On Line 6 from Gangcheng Road, a man moves nut beads around a string. The diameter’s length is about half a meter. The man rotates the nut husks quickly. They look like miniature walnuts. They are polished and gleam a bit. He wears garishly coloured training shoes and a golden bracelet and a golden necklace with a jade-like pendant. His head is shaved, he has thick lips and his black shirt features a tiger. M50 is a “creative park” in Shanghai. There are shops and studios. There’s a small coffee shop. Inside hangs a punching bag with a sign asking its viewer not to punch it. A stuffed rhinoceros toy looks out at the punching bag. It’s a coffee shop less than it is a tattoo parlour. The business model is tattoos and coffee. A fat cat lolls about. It needs its owner to feed it water through a syringe because it lacks volition to consume water. There is a tattoo in progress. An outline of activity is visible through a frosted glass screen. The target …

Like a commute, a Renaissance garden is a buffer between outer landscape and internal living: outside and inside, departure and arrival. A good commute would be like the Piccolomini Palace garden in Pienza. Opposite me a young man’s neck cranes down to his phone. His ears are covered by green metallic headphones. His perception is limited. His breathing oscillates. An excited crescendo is followed by a sigh. He leans forward sometimes and his stale breath enters my range of olfactory perception. The fold-out bikers coalesce into a peloton on Whidborne Street. It is not safe to cross the road until they pass. A man in a grey tracksuit and a woman by the window argue. He has a can of Red Bull on his table. His black training shoes are immaculately black. He is probably forty years old. The argument pauses. He asks me whether they are in the right carriage to King’s Cross. Two men at Starbucks talk about God. “I know I should be praying” says the one wearing a light beige coat, …

“The signaler tried to terminate us early at the last station.” A new reason for a morning’s train delay. Illusions become stale. Once you’ve seen the Müller-Lyer arrows they won’t fool you again. Psychologists may at some point in the future run out of illusions to illustrate the mind’s foibles. Follow simple rules and study the effect. For example, take a deep breath before you use an electronic device. What happens? Most of us become obsessed with work at some point. How many calories are channeled into corporate endeavours? There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, …

A bulky man in a jacket wears a gold watch and brown suede slippers. The lowest button of his jacket is done up in spite of his girth and the rules. Good rules are based on good stories. The story for the button rule is that Edward VII became so fat he couldn’t do up the last button on his waistcoat. In solidarity members of the court all set their last button free. This jacket is cream, beige, green with an orange square pattern. Two North Americans: He is wide, bulky with a Mammut jacket over a checked business shirt. His attention is focused on his phone. His wife is bored. He shakes his legs like a novice poker player excited by a mad bluff. The woman is slender, thin, younger looking. Her ears sport two large pearl earrings, her ring fingers carry jewel-studded rings. She is looking at her phone as well, but it is not the greedy look of the man. She has no choice. He is not paying her any attention and the …

Between Coulsdon and Redhill from the train I saw decommissioned red telephone boxes stand close together in the cold weather. What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick’s skull. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton Perched by the window on a plane due to fly from Munich to London is a well-suited man with hair combed back from a widow’s peak who dominates more than the space he has paid for, V-legged, but one row behind the edge of alpha-class, where …

I get up early. An email woke me. I had forgotten to switch my phone to airplane mode. Airplane security has wrought itself into some of the daily operating systems of our earth-bound lives. Why should it be called “airplane” mode? Why not “offline” or “free” mode? To paraphrase Herb Simon, problems are more complex than our brains can handle, so we oversimplify and ignore parts of the problem statement, or fill in the unknown with our mental models of the way we think it should be, sometimes with dramatic effects on the results. Creating a useful problem statement is therefore a balancing act, a matter of providing enough solution-neutral information to capture important needs, without providing extraneous or misleading information. System Architecture, Global Edition Because the safety switch must be recognizable to strong-willed stewards in the economy classes of intercontinental flight services. An oversight like keeping your phone wired to the beating throb of cyberspace might change your life. You get up and have three or four hours more time to think or write …

The train is full. I settle into a seat in the first-class compartment. Here there is ample space while it is cramped outside. I recognize others who are not supposed to be here either. The man next to me is marking tests labeled “Human Synergistics: Life Styles Inventory, Description by others, LSI2.” How does he describe himself? Is someone who evaluates states of mind with standardized tests a coach, a psychologist or a consultant? He is a kind of priest taking confession through a score sheet. “If one wanted to express the value of the priestly existence in the briefest formula it would be: the priest alters the direction of ressentiment.” He wears a blue suit, sits with shoulders hunched. The crown of his head is bald. He is on a new set of test-papers, LSI1 this time: “Strengthening organizations through individual effectiveness.” (According to the website, LSI1 is a self-assessment of thinking styles, personal effectiveness and satisfaction while LSI2 is feedback provided by peers, managers, and/or sub-ordinates.) He goes through the 20 squares on the …

Old sustains new. Ruins are reductions to an essence. The past lies in fragments in order to occupy the present. When I saw Greek ruins for the first time they were distant and unfamiliar. Knowledge develops with familiarity. I find it difficult to identify with ancient temples. I’m completely unmoved on my first encounter with them. It takes a long time for me to delve into my thoughts and exercise my eye, before I can enjoy the simplicity and the wisdom, the power and grace of an ancient temple. Nikos Kazantakis In myth, Daedalus crafted statues that were life-like. Once complete they had to be tied up to stop them from running off. Familiarity itself is like a statue that is life-like. An object may be familiar today, but the thought may be lost tomorrow. We are bombarded by shards of familiarity all the time. Why would one last over another? For virtue may be under the guidance of right opinion as well as of knowledge; and right opinion is for practical purposes as good …

The layout of the courtyards and gardens of Zhu’s family mansion in Jianshui was no more familiar after spending a night there. The place is being extended. Overnight guests and their cigarettes are a threat to century old wood. There is a fear that the whole thing will go up in flames  ignited by recklessness. The new concrete-built garden will be in the Suzhou style. The Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou was built by a civil servant who had become disillusioned with the bureaucracy of government.  The garden-extension in Jianshui is being built by the bureaucracy itself. No real garden can compete with an imagined garden. 假作真時真亦假， 無為有處有還無。 Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real. Dream of the Red Chamber Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the foot …