On Anathem and points of view

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If you’re a frequent reader of metacool, no doubt you’ve noticed that I’ve had a book parked on the nightstand for more than a month.  I’m pleased to report that I’ve spent the past month reading Anathem, the latest work by Neal Stephenson.  Actually, you don’t just read a Stephenson book like Anathem, you inhale it, such is the totality of the environment he’s able to  create.  Without giving away the plot — or even pretending to be able to summarize its complexity — let’s just say that the book explores topics as a varied as the space-time continuum, the concept of time itself, and the the notion of topology as destiny, all delivered in a tasty package of vivid characters and zesty dialog.

One of the many reasons I like Stephenson’s writing is that I always learn something about the process of bringing cool stuff to life.  One of the characters in Anathem is a very large clock.  The clock was designed a long time ago, and was built to last.  I admire the following passages from page 94 of the book, which are spoken by an engineer and a monk of sorts discussing the design of the clock, because of how to they speak to the concept of point of view:

“This just isn’t the way to do it!”

“Do what?”

“Build a clock that’s supposed to keep going for thousands of years!”

“Why not?”

“Well, just look at all those chains, for one thing!  All the pins, the bearing surfaces, the linkages — each one a place where something can break, wear out, get dirty, corrode… what were the designers thinking, anyway?”

“They were thinking that plenty of avout would always be here to maintain it.  But I take your point.  Some of the other Millennium Clocks are more like what you have in mind: designed so that they can run form millennia with no maintenance at all.  It just depends on what sort of statement the designer wanted to make.”

Exactly: a point of view is the set of conscious constraints a design thinker adopts in order to make a specific statement.  In the case of Anathem’s Millenium Clock, it is about a design which can be complex and nuanced because of a ready supply of labor to run and maintain its myriad mechanisms.  Another point of view could have been to design a very simple clock with few moving parts, the extreme version of this point of view being a sundial.

I submit to you that, as a rule, things that are remarkable are born from a strong point of view.  Those that are not remarkable are often the result of a muddled point of view, or no point of view at all.  Having a point of view requires making choices among many possible alternatives.  Having a point of view means having a vision of what good looks like as a means to make those choices.  You can feel it when something was created with that vision in mind.  And when that vision was not in play, you can feel the lack of it.

3 thoughts on “On Anathem and points of view”

  1. Inhale – Best definition I’ve heard for a NS reading experience. His best books “permeate” your mind / soul during their reading, and usually long after.

  2. I haven’t read Anathem (not sure it’s available yet in Australia), but I understood the final part of the section you quoted:
    “They were thinking that plenty of avout would always be here to maintain it. But I take your point. Some of the other Millennium Clocks are more like what you have in mind: designed so that they can run form millennia with no maintenance at all. It just depends on what sort of statement the designer wanted to make”
    as meaning that the clock was designed to *require* maintenance. A clock that’s designed to run without maintenance doesn’t require a collection of followers to maintain it. That is, the millennium clock was designed to be a social object to be engagd with and a point of focus for the faithful, rather than something remote from the faithful.

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