Anti-Viral
I like this obscurity. Don’t you?
There’s something towering and distant when you start scaling. What starts as a hole-in-the-wall turns into a Yelp Special with the skinny-jean whispering that maybe, just maybe, it’s out of vogue. Even if they’ve expanded to thirty locations. Expanded to thirty locations, but all the original spirits now missing. Recipes change, and they threw away those creaky rose chairs for metal screechers.
It’s not about a loss-of-essence necessarily, though a result — it’s about the disfigurement. The amount of raw attention power corrupts within, or attracts some strong-arming and contortions to appeal to lowest common denominators all in a race for resource acquisition. Fame hollows and sews in the slogans as stuffing that sustain fame, power. Money. Power of money.
Most ideas get co-opted, and very few individuals can sustain the pressure of the humanity conscious haul waiting for their next move before they bury you. When you have to start thinking in terms of metrics and business speak you start seeing the puppet strings.
The worst part is that you’d hope, before the origin is all but extinguished, that this grace of fame for whatever wares or ideas or personas, you’d hope it may spark others. But fame devours while the eyes are often opaque: the faceless apparatus of mouse clicks won’t understand and only demand more.
Yet here, in this obscurity, how many unknowns and experiences are waiting? There’s no need to explain yourself nor edit out the excess. One can only wonder what’s waiting between the next “inefficient” and “poorly” structured paragraph.
The Timeless Way of Building begins with an attempt to define “a quality without a name.” It has no name not because it is too vague and imprecise, but because words are, and it is the most precise thing of all.
Alexander gives a range of words whose elliptical meanings contain the ‘point’ of the quality: alive; whole; comfortable; free; exact; egoless; eternal. None of these are quite right, none quite wrong.
It is, he writes, “the central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.”
[…]
[A] quality that makes us us.