A Long Patience: Exploring “The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”
I. Introduction
I’ve resisted writing for a while. More accurately, I struggle with the implied responsibility for usefulness that peers through the keyhole of one’s thinking when writing publicly.
What’s more interesting in writing is the space for intellectual truancy, to noodle at the back of a notebook behind a dutiful transcription of notes.
To slip away, and to instead inscribe—a secret. Much like floating excerpts on Twitter in plain view, devoid of significance and context; a soft encryption.
Over the last year, a number of Twitter friends and acquaintances have encouraged and implored me to write openly about Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.
Yet the sense of responsibility to readers and the invocation to usefulness invades my thoughts.
Hence, I declare: I make no such promises for usefulness.
When I think of The Diamond Age, what’s unearthed and evoked is closer to: sensing hidden poetry.
The mathematician, Jacques Hadamard, provides a lovely phrase in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, when he summarizes Comte de Buffon, stating: “genius may often be nothing else than a long patience.”
Except it’s more fun to replace the imposing stature of “genius” with “magic.”
The upcoming posts will chronicle and explore passages and themes from Stephenson’s novel, weaving in outside sources, including limerent allusions, cues to inferences, or extra lenses to reveal possibilities buried within The Diamond Age.
I extend an invitation to you, dear reader, to follow along with a long patience to glimpse the book’s magic.