There are times when an artistic production resonates with such eloquence that it feels almost egregious to ignore it. I confess, in broad strokes, that I have always had a hard time grasping the concept of cinephile entertainment. In my youth, I was far more attracted to videogames, particularly strategy games and RPGs, than to anime or movies. Truth be told, I did watch anime back in the day, but that activity was largely reserved for a very particular kind: slice of life. It is often a forgotten genre, but by far my favorite.
Figure 1: The movie poster. Compare it with garbage like "Avengers" that attempts to induce a seizure by overstimulation.
It is customary, it seems, for particular aspects of our lives to become intelligible to us through forms of media. Recently, I had the privilege of watching a movie called The Great Passage, a Japanese film produced in 2013. It is one more of those slice-of-life movies that most people would probably ignore outright. And yet there is immense beauty in the message it attempts to portray.
The plot begins with a team in crisis. They have set out to publish a new dictionary of the Japanese language, but one of the principal members of the team must retire in order to care for his ill wife. The team is remarkably small: a professor, a secretary who logs information into a computer, an editor-in-chief responsible for writing definitions and sorting words, and a salesman who finds the work excruciatingly boring.
With the departure of the editor-in-chief, the team finds itself in a bleak position. They need a successor, someone worthy of the task and, more importantly, capable of understanding the purpose behind writing a dictionary. It is a gargantuan undertaking, one expected to consume years of their lives.
Tell this synopsis to most people and you will probably invite a few yawns. After all, we are speaking about one of the most mundane objects in existence: a dictionary.
But consider what a dictionary actually is. It is an attempt to establish a central authority for a language, to record the words through which we interpret one another and communicate through this almost magical human construction of language and writing. Behind something as ordinary as a dictionary lies the question of how we make ourselves understood.
The heart of the movie is the discovery of talent and a sense of belonging in the most unlikely of characters, a subject often discussed but rarely witnessed in most corporations. Majime is a man of very few words and remarkably poor communication skills. Yet through his love for the work, he slowly perfects his craft.
Consider the motif here. It is not so dissimilar from the old artisanal traditions of Japan and Europe, from the relationship between master and apprentice, or from the life of a guild member. One's craft was not merely something performed during certain hours of the day in exchange for a salary. It could become an everlasting project, something to which a person adhered because it expressed a beautiful conception of their purpose in the world.
The absence of such purpose is one of the defining afflictions of modern life. It is not uncommon to see young people enter a crisis when confronted with an ordinary, repetitive, boring job. They have been told throughout their lives that they are more important than they appear to be, and yet the tasks they perform every day seem to possess very little importance at all. There is something here that resembles a false economy, one in which its products, its labor, and even its measures of achievement can become completely dissociated from the reality of human purpose.
The Great Passage, then, is the story of a man finding his place in this grandiose play of life.
Perhaps it is precisely through the mundane, through these slices of life, that we may discover a personal mission. In doing so, we sanctify ourselves. At the very least, we learn to see the world in superlatives: to perceive in ordinary reality something above its immediately visible form, and therefore to find reasons for demonstrating extraordinary resilience before the hardships that are so common to life.
Recently, I wrote about building a virtual monastery. To me, this is very analogous to what Richard Stallman did with the GNU Project. It became the purpose of his life and of the lives of many others who joined that undertaking, and from it an immense amount of societal wealth was generated.
There is another example that has occupied my thoughts recently.
I have become extremely interested in the NT kernel, and once again Microsoft surprised me with a phenomenal piece of software -- not to say that it does not have its problems; it most likely has plenty. During that adventure, I came across G. Pascal Zachary's Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft.
To my surprise, I found myself binge-reading it. What fascinated me was not merely the technical history of NT, but what the book reveals about a culture of personalism surrounding its creation. Several episodes immediately echoed, in my mind, something almost Virgilian: people bound to labor not merely because labor had to be performed, but because the work had become inseparable from their conception of themselves.
