The Curved Line

“Every time it seems to me that I’ve grasped the deep meaning of the world, it is its simplicity that always overwhelms me”

Albert Camus

The way you arrive at an end affects the end itself. I would like to consider the tension between how a thing happens and what the thing is. It seems to me that ‘How?’ is more important than ‘What?’ … I am not making an absolute statement here. 

I have often read books and written essays that, upon reflection, can be summarized uncomfortably effectively as boiler-plate clichés. Tons of literature and careful argumentation summed up to say “Be open-minded” or “Don’t worry about what you can’t control” or “Follow your heart.” It is rare that I find a deeply persuasive and profound-seeming work that doesn’t eventually boil down to a cliché I heard when I was nine. For the exceptional cases, I suspect I have simply not understood the message clearly enough to identify the underlying cliché. (Queue Albert Einstein: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”)

I always get a little upset when I realize the deep secrets of the universe I’ve worked so hard to understand are actually very simple well-known ideas. Often, these ideas are so obvious and implicitly understood that it is embarrassing to even say them out loud. The truth is, things are always simple. Billions have lived happy lives without having known the Internet, without learning the quadratic formula, without understanding what consciousness is (we still don’t!). It is never necessary to make things complicated. But here I am not talking about necessity.

I am startled by the clichés that prove more efficient means than the novels I’ve read. The novel and the route I’ve taken to earn my lesson have been shown to be a great excess. Why do I still prefer the long route then? I am writing here in defense of the long route, the curved line. It is not the same end you arrive at through the straight line. There is beauty in getting lost in order to find yourself. There is a profound grounding that takes place when you unravel a tightly wound truth in order to see it spread across the world. A is not A.

There’s a place in town that is called ‘Not-Not-Tacos.’ It is a weird choice for a name. A name like ‘Tacos’ would be logically equivalent and more efficient. But are the two names really equivalent? Does your mind respond to the two names the exact same way? I argue it doesn’t. Not-Not-Tacos throws me for a loop. Something about the need to arrive by this windy path to reveal ‘the store that sells tacos’ changes your perception of it. What does it mean to not be a not-taco? What about this food keeps it from not being a taco? What is a taco? I suspect this restaurant questions the boundaries of what a taco is. It finds itself along the edges of the realm of tacos. I don’t think I would have these thoughts if we took the straight path of calling the restaurant “Tacos.” Obviously, this is a very silly situation to be asking deep philosophical questions about the essence of matter and meaning, but here I take it to be exemplifying that different paths can take you to different places, even if the two paths arrive at the same spot.

I once spent a week in a beach town in Oaxaca. I’ve lived near and explored many beaches, but this one was different. The beach filled me with inspiration and passion like I’ve never quite felt since, it seemed like a mythical property of the beach itself. But thinking back on it, I realize the way the particular sequence of moments and experiences throughout the day created this mythical property. The shape of the town and the calm of its people, the quiet heat of the evenings and mornings, the long walk through winding dirt roads that carried the whispers of the waves a mile into town; the beach was colored by all these aspects of life that surrounded it and led up to it. It was the entire context of living in the town that shaped the beach for me and made it special.

What I am saying is that context is the supreme consideration. It is only ever in a way  that a thing happens. When you consider an end that you’re striving for, you cannot truly consider it without considering a context in which it arises. The way you make decisions, the way a joke is told, the way you work through a problem might be more important than the particular decisions made, or the punchline of the joke, or the answer to the problem. In light of this we should give less consideration to the ends we aim for and more towards the context, the ways, the approach taken to arrive at and produce any given end. 

I am not trying to convince you that “context is key” or “the beauty is in the details.” I think that clichés are useful and valuable only when it is clear how we arrive at them. You gain a new appreciation for a truth only when you see it in action, when you see how all of the world is made through it. There are a few truths so dear to me that I wish for nothing more than to re-learn them every day; to chop up and re-orient the world a thousand different ways to solve the same puzzle every day. I know you only live once, I know nothing lasts forever, I know I can be whoever I want. But written on paper and regurgitated from memory these are dead truths. The value of these clichés is not so much in their pure truth-ness, but in the process and feeling of discovery, in their coming-to-be as opposed to their being-in-itself. It is in their continuously lived discovery as true that gives them their value. It is a great pleasure to complicate things, making a mess with unnecessary questions, only to conquer anew the very simple truths that we already knew.

Life is the journey from Being to Being. We come from stardust, we are conscious for a few decades, then we return to stardust. Why the detour? If stardust was the final destination, why didn’t I just stay there to begin with? Life is a detour made up of detours. It is the most curved line. It makes it obvious that the goal is not to arrive, but to travel the best route. Because human consciousness exists, and forever it can be said that we existed, the universe can be said to be not-not-dead, not-not-meaningless, not-not-cold. When all is said and done and the dust settles, the universe existed in a way. We brought life, meaning and warmth to the world for a few moments before it returned to its beginnings, is this not a beautiful fact? This is the meaning of the curved line.