The View from the Quai Voltaire

Friday has taken to living with the neighbours downstairs, for which I am grateful both to the neighbours and to him. We all live together in this latter-day reconstitution of the Palace Flophouse, even those who don't officially live here, but who have nowhere else to go. Anyway, crazily, the hocus-pocus about "clean diskettes" and "healing," when administered by the computer-savvy neighbour-lady, Carla (who was on the phone the whole while to her mother-in-law, a very great computer maven), worked: My PC is now virus-free. I gave Carla twenty dollars for her incomprehensible and inestimable services, and she seemed pleased with it.

My computer, my life. My man Friday, a better man, has just run downstairs with a clean floppy disk (or diskette) to acquire something from a neighbour's computer which, when my computer is booted up from it, will isolate, then heal the nasty NYB virus that I can only have succumbed to by booting from an infected disk or DVD. What the hell this meaneth my man Friday knoweth more about than I, and I just irritate him when I try to make sense of it. My model, I think, is Montgomery Burns: Think of his struggling with the "telephone-machine,"
and you have a clear image of how I handle post-technology technology. Or any kind of technology, for that matter. Like Mr. Burns, I try not to handle it. And like Mr. Burns who could not live without Wayne Smithers, I give thanks daily--even hour to hour--for my man Friday.

The View from the Quai Voltaire

The idea of "miniaturization technology," the technology of miniaturization, has possessed my soul the last couple of days, filling me with vast, vague speculation... What is "file compression"? Esssentially, as near as I can make it out, it means: eliminating redundancies in the algorithms of encoded data. Mouthful. But when you get to thinking about it, what isn't an algorithm? Genomes are algorithms. We, perhaps, are algorithms--Turing, the inventor of the pluperfect "universal algorithm" from which the modern computer is descended, evidently quite sincerely believed that humans have souls and that these are algorithms. Why is this all so reminiscent of Leibnitz and monads and infinitesimal calculus? Stuff about which I know less than nothing, but which all sounds so strangely, anachronistically alike. May we hope any day soon for a rebirth of the Rococo? A resurgence of counterpoint? Masked balls? Round-dancing? If we are indeed, in compact essence, sets among sets, algorithms among algorithms--more or less redundant--it seems possible.

The View from the Quai Voltaire FAQ

Where is the Quai Voltaire and what is it about? It's in Paris, France. Nowadays it's a good place to find a 4-star hotel. It is still a good place to go for a stroll--or, if you like, expatiate--but of course anywhere in Paris is good for that. Of particular symbolic and sentimental interest to us is that the quai Voltaire is where François Thibault (known as 'France' to his friends), in the 1850's, had a bookshop and intellectual clearing-house called the 'Librairie de France' (pun intended). Coffee was served, and there were chairs to sit in; some of the regulars (among them the brightest, best-informed men of the age) even having their 'own' chairs that nobody else was allowed to sit in. Talk was mostly political, though it ranged far afield; and, whatever it was, France Thibault kept abreast of it and added his share. Amazingly, the Librairie de France was also a fair commercial success, and enabled Thibault to retire in modest comfort when he sold it late in life--but that's nothing to us. The perspective I'm trying to frame here is the by-his-bootstraps, self-taught but world-worthy, intellectual integrity represented by France Thibault and his Librairie.

The new thing in my life is that somehow I have gotten to be old. Not just no-trifling-with-life middle-aged, but old. This means, basically, that sooner than I like to think, I will be dead. Then, nothing will matter--but till then, my intention is to concentrate my dwindling faculties and capacities on the things that do matter, and, as always, on trying to figure out what those things are. There are precious few advantages to being old (certainly not wisdom), but there are some: One's piano technique just keeps getting better and better. If one has assiduously read many French novels, essays, plays and short stories over a long life, one finds at the end of it that one can also speak French, and understand it when people speak it to you. And, as they say, the years really do go quick. One learns to let loose of the reins, so to speak, and let life take its head (it will anyway).