The trouble with America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has changed to advertising copy.

-- Mortimer B. Zuckerman in U.S. News & World Report

We would be happy, precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

-- Franz Kafka

What poured forth from every radio was the very sound of life itself, and from every television set the very sight of it: car chases, wars, laughing faces, oceans, volcanos, crying faces, tennis matches, perfume bottles, singing faces, accidents, diamond rings, faces, steaming food, more faces . . . images, ultimately, of a life not really lived anywhere but arranged for the viewing. Critic and writer Horace Newcomb (1976) calls television less a medium of communication than a medium of communion, a place and occasion where nightly the British, the French, the Germans, the Americans, the Russians, the Japanese . . . settle down by the million to watch and ratify their respective national mythologies: nightly variations on a handful of dreams being played out, over and over, with addicting, tireless intensity.

-- Michael Benedikt, from the Introduction to Cyberspace: First Steps

This, the oldest thread, begins in language, and perhaps before language, with a commonness-of-mind among members of a tribe or social group. Untested by dialogue -- not yet brought out "into the open" in this way -- this commonness-of-mind is tested and effective nonetheless in the coordinated behavior of the group around a set of beliefs held simply to be "the case:" beliefs about the environment, about the magnitude and location of its dangers and rewards, what is wise and foolhardy, and about what lies beyond; about the past, the future, about what lies within opaque things, over the horizon, under the earth, or above the sky. ... Variations develop on the common themes of life and death, the whys and wherefores, origins and ends of all things, and these coalesce ecologically into the more or less coherent systems of narratives, characters, scenes, laws, and lessons that we now recognize, and sometimes disparage, as myth.

...

The segment of our population most visibly susceptible to myth and most productive in that regard are those who are "coming of age," the young. Thrust inexorably into a complex and rule-bound world that, it begins to dawn on them, they did not make and that, further, they do not understand, adolescents are apt to reach with some anger and confusion into their culture's "collective unconscious" -- a world they already possess -- for anchorage, guidance, and a base for resistance. The boundary between fiction and fact, between wish and reality, between possibility and probability, seems to them forceable.

-- Michael Benedikt, from the Introduction to Cyberspace: First Steps

The city exists as a series of doubles; it has official and hidden cultures, it is a real place and a site of the imagination. Its elaborate network of streets, housing, public buildings, transport systems, parks, and shops is paralleled by a complex of attitudes, habits, customs, expectancies, and hopes that reside in us as urban subjects. We discover that urban "reality" is not single but multiple, that inside the city there is always another city.

-- Iain Chambers, from "Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience" (as referenced in Storming the Reality Studio)

Larry McCaffery: So your use of computers and science results more from their metaphoric value or from the way they sound than from any familiarity with how they actually operate.

William Gibson: I'm looking for images that supply a certain atmosphere. Right now, science and technology seem to be very useful sources. But I'm more interested in the language of, say, computers than I am in the technicalities. On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside -- this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

...

William Gibson: As I said earlier, I'm not interested in producing the kind of literalism most readers associate with SF. This may be a suicidal admission, but most of the time I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to the scientific or logical rationales that supposedly underpin my books. Apparently, though, part of my skill lies in my ability to convince people otherwise. Some of the SF writers who are actually working scientists do know what they're talking about; but for the rest of us, to present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

from "An Interview with William Gibson" by Larry McCaffery, as reprinted in Storming the Reality Studio

"Not to stagger on being shown through the laboratory of Nikola Tesla," McGovern would later recall, "requires the possession of an uncommonly sturdy mind...

"Fancy yourself seated in a large, well-lighted room, with mountains of curious-looking machinery on all sides. A tall, thin young man walks up to you, and by merely snapping his fingers creates instantaneously a ball of leaping red flame, and holds it calmly in his hands. As you gaze you are surprised to see it does not burn his fingers. He lets it fall upon his clothing, on his hair, into your lap, and, finally, puts the ball of flame into a wooden box. You are amazed to see that nowhere does the flame leave the slightest trace, and you rub your eyes to make sure you are not asleep."

If McGovern was baffled by Tesla's fireball, he was at least not alone. None of his contemporaries could explain how Tesla produced this oft-repeated effect, and no one can explain it today.

---

One day in 1898 while testing a tiny electromechanical oscillator, he attached it with innocent intent to an iron pillar that went down through the center of his loft building at 46 East Houston Street, to the sandy floor of the basement.

Flipping on the switch, he settled into a straight-backed chair to watch and make notes of everything that happened. Such machines always fascinated him because, as the tempo built higher and higher, they would establish resonance with first one object in his workshop and then another. For example, a piece of equipment or furniture would suddenly begin to shimmy and dance. As he stepped up the frequency, it would halt but another more in tune would take up the frantic jig and, later on, yet another.

What Tesla was unaware of on this occasion was that vibrations from the oscillator, traveling down the iron pillar with escalating force, were being carried through the substructure of Manhattan in all directions. (Normally earthquakes are more severe at a distance from their epicenter.) Buildings began to shake, windows shattered, and citizens poured onto the streets in the nearby Italian and Chinese neighborhoods.

At Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street, where Tesla was already regarded with suspicion, it soon became apparent that no other part of the city was having an earthquake. Two officers were dispatched posthaste to check on the mad inventor. The latter, unaware of the shambles occurring all around his building, had just begun to sense an ominous vibration in the floor and walls. Knowing that he must quickly put a stop to it, he seized a sledgehammer and smashed the little oscillator in a single blow.

With perfect timing the two policemen rushed through the door, allowing him to turn with a courteous nod.

"Gentlemen, I am sorry," he said. "You are just a trifle too late to witness my experiment. I found it necessary to stop it suddenly and unexpectedly and in an unusual way... However, if you will come around this evening I will have another oscillator attached to this platform and each of you can stand on it. You will, I am sure, find it a most interesting and pleasurable experience. Now you must leave, for I have many things to do. Good day, gentlemen."

When reporters arrived, he blandly told them that he could destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in a matter of minutes if he felt like it.

---

Tesla, long before anyone else, published in Electrical World and Engineer (March 5, 1904) what has always stood out as the clearest statement by any pioneer working in the wireless art of what radio was to become and as we know it today. He envisioned the entire concept of transmission of intelligence, not just the sending of a single message from one point to another -- and he alone of the pioneers in radio did so.

Tesla said his "World Telegraphy constitutes, I believe, in its principle of operation, means employed and capacities of application, a radical and fruitful departure from what has been done heretofore. I have no doubt that it will prove very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries and less accessible regions, and that it will add materially to general safety, comfort, and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization, and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one's pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world's news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horse-power can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence."

---

Scherff wrote that creditors were "hounding me hard," and that the illness of his wife had put him in debt. He hoped Tesla would make some payment on his loans. The inventor loftily responded, "Please do not give way to bitterness. You know that the experiences you have had were unusual and that while they have not benefited you materially to a great extent, they have been the means of developing the good that is in you..."

---

Tesla said that he was deeply religious, although not in the orthodox meaning of the word, and gave himself "to the constant enjoyment of believing that the greatest mysteries of our being are still to be fathomed and that, all the evidence of the senses and the teachings of exact and dry sciences to the contrary notwithstanding, death itself may not be the termination of the wonderful metamorphoses we witness."

---

"Mr. Tesla looked up at the [library] windows, which are fenced with the iron bars, that some pigeons did not fall down somewhere and got freezed," he [Dragislav Petkovic] recalled. "In one corner he spotted one which was halfway frozen. He told me to stay here and watch that the cat does not come to get him while he look up for others. While I was watching, I tried to reach the pigeon, but could not do it because the bars were so close to one another. When Mr. Tesla returned, he quickly bended and pulled him out.

"'All things from childhood are still dear to me,'" he told Petkovic, as he began to pat the almost frozen pigeon, assuring it that it would recover.

"Then," said Petkovic, "he took the package from my hand and started throwing the food all around in front of the library. When he distributed the food he told me: 'These are my sincere friends.'"

---

In his desk in New York lay a letter, some years old, from Katharine Johnson, one of the last that was kept, or perhaps written, by her to her "ever silent friend." She had gone to Maine without her children or husband for part of the summer.

"I came here a month ago, quite alone," she wrote, "to this hotel full, but empty for me, since it is a strange world. Here, I am as detached as if nothing belonged to me but memory. At times I am filled with sadness and long for that which is not -- just as intensely as I did when a young girl and I listened to the waves of the sea, which is still unknown, and still beating about me. ... I do not know why I am so sad, but I feel as if everything in life had slipped from me."

---

[Kenneth M.] Swezey, on meeting the inventor for the first time in 1929, ... was surprised to discover (as he wrote) "a tall skinny man of upright posture" who might go about for hours in a daze of concentration, but who also had a side intensely human and "almost painfully sensitive with fellow-feeling for everything that lives."

---

The strange tale of the white pigeon was told by the inventor to O'Neill and William L. Laurence, science writer for the New York Times...

"I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years," he said. "Thousands of them, for who can tell--.

"But there was one pigeon, a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I would know that pigeon anywhere.

"No matter where I was that pigeon would find me; when I wanted her I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. She understood me and I understood her.

"I loved that pigeon.

"Yes, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.

"Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her.

"As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me -- she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes -- powerful beams of light."

Tesla paused and then, as if in response to an unasked question from the science writers, continued.

"Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.

"When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life's work was finished.

"Yes, I have fed pigeons for years; I continue to feed them, thousands of them, for after all, who can tell--".


-- Margaret Cheney

To the extent that abolishing the differences in the approved personalities of men and women means abolishing any expression of the type of personality once called exclusively feminine, or once called exclusively masculine, such a course involves a social loss. Just as a festive occasion is the gayer and more charming if the two sexes are dressed differently, so it is in less material matters. If the clothing is in itself a symbol, and a woman's shawl corresponds to a recognized softness in her character, the whole plot of personal relations is made more elaborate, and in many ways more rewarding. The poet of such a society will praise virtues, albeit feminine virtues, which might never have any part in a social Utopia that allowed no differences between the personalities of men and women.