One passage in the history of NT captures both the ambition and the atmosphere of that era particularly well. Dave Cutler, the principal architect of NT, described himself as "one of these people who just don't make many mistakes". He then found himself stuck for weeks writing code simply to make NT boot after the system had grown beyond the capacity of their floppy disks.
Cutler swore at himself. His teammates, accustomed to receiving plenty of warm abusive language from him, openly mocked him in return:
"Would you like me to write the code? Or should we ask someone from another group to do it for you?"
There is something remarkable in that exchange. The group felt free enough to be cruel and free enough to disregard hierarchy, at least in the immediacy of the work. Cutler could be the architect of the entire system and still be ridiculed when he failed at something. To me, despite all of its harshness, this describes something of the culture of a free team: authority existed, but it did not entirely insulate a man from his peers.
On the personal side, however, what fascinates me most is what seems to have given NT its peculiar edge. Zachary describes Unix as Cutler's lifelong foe:
"Unix is like Cutler's lifelong foe […] It's like his Moriarty […] He thinks Unix is a junk operating program designed by a committee of Ph.D.s."
That is a wonderful way of understanding the project because it transforms NT from merely another operating system into a counterstroke.
Cutler was not simply constructing software according to a product specification. NT became an opportunity to embody, within a single technical vision, what he believed the rapidly evolving world of computers demanded, and to refuse surrender to the domination of Unix because he believed something better could be made. Ballmer's reassurance that the move toward Windows meant freedom from IBM likely mattered enormously in allowing the project to be understood in precisely those terms: not merely as corporate engineering, but as creative work.
There is something deeply attractive about the idea of having a foe. Not necessarily another person, nor even an enemy in the ordinary sense, but something against which one's work is defined. A problem, an idea, a system, an imperfection in the world that becomes intolerable enough that one feels compelled to answer it.
For Cutler, Unix seems to have occupied that role. NT was, in some sense, his attempt to wrestle with his Moriarty.
Computers are wonderful because they allow us to represent and apply aspects of the abstract with extraordinary concreteness. Ideas about order, language, architecture, communication, hierarchy, memory, isolation, and control can become actual working machinery. Because of this, a lifelong struggle conducted through software can become as real as any other form of creative labor.
One can spend years constructing an operating system for reasons not altogether different from those that might compel another person to write a dictionary, cultivate a field, construct a cathedral, or spend a lifetime painting.
And sometimes I think there is hardly anything more motivational than asking oneself:
Who is your foe?
Figure 2: The bust of Publius Vergilius Maro, my favorite poet.
Somehow this brings me back to the beginning of Virgil's Georgics:
"What makes the crops joyous, beneath what star, Maecenas, it is well to turn the soil, and wed vines to elms, what tending the cattle need, what care the herd in breeding, what skill the thrifty bees"
What strikes me about the Georgics is the dignity granted to labor. The subjects are, at first glance, profoundly ordinary: soil, vines, cattle, breeding, bees. Yet Virgil places them beneath the stars. Human work is not presented as something detached from the order of the world, but as participation in it.
Human life is bound to labor. But labor becomes dignified when it aligns us with something beyond its immediate execution—with the rhythms of nature, with an order from up high, or perhaps simply with a conception of the world sufficiently meaningful that we are willing to surrender years of our lives to bringing it into existence.
That, I think, is what The Great Passage manages to portray so beautifully. A dictionary need not merely be a dictionary. Programming an operating system need not merely be programming an operating system. Tending a vineyard need not merely be tending a vineyard.
The mundane does not cease to be mundane. Rather, through devotion, it acquires another dimension.
I wonder whether NT was something like that for Dave Cutler. Perhaps the dictionary was that for Majime. Perhaps GNU was that for Stallman.
This is not about ignoring reality. Quite the opposite. It is about finding something within reality worthy of devotion, and longing for a change so great that one becomes willing, indeed, to move mountains.