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The Résumé

Artania could sense the stares stabbing her from all directions. She pretended not to notice them, looking directly forward, even though people could not see her eyes. She switched off the transparency of her augmented-reality glasses, so all the others could see was the black, curved glass hugging the upper half of her face. She stayed straight, perhaps a bit too tense, on the grippy surface of her electric hoverboard, commanding it to move forward by a deliberate tilt of her feet.

The hoverboard was the reason people were staring at her. It was a relic of the past – one of the early versions of the electric mobility devices that exploded in popularity about a decade ago and that were hopelessly obsolete now, in 2034. Here, on a cobbled street of Montmartre, among a dense crowd filled with the most advanced personal transportation contraptions imaginable, Artania’s board was as out-of-place as a horse carriage in a showroom full of luxury concept cars.

Paris was the point of convergence of the new avant-gardists, who were extremely attuned to the latest developments in technology and art. The history has come full circle in Montmartre, which once again, as in the end of the XIX century, has become home to the revolutionaries of the art world.
Coming here took all the courage Artania could muster. Her dream, and the reason for coming to Paris, was to join the famously secretive Bureau for Art and Technology Affairs – an arm of the INTERPOL that dealt with art-related crimes. She didn’t really have a plan of how to do it. As everyone else, she knew that the Bureau’s headquarters were in Paris, and that she couldn’t apply on her own initiative. Hopefully, they would approach her if they thought that she had what it took to work for them. It was also a common perception, perhaps cultivated by the Bureau itself, that what they demanded of their recruits was a rare blend of analytical and artistic skills, some would even say, talent. One had to assume that all the Bureau’s agents also had above-average athletic abilities, but that was an easily satisfied requirement – there were many young men and women, who could hit hard and run fast. Presumably, the Bureau would teach them to shoot straight too. Such was the image of an elite warrior of the New Renaissance era, and to become one was what Artania wanted most of all.

Getting recruited by the Bureau was Artania’s all-consuming goal. She dedicated the last decade of her twenty-two years to forging herself into the image of the Bureau’s agent, which she created in her imagination. The bar that she set for herself was high. Considering that she didn’t know where the real bar was, aiming high was a reasonable idea. She decided that she would have to establish herself as a leading force in both the art and the tech worlds. In fact, she would have to be so undeniably strong in these spheres that nobody, including the Bureau, would be able to ignore her.

The tech part was relatively easy. Artania always knew that any mathematical puzzle or a piece of code would eventually unravel if she kept patiently turning it in her mind and poking at it from different directions, never releasing from the firm grip of logic.

Art was trickier. She did have true passion for it from the earliest years, and through countless hours of doodling, painting, taking photos with various cameras and experimenting with graphics software, she developed some formidable skills. But who was to say if she had real talent? Sure, parents, friends and teachers always praised her as an artist, but she mostly dismissed their praise, attributing it to kindness. In order to be noticed by the Bureau, she would need to truly embody the artistic power. She needed to have style. And style wasn’t possible to acquire by hours of hacking, as one would do with a piece of computer code or a golf swing. It was even less possible to fake it.

And Artania did feel like a fake right now. She was obviously failing the test. She was not fitting in with this techno-artistic elite.

*

The crowd was filled with the latest tech, mostly gadgets for creating images, holograms and for interacting with virtual reality. There was also abundance of electric skateboards, motorized footwear and scooters. The reason that the contemptuous glances at Artania’s hoverboard did not escalate into open mockery was the impressively large and tough-looking backpack on her back. Purpose-built for carrying video gear, the bag was clearly state-of-the-art, and one could reasonably assume that it contained state-of-the-art equipment. Artania’s clothes, backpack, as well as her virtual ID that was visible to anyone with an augmented-reality eyewear (probably everyone in the crowd) did not contain any indication that she was affiliated with a large design firm. While she certainly didn’t look like a high-flying Parisian artist or agent, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t turn out to be a pro.

