Fantasia on a Materialist Epiphany

Unfolding the mind of one youthful version of Alan Turing

To his great surprise his materialism is not so sad. He moves with greater ease and resilience and less fear. It is as though his eyes have suddenly come into focus from a nauseating blue and the whole world looks brilliant. All of his senses have sharpened so that colors and sounds and smells and textures are splendid and vibrant, his experience of them a heart-soaring joy. Every blade of grass glistens. The hard Cambridge wind batters respect out of him. The barren twist of every branch of every tree, even the weak fog of light, the whole of the world sings out to him as though he has never seen or heard anything before. With the sheer pleasure of this tactile awakening, his love of nature intensifies as though he has finally given over to her, wholly and without inhibition. Within days his spiritualism is no more than a mildly embarrassing, childish memory. In its place is calm, impervious materialism — nothing like the sad, bleak emptiness he feared. He would have a bad time trying to put it into words. No single word could mean this thing. He would have to write something lengthy with many caveats and tangents and even then he knows he would not successfully express the immediacy or the splendor of the visceral experience. Maybe in another's mind better words would come, but not in his. And so his mind offers him something simple. only one world comes to him over and again, and it could be only this — a word he doesn't often think to use: "beautiful." It is beautiful.

Janna Levin. A madman dreams of Turing machines

And so for day 2244
03.02.2013