Anathem
by Neal Stephenson
6 cardsStephenson's 2008 novel of cloistered scholar-monks: how to keep your mind yours. Ration what comes in, filter it through people, question it with old tools.
Don't believe it because you want it to be true
Diax chased the fortune-tellers out of the temple with a gardener's rake and left one rule behind: never believe a thing only because you wish it were true. The avout repeat it the way other people say grace. Erasmus admits the hard part out loud: he was still young enough to forget the Rake completely whenever he fell in love with some idea. That confession is the whole mechanism. Wanting-to-believe is the one bias nobody outgrows, so you build a habit that catches you in the act.
Ripped from the novel: "one should never believe a thing only because one wishes that it were true." And: "you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it." And Erasmus on himself: "I was still young enough that I could let myself forget about Diax's Rake when I was in love with some idea."
— In our words · Source: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
Let the world in on schedule, not on demand
The math opens its gates for ten days, then shuts them for one year, ten years, a hundred, a thousand. Nobody inside checks the news in between, because there is no news to check. The outside world arrives on the calendar. Attention is the scarce resource, so they ration it with architecture: stone walls and a timetable.
Ripped from the novel: "The aut in which a math opens its gates for a period of ten days, during which time the avout are free to come and go extramuros, and Saeculars are free to come in, sightsee, and talk to the avout."
— In our words · Source: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
Don't drink from the feed. Find someone who chewed it first
Orolo refuses to point a camera at the world. Aiming a recorder at something, he says, doesn't collect what's meaningful to him. He needs a person to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words. The raw stream is just raw material. The valuable layer is a trusted mind that did the chewing for you.
Ripped from the novel: "at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words."
— In our words · Source: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
Pick your media the way you pick your food
The avout's only media are chalk, ink, and stone. They chose those three on purpose, for what each one does to a mind. Chalk fades, so you rewrite and rethink. Ink commits you to the page. Stone outlives you, so you only carve what deserves to last. Every medium trains its user. They made the choice deliberately. Most people just inherit whatever is newest and let it train them by accident.
Ripped from the novel: "Living as we do under the Cartasian Discipline, our only media are chalk, ink, and stone,"
— In our words · Source: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
Ask the 500-year-old question
Orolo interviews a man from the outside world using a question list five centuries old. "Do your neighbors burn one another alive?" He isn't being quaint. Old questions cut past the novelty of the moment straight to the permanent things: fear, ritual, power, belief. Fresh takes go stale in a day. The old question is still sharp because it has survived every previous novelty.
Ripped from the novel: "Do your neighbors burn one another alive?" was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
— In our words · Source: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
The builders volunteered for the cage
The theors built the Everything Killers. Afterward they agreed to be segregated from the rest of society, and that agreement became the Reconstitution. Nobody imposed the walls from outside. The people who built the dangerous thing locked themselves up. The cage was the profession taking responsibility for what it was capable of.
Ripped from the novel: "the complicity of theors in the development of this praxis led to universal agreement that they should henceforth be segregated from non-theorical society, a policy that when effected became synonymous with the Reconstitution."
— In our words · Source: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)