To the extent that a society insists upon different kinds of personality so that one age-group or class or sex-group may follow purposes disallowed or neglected in another, each individual participant in that society is the richer. The arbitrary assignment of set clothing, set manners, set social responses, to individuals born in a certain class, of a certain sex, or of a certain colour, to those born on a certain day of the week, to those born with a certain complexion, does violence to the individual endowment of individuals, but permits the building of a rich culture. The most extreme development of a society that has attained great complexity at the expense of the individual is historical India, based, as it was, upon the uncompromising association of a thousand attributes of behaviour, attitude, and occupation with an accident of birth. To each individual there was given the security, although it might be the security of despair, of a set role, and the reward of being born into a highly complex society.


-- Margaret Mead

The sexual ideal with which young people come to marriage, always one to which men are expected to give only lip-service, is that of chastity for both. The man who can say to a girl that she is the first is still valued by American girls almost as much as the man values being his wife's first lover. Until the era of petting, all the husband's premarital experience had to be ignored, and if possible pushed out of the wife's consciousness. Now each is condemned to wondering how far the other has gone, with whom, under what circumstances. The various conventions of frankness that are growing up are an overlay on the old concealment based on a prevalent but repudiated double standard, but they are still an overlay. For the old requirement of real virginity in the bride and a decent reticence in the groom -- which included a taboo on displaying any skill as a lover -- there is being substituted a determination to start with a "clean slate." Starting with a clean slate often means making a clean breast of all one's past sex experience, but this is also a very effective way of making sure that it contributes nothing to the new marriage. Instead of offering each other the relaxation, the capacity to pause and listen a little to the beating of another heart because the sound of one's own quickened heart-beat has ceased to be so astonishing, the attempt is made to offer the new marriage, which is to be "for keeps," an as if position in which none of the past is relevant.

This ability to block out the past, to enter each new situation, be it job or love-affair, with the kind of innocence that it seems to Europeans could only be acquired by amnesia from a blow on the head is a peculiarly American characteristic, bred of the need to be both poised for flight and firmly rooted in the immediate landscape. Oriented outward, towards time and place and the actual concrete realities of life, we develop a capacity to respond quickly, learn and use first names, take the woes and joys of the man at the next desk or the woman across the aisle in a train as our own. Nostalgia for the past is out of place among a people who must always be moving, to a better job, a better house, a new way of life. To the immigrant from Poland to New Jersey or from Massachusetts to Iowa or from Illinois to California, nostalgia for the past way of life is an acute threat to good adjustment in the new environment. To the children of immigrants, there is a new danger, that they may absorb not the direct nostalgia for Poland or Massachusetts, but the parents' sense of unreality, of repudiated roots, of rootlessness. This too must be fended off, and it can be fended off by taking the present reality as the only reality and yet keeping one eye always on the future, which may be different. So Americans do not find it shocking to say to three different girls in a year, "You are the only girl I have ever loved," because the girl who came before is defined as unloved by the very fact that another is loved now. Past loves, past experiences, are named over to be by that very act eliminated. Each lover brings to marriage a conviction that this is the real thing, the only reality for either one. If it fails, then it is not the real thing, but the next experience may be. So each job, each home, each friend, and each lover can be eagerly accepted, optimistically, whole-heartedly, and no failure along the way finally disproves -- for the healthy -- the possibility of a later success.

...

The pressure for divorce is easy enough to understand on many counts. The emphasis on choice carried to its final limits means in marriage, as it does at every other point in American life, that no choice is irrevocable. All persons should be allowed to move if they don't like their present home, change jobs as often as they can get another, change schools, change friends, change political parties, change religious affiliations. With freedom to choose goes the right to change one's mind. If past mistakes are to be reparable in every other field of human relations, why should marriage be the one exception? If their choice of each other was what made a marriage a "real marriage," then once either makes another choice, its reality is gone. The spouse who clings to such a marriage is committing one of the worst acts in the American list of sins, limiting the freedom of another person, exploiting and taking advantage of some one else's past, dead impulse, freezing a past mistake into a present prison. The more modern psychology and modern literature emphasize the importance of impulse gratification, the tighter every spouse is caught in the obligation not to limit the impulse gratification of the other person. In every triangle, where two are married, three are trapped just because the man or woman who is desired by two others is free to choose between them. Because he and she can get a divorce if they really love the third person, not getting a divorce becomes a hostile act for the one who loves both, while failing to give a divorce on the part of the partially rejected spouse is limiting the freedom of two other people. Ethical dilemmas that do not arise in countries where Church and State not only advocate and teach, but enforce, marriage for life are recurrent, inexorably associated with the degree of freedom that exists in the United States.


-- Margaret Mead

I see the light of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
That my soul cannot resist;

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.


-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow