It’s kinda ridiculous to attempt to use words to describe feelings that I don’t have words for, but let me circumscribe them, at least partially, and I’m curious to know whether I share these with anyone else, and what other people have called them.
Imagined vastness
When I’m reading a book, usually sci-fi, and the implied universe is very big, and described with detail so it feels real, but with gaps such that you mentally decide there must be more there with as much resolution, and so the result is much bigger than any book could really ever contain, there’s a joy of exploring that vast world that I wish would continue forever. I feel wide-eyed and absolutely content, and weirdly somehow outdoors.
Books that create this feeling for me are Anathem (Neal Stephenson), as I’m discovering by re-reading it at the moment, and (looking at my shelf) Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delaney). I’m sure there are more.
Stack overflow vertigo
When I’m programming and I’m many parentheses deep, I have a sense of precariousness. There’s a similar feeling when making a change that needs to touch many lines of the codebase simultaneously before it starts to work again – starting from the first change it feels like setting off on a tightrope, and reaching the final change feels like making back to safety. I often hold my breath. I am hyperaware of what’s around me in the code, and that focus pushes away all input from the real world.
Atemporal hotel lobbies
I’m having the opportunity right now to encounter very many new ideas, for work, and I have a need to rapidly synthesise them and to come up with ways to share that synthesis – and ask more questions. I’m in pursuit.
It’s all consuming, and it can’t be hurried. The best way to do it, for me, is to sit with the raw ideas, mull them over, sketch them, write about them, sit some more, and so on…
And I’ve done that a lot in my life, mainly late in the evening, on my own, in hotel lobbies in cities that are not my home city, with the cold beer that you only get in hotel lobbies, and the music you only get in hotel lobbies, on the chairs you only get in hotel lobbies, brain exhausted but still chewing things over, turning things around and around, continuously but somehow leisurely. There is a pleasure in it.
And also:
I tweeted about a pecularity back in 2016:
every moment i’ve sat in a hotel lobby with a beer and my laptop is the same moment. for 13 years? time shrinks like a collapsed telescope
And previously back in March 2012: Hotel lobbies always feel the same to me. The exotic, and melancholy. Temporary homes. I like sitting in them.
Both of which get to the nub of this feeling:
The hotel lobby exists outside time. In that place, I’m 28, I’m 42, I’m all ages in-between. I feel like, sitting there in 2012, I could probably remember the future yesterday of 2016, but it didn’t feel special to do so, so I didn’t bother to think about it.
So there’s a mental place which has such a strong feeling associated with it that all other places are washed away, and all the instances of that time feel identical, past and future identical, outside time, and FOR SOME REASON I reach that mental place when I’m working in hotel lobbies, and it’s touched with a kind of nostalgia for the present, and gentle pleasure, and immortality, and I don’t know how to explain it better than that.
Loosely I would say that a feeling is
felt viscerally, that is it in the body
and it is accompanied by a bias on the trajectory of my thoughts.
For example, panic is a shortness of breath and a tightness in my mouth, and it biases my thinking towards the short term.
Contentment is a widening of the face and an ability to stay in the moment.
By this categorisation, the three descriptions above are all feelings. As fundamental as panic and contentment, or at the very least, on the same plane? Maybe.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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It’s kinda ridiculous to attempt to use words to describe feelings that I don’t have words for, but let me circumscribe them, at least partially, and I’m curious to know whether I share these with anyone else, and what other people have called them.
Imagined vastness
When I’m reading a book, usually sci-fi, and the implied universe is very big, and described with detail so it feels real, but with gaps such that you mentally decide there must be more there with as much resolution, and so the result is much bigger than any book could really ever contain, there’s a joy of exploring that vast world that I wish would continue forever. I feel wide-eyed and absolutely content, and weirdly somehow outdoors.
Books that create this feeling for me are Anathem (Neal Stephenson), as I’m discovering by re-reading it at the moment, and (looking at my shelf) Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delaney). I’m sure there are more.
Stack overflow vertigo
When I’m programming and I’m many parentheses deep, I have a sense of precariousness. There’s a similar feeling when making a change that needs to touch many lines of the codebase simultaneously before it starts to work again – starting from the first change it feels like setting off on a tightrope, and reaching the final change feels like making back to safety. I often hold my breath. I am hyperaware of what’s around me in the code, and that focus pushes away all input from the real world.
Atemporal hotel lobbies
I’m having the opportunity right now to encounter very many new ideas, for work, and I have a need to rapidly synthesise them and to come up with ways to share that synthesis – and ask more questions. I’m in pursuit.
It’s all consuming, and it can’t be hurried. The best way to do it, for me, is to sit with the raw ideas, mull them over, sketch them, write about them, sit some more, and so on…
And I’ve done that a lot in my life, mainly late in the evening, on my own, in hotel lobbies in cities that are not my home city, with the cold beer that you only get in hotel lobbies, and the music you only get in hotel lobbies, on the chairs you only get in hotel lobbies, brain exhausted but still chewing things over, turning things around and around, continuously but somehow leisurely. There is a pleasure in it.
And also:
I tweeted about a pecularity back in 2016:
And previously back in March 2012:
Both of which get to the nub of this feeling:
The hotel lobby exists outside time. In that place, I’m 28, I’m 42, I’m all ages in-between. I feel like, sitting there in 2012, I could probably remember the future yesterday of 2016, but it didn’t feel special to do so, so I didn’t bother to think about it.
So there’s a mental place which has such a strong feeling associated with it that all other places are washed away, and all the instances of that time feel identical, past and future identical, outside time, and FOR SOME REASON I reach that mental place when I’m working in hotel lobbies, and it’s touched with a kind of nostalgia for the present, and gentle pleasure, and immortality, and I don’t know how to explain it better than that.
Loosely I would say that a feeling is
For example, panic is a shortness of breath and a tightness in my mouth, and it biases my thinking towards the short term.
Contentment is a widening of the face and an ability to stay in the moment.
By this categorisation, the three descriptions above are all feelings. As fundamental as panic and contentment, or at the very least, on the same plane? Maybe.