，在一个深夜的便利店里，她进来买了一大叠零食之类的东西。

接着另一位观众也站起来，跟旁边的人说，我也想起来了，那天我们去看电影的时候看到她，她坐在最后一排的角落里。

第三个人说，我在一天的下班路上看到她的，她正混杂在人群里，好像被推着一样慢慢地往前走。

一伙人在旁边悄悄议论，哎她不就是住咱们小区里的那姑娘吗，我每天清早散步的时候老碰到她。她总是低着头沿着路边儿走。

于是人们就都认出了她。那一个个孤单又疲倦的身影，一幕幕唏嘘又无奈的生活剧。而在这座城市里，每天有无数的人出现，又有无数的人消失。我们站在镜头后面观看着这场戏，没空理会谁在看着我们。

Section 4

我们最后一次调整画面，重新把注意力转移到室内。那位美丽的女子消失在窗前，紧接着出现在咖啡馆门口，朝这边走了进来。她一身的白色在昏暗的桌椅之间穿梭，人们跟着她移动着视线。她走到男人对面坐了下来。男人终于抬起头，他高大的背影占据画面有半边，挡住了这位动人的女士，我们可以看到他干净的脖根。他们愉快地交谈着什么，男人笔直的肩膀随着肢体的移动兴奋的上下起伏着。

另一边，我们的女主角仍然望着窗外，出了神似的。阳光已经不那么刺眼了。人群仍然不断地从窗前走过，影子打在她身上，一闪一闪的。她的咖啡早就喝完了，白色的杯子还呆在桌子上，也跟着一闪一闪的。

End

看到这里，我们就离开了。

Tags: Short Stories · Coffee