“You see, these provincial dilettantes, who come to concur the big city – they are hardly better than amateurs. It’s a pity, really. They watch a few clickbait videos on the Net and think they are the new van Gogh. The truth is, they don’t have resources even to buy decent gear. And the gear is practically all that matters these days.”

There was a pause.

“See this girl, for example,” continued the calm women’s voice. “One look at the contraption she is riding on, and you can figure her entire résumé.”

“This device would be even curios if it wouldn’t be so sad,” added the woman. “I’d offer to buy it from her to display with other antiques in my studio, but this would probably deprive her of her only means of transport.”

Artania heard this monologue in crystal-clear, digitally-enhanced sound through her active headphones, which were barely visible in her ears and could be mistaken for minimalistic jewelry. She blushed, but continued staring forward. The woman’s words echoed her fear: she was a fake, she had no business being here. She heard her pulse in her ears.

Gradually, on the back of Artania’s mind, another thought began to stir. It was something her mother told her after a long hug, before Artania boarded a supersonic flight to Paris: “Don’t let anyone tell you what you are worth as a person. You’ve worked very hard. You have great skills and a great heart. Nobody can take that away from you.”

An orange arrow in the corner of her head-up display indicated the direction, from which the women’s remark came from. There was no pretending that she didn’t hear it.

Artania pressed on her right heel, simultaneously pushing her left toes down, abruptly spinning her hoverboard towards the woman’s voice and flicking the transparency of her glasses on with a wrist gesture. She found herself staring, point-blank, at a tall, brown-haired woman in her thirties. The lady was casually resting her elbow on the handlebars of the latest-model German self-balancing scooter. Besides the beautiful machine, Artania noticed that she had only a single piece of tech. It was a thin, transparent tablet computer, which the lady carried on a metallic chord slung over one shoulder, like a handbag. The tablet looked understated. It had several tiny camera lenses located along the edges, and its screen was displaying a slowly-rotating abstract 3D model that matched the colour of the woman’s eyes and that of her long, floating jacket. The tablet was a truly impressive device, which Artania immediately noticed – an organically grown computer, likely with enormous computational power for its size.

Artania’s sudden pirouette and piercing stare apparently had no effect on the woman, who continued talking to her companion, a slim young man in a leather outfit, straddling an electric motorbike. The man had his helmet on, and the upper half of his face was covered by a black visor.

“This kind of board was all the rage years ago, before the AI. I am surprised the battery is still working,” – the lady pointed on Artania’s board with her eyes.

“Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing that you were making fun of me behind my back,” – Artania’s voice was slightly high with indignation.

“Curious, isn’t it, that people don’t get what it takes to compete in the tech world these days,” continued the lady.

Artania’s head-up display showed that her heart rate increased. She felt insulted, but strangely, the self-doubt that was consuming her moments ago was gone. She was confident that the woman was wrong. Artania did know the importance of high-tech tools in her trade. And she was confident that the gear she had in her backpack could give the woman’s fancy tablet a run for its money. She inched even closer on her board.

“Madame, why do you think you can make fun of me and make assumptions of my tech literacy?”

The woman turned to look directly at Artania and said, after a pause: “I wasn’t making fun of you, young lady. I was making fun of the board you are riding on.” She released Artania from her gaze and turned again to her companion.

Artania stepped off the board, pulled one arm from the strap and swung the backpack to the front of her body. Holding it horizontally across her chest, she touched the quick-access panel. It flashed her monogram, “A”, as an indication that her biometrics were recognized. The zipper illuminated around the perimeter and opened with a muted beep. She pulled out a thin rectangular box made of chitin, which immediately transformed in her hands. The organic exo-skeleton retracted, revealing a sensor of a lensless camera. Artania’s fingers reflexively found the shutter button.

“Would you like me to take your friend’s portrait? You can compare it with the pictures you take with your tablet and decide if it might be overdue for an upgrade.”

The woman’s eyes scanned Artania’s camera, slightly worried look momentarily flashing across her face.

