Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [41]
At that point it became clear even mapping was an analogy. Anna would not think much of it. But everyone needed a set of operating procedures to navigate the day. A totalizing theory forming the justification for a rubric for the daily decisions. The science of that particular Wednesday. Using flawed equipment (the brain, civilization) to optimize results. Most adaptive practices. Robustness.
Something from ecology, from Aldo Leopold: What’s good is what’s good for the land.
Something from Rudra (although he said from the Dalai Lama, or the Buddha): Try to do good for other people. Your happiness lies there.
Try it and see. Make the experiment and analyze it. Try again. Act on your desires.
So what do you really want?
And can you really decide?
ONE DAY WHEN FRANK WOKE UP in the garden shed with Rudra, it took him a while to remember where he was—long enough that when he sat up he was actively relieved to be Frank Vanderwal, or anybody.
Then he had trouble figuring out which pants to put on, something he had never considered before in his life; and then he realized he did not want to go to work, although he had to. Was this unusual? He wasn’t sure.
As he munched on a PowerBar and waited for his bedside coffee machine to provide, he clicked on his laptop, and after the portentous chord announced the beginning of his cyber-day, he went to Emersonfortheday.com.
“Hey, Rudra, are you awake?”
“Always.”
“Listen to this. It’s Emerson, talking about our parcellated mind theory:
“It is the largest part of a man that is not inventoried. He has many enumerable parts: he is social, professional, political, sectarian, literary, and is this or that set and corporation. But after the most exhausting census has been made, there remains as much more which no tongue can tell. And this remainder is that which interests. Far the best part of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed, before him. This dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility.”
“Maybe so,” Rudra said. “But whole sight is good too. Being one.”
“But isn’t it interesting he talks about it in the same terms.”
“It is common knowledge. Anyone knows that.”
“I guess. I think Emerson knows a lot of things I don’t know.”
He was a man who had spent time in the forest, too. Frank liked to see the signs of this: “The man who rambles in the woods seems to be the first man that ever entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so novel and strange.” That was right; Frank knew that feeling. Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal—Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. “Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o’clock; cold and shabby at six.” The quick strangeness of the world, how it came on you all of a sudden—now, for Frank, the feeling started on waking in the morning. Coming up blank, the primal man, the first man ever to wake. Strange indeed, not to know who or what you were.
Often these days he felt he should be moving back out into the park, and living in his treehouse. That would mean leaving the Khembalis, however, and that was bad. But on the other hand, it would in some ways be a relief. He had been living with them for almost a year now, hard to believe but it was true, and they were so crowded. They could use all the extra space they could get. Besides, it felt like time to get back outdoors and into the wind again. Spring was coming, spring and all.
But there was Rudra to consider. As his