Writing for an Air-Conditioned Data Center in the North

Or, being right in a wrong world

To get you caught up, a couple years ago I wrote a post in which I quoted a fragment of Holderlin’s poem In Lovely Blue:

Is there measure on earth? There is

None. No created world ever hindered

The course of Thunder.

And then I wrote:

That we cannot live according to our innate rhythms, but must force ourselves into Time’s Procrustean bed is a great and terrible wrong. I rebel against this state of affairs. Let measure go where it belongs: in the building of bridges and the dosages of medicines. But don’t let measure keep me from life and living.

My friend Chester asked me to sign a letter in support of his application as an Alien of Outstanding Ability—which is what they call “Special Experts” in America, a category that might soon be obsoleted, expertise being less and less in demand—but the letter he presented to me was so mechanical, so poorly written, that I couldn’t bear to sign my name to it. This was before the widespread use of AI, but you would have thought it had been written by ChatGPT-2. The awful prose roused my most annoying and pedantic mode. I felt a revulsion I was unable to overcome. So Chester, or his lawyer, or some poor paralegal, rewrote the damned letter at my request, and while I felt slightly bad, I still asked that it be done. The letter was destined to lie unread in a bureaucrat’s drawers, or more likely, a cloud computing service’s remote air-conditioned data center in a lost desert or the anonymous north, but that was maybe the point.

It was the pointlessness of the letter that made me want to fight for better prose. It was the only way of asserting my humanity in the face of the anonymizing mechanistic onslaught that is erasing us, filing us into slots, forcing us into places where our individuality, idiosyncracy and humanity are inconveniences rather than our very selves. But yes, probably only a symbolic gesture.

I read a book a few years ago by Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone, based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, a middle-aged, working class couple in Nazi Berlin who wrote postcards denouncing the Nazis and Hitler and left them in office hallways and other public places. All but a very few of the 200 postcards were turned in to the Gestapo, as the finders feared being caught with them, and eventually the Hempels were caught, imprisoned and beheaded.

A waste, one might say. They accomplished nothing—the Gestapo gloated over how the postcards had been turned in—and they suffered a needless death. But there is something beyond accomplishing something in this world. There are things better than staying alive. There are less recognized virtues, like dignity and decency. There are inner lives and secret triumphs and thoughts that in the thinking make us better than we are. There are sums no devil has fingers to count. There are irrefutably futile things eminently worth doing. There are hundreds, thousands of Otto and Elise Hampels whose names we don’t know. People unsuspected of heroism who remain unknown and unhonored.

Protest against injustice, even if it bears no fruit and is unseen. A postcard, a letter, a diary. One true email in a sea of nonsense. It may be the end of you, like the Hempel’s postcards, or Winston Smith’s diary. Go upright among those who are on their knees, among those with their backs turned, and those toppled in the dust, as Zbigniew Herbert writes. The national guard may come for you. But there it will stand, invisible, your protest, your testimony, your monument.