Doing what we do . . .

In the mailbox this 26th day of 2023 March . . . a ray of light from unimaginably far away . . .

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. – Elizabeth Gilbert

A.I. will do what it does, just as the automobile replaced the horse and buggy, but we artists will do what we do, which is to readjust and find new ways to lay claim to our humanity. On the margins, where art lives, humans will continue to carve and paint and hear voices and daydream, pulling out of unique lives unique work — just as this morning, as I finish writing this, I prepare to go down into my office and work on my cat story, examining my scenes, rewriting sentences and trying to see what I’m doing, aware that the world has not yet seen what I’m creating, which no A.I. can replicate because, right now, as I sit here, as far as the world is concerned, it does not exist. – David Means

We learn, as we say, by “trial and error.” Why do we always say that? Why not “trial and rightness” or “trial and triumph”? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done . . . Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error. . .hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments. . . – Lewis Thomas in Maria Popova's current issue of The Marginalian

Also see Maria at TED on humanity’s search for cosmic truth and poetic beauty.