The thin man leaned slightly toward her and said in a low tone: “Madame, I will take my leave now, before people start taking photos of us.” With that, he put his hands on the handlebars of the bike, which came to life with a low hum of the powerful electric motor.

The woman nodded and turned to Artania.

“I can see that you’ve just arrived here and are eager to make a name for yourself. But because you apparently don’t know who I am, I’ll give you a piece of advice: spend some time studying the field you are planning to enter before barging in.”

The woman stepped onto her scooter, which immediately whisked her away through the crowd, leaning nimbly into the turns.

*

Artania remained there for moment. She felt good for standing up for herself, but her self-doubt was starting to flood back. “She is probably right,” Artania thought. “What was I thinking – coming here to joint the Bureau, without knowing even whom to talk to and what to say? Besides, it all might be coming down to having the latest gadgets and computing power after all. With the AIs capable of writing code and generating art, who really needs humans anymore?”

She slowly folded the camera back into its shell and stowed it into the backpack, closing it with a touch of her finger. The bag beeped, flashed her initial again, and Artania swung it back over her shoulders.

She didn’t notice that a sheet of paper slid out of the backpack and landed on the cobbled sidewalk.

Artania picked up her heavy, nearly-discharged hoverboard under her arm and started walking down the hill. She wasn’t going to give up that easily. Tomorrow will be another day that might bring better luck.

*

As Artania was rounding the corner of the narrow street, a middle-aged man with closely-cropped gray hair and rimless AR glasses stepped out of the crowed and picked up the sheet dropped by Artania.

It was a pen-and-ink sketch of Parisian rooftops that Artania made on the first evening of her arrival as a part of her daily practice to hone her observation and drafting skills.

The man looked at the sketch for a long time. The pattern of the ink lines led his eyes into the page. Subtle details in the treatment of perspective – deliberate deviations from the strict rules of nature – made him subconsciously aware that it was not an AI-generated image. The composition reminded him of the compressed perspective effect of old-school telephoto lenses. Despite the startling boldness of the composition and the roughness of the penwork, the image was incredibly balanced. It was imbued with the inner strength that difficult to define, but which was undeniable. It was the same kind of boldness that he just witnessed in the girl, who confronted the leader of the largest international art crime organization – the woman he has been tracking.

The man turned the paper over and back, looking for the signature, and finally found the initials concealed among the pen strokes at the bottom of the image: “AO”. Not much, but not a problem – he will find her. The man smiled. It turned out to be a good day after all. This young lady couldn’t have left him with a better résumé even if she wanted to. She was just the right type that he was looking for: good eye, sharp technique, knowledge of the craft,.. and something else that was difficult to put into words, but that was shouting from the paper he held in his hand. Talent.

The man pulled a thin folder from his leather shoulder bag and carefully slipped the sketch into it. He sealed the folder with a gesture of his index finger. It beeped, indicating the lock activation, and its cover briefly flashed a logo consisting of a globe, scales, olive branches and a sword, with the text below in pale blue letters: “Bureau for Art and Technology Affairs”.

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On getting old(er)

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about getting old more and more often. Probably, this is related to my Mom’s recent birthday, but likely also to my own transitioning through the somewhat arbitrarily-defined middle age. I certainly notice more discussions of the coming-to-terms-with-your-own-approaching-death – kind of musings in what I read (outside of work, naturally; my work-related reading could indeed bore an unprepared reader to death, but that would be just an unfortunate side effect of my research area).

I’ve just finished listening to an audiobook called “Happy” by Derren Brown. It is another modern take on the Stoic philosophy, and has an insightful section related to our (human’s, in general) relationship with the older generation throughout our lives. At any point in our lives, we generally view the old people as un-cool and implicitly think and act as if we would not be like them in a similar situation. More generally, we think in terms of “us vs. them” towards the old, even though, ironically, we will almost definitely be old ourselves (that is, if we a lucky and healthy enough to live to the old age, of course).

A line of thought that I found helpful in that regard goes like this: consider that we’ve been aging since the day of our birth and that, generally speaking, in the majority of cases, it has been a positive experience – we gradually became more capable intellectually and also developed individual character. So it probably wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume, that we will continue refining our individuality and intellectual capacity, at least up to a certain point.

Here is another neat mental exercise that I consider a worthwhile takeaway from the book. It is generally easy to imaging telling ourselves: “If I had a chance to talk to my younger self, I’d give them this advice:..” It should be possible, therefore, to a forward-projecting version of this thought experiment: “If my older self would have a chance to talk to me right now, what advice would they gave me?” Granted the hindsight is clearer than forward-seeing, but some insight could still be gained.

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Character vs personality

Esse Quam Videri (To be rather than to seem)
— state motto of North Carolina

For the second time in a little while, I came across a reference to a paradigm shift in the literature and culture of personal development from the “character ethic” to the “personality ethic” that occurred in the early XX century. I’ve been listening to Stephen R. Covey’s “7 habits of highly successful people” book, which holds this shift as the defining thesis. The character ethic has been the prevalent paradigm in the old days, being popularized by Ben Franklin’s autobiography, among other works. The main premise is that a person needs to develop one’s own character in order to become successful in life. For example, Franklin identified 13 virtues to develop: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility. From a practical standpoint, he would pick a single virtue at a time and work on it for a fixed period of time (about a week) before moving to the next one. He would repeat the cycle every 13 weeks.

The personality ethic is exemplified by Dale Carnegie’s 1936 book “How to win friends and influence people“. The main difference with the character-centered mindset is that the objective is to improve the way one interacts with other people in order to create the most favourable impression on them. For example, you would be advised cultivate an interest is hobbies of people whom you’d like to influence, employ mnemonics to remember the names of new acquaintances, etc.

The argument in the “7 habits” book is that the principles of the character ethic are more fundamental, and that the social success would naturally follow as a by-product of character improvement. I certainly like this idea, but would probably not dismiss the personality-centered approach either. Maybe, consistently acting the way a person with a strong character would eventually leads to an underlying character transformation, in a way becoming a self-fulfilled prophecy. Still, this “faking until you make it” approach seems to be a roundabout way to personal development for at least two reasons. First, at some level, you would always have to convince yourself that the personality traits that you are trying to develop are, in fact, ethical and not purely manipulative. Second, people are generally quite good at seeing through a personality if it is not genuine, which can interfere with communication. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1875 and quoted in the “7 habits” book in a slightly streamlined form for the modern audience: “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say.”

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Desirable difficulties

While listening to an audiobook called “Range” by David Epstein, I’ve come across the concept related to learning called desirable difficulties. These are features of the learning process that, as the name implies, create difficulties for the student but improve the long-term learning outcome.  There is compelling evidence that increasing the difficulty of tasks is beneficial in the long-term, even though it slows down the initial progress.

This is counter-intuitive, and it creates a conundrum, both for the student and for the teacher: one needs to trust the process to continue viewing the difficulties as desirable even in the face of decreased performance, e.g. relatively poor test results. There is some consensus, though, on how desirable difficulties can be created by the teacher or by the students themselves (the key assumption here is that everyone agrees that the difficulties are, in fact, desirable).

One tactic is retrieval practice, which is, basically, testing. Again, it’s been shown that spending some learning time on testing, including self-testing, is beneficial. It sounds like a truism, but exerting effort in retrieving the information that needs to be learned helps with the learning. Flashcards is a typical example of a retrieval practice tool, and progressively increasing the size of the stack of flashcards is a desirable difficulty.

Not surprisingly, feedback is important for learning, i.e. the student needs to receive correct information about their performance. Surprisingly, though, delaying the feedback, or the test itself, is a desirable difficulty. This idea clashes somewhat with the huge body of research that shows that immediate feedback is beneficial for building skills, being a key characteristic of so-called “kind learning domains,” e.g., classical music, golf, chess, etc. I think there is no logical problem here, though. Kind learning domains facilitate reliable immediate progress, while “wicked domains”, where feedback is delayed, are conducive to better long-term learning. I should note, that delayed feedback can be intentionally used in a kind domain, and that wicked domains are sometimes characterized by misleading feedback, which is definitely not conducive to learning and what makes these fields “wicked” in the first place.

Another neat technique for introducing a desirable difficulty is interleaving. Here is an example from the “Range” book. Suppose that you are studying painting styles of van Gogh, Picasso, Monet and Kandinsky with the goal of being able to identify the author of a painting by their style during an upcoming visit to a museum. If you are using flashcards with reproductions of various paintings on one side and the painter’s name on the back to self-test your knowledge, it would be more difficult, but beneficial in the long-term, to make a deck of flashcards containing the works of all these painters, rather than studying them one-by-one.

When I was a graduate student, one of the professors in our department used to joke that one qualifies for a post-graduate degree not so much on the basis of acquired knowledge or on the level of contribution to the field, but on the certain amount of suffering one accumulates during the studies, e.g., suffer for two years – get a Master’s degree, suffer for four more years – get a PhD. It appears that there is some truth in this joke – the amount of struggling along the way correlates with slower initial progress, but also with deeper knowledge down the road.

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Playing a role

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”
— William Shakespeare

I’ve just finished listening to an audiobook by Michael Hyatt called “Free to focus“. Reading personal productivity guides has become a bit of a hobby for me, so they often seem like a blur. After all, there are only so many ways one can spin the same idea. I began listening to this book expecting as much, but was pleasantly surprised by the fresh take on the day-to-day tactics of grappling with the (not really new) underlying concept of prioritization and execution of multiple tasks that compete for ones attention. I particularly liked the framework of viewing your life as consisting of separate roles (e.g., professional, family, etc.) Hyatt side-steps perhaps the most challenging issue of prioritizing these roles (perhaps, the Shakespeare’s quote above gives an approach that is not so bad – your primary role is related to your age, i.e. your stage in life). Within a given role, however, he suggests classifying your activities into three categories: on-stage (the primary activities defining your role), backstage (development of skills and setting up the conditions for performing the on-stage work) and off-stage (activities that are deliberately not related to your primary role, but that are necessary for recharging and avoiding burnout). He then suggests to plan on the weekly time scale, allocating about two days for the “on-stage” activities, two days for unplugging from work (being “off-stage”) and the rest – for “backstage” development work. The key advice is to be mindful about not slipping into backstage work during your primarily on-stage days.

For me personally, this model is a bit too rigid, because the academic work is notoriously unstructured, with all the benefits and disadvantages that it entails. Still, it is comforting to have this theatrical framework as a conceptual guide as I roll through the weeks of a typical academic term. To throw in another quote, this one by Dwight Eisenhower, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

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Invention vs. discovery

Mathematics has been a big part of my life since middle school, when, out of curiosity and with encouragement of my teacher, I became interested in solving mathematical puzzles and participating in inter-school competitions. Subsequently, it led me to studying applied math in the university and later doing research and teaching fluid mechanics as an engineering professor. Ironically, ever since research became my career, I somehow stopped being particularly curious about the mathematics itself, and started treating it as tool for doing my work.

About a year ago, I read book called “Is God a mathematician?“ by Mario Livio. It prompted me to think about math from less utilitarian and more philosophical perspective. A curious feature of math is that it can be considered both as a human creation (e.g., a language that is useful for performing calculations and expressing laws of physics) and as something existing on it’s own and what humans only discover (e.g., like the natural laws themselves). It seems that the latter aspect is definitely present, despite Albert Einstein’s belief that math is, essentially, a set of human-made tools. In 1960, Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate physicist, even wrote a paper in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” which discussed precisely that – how it is possible that exercises in “pure” mathematics prompt post-factum discoveries of natural phenomena.

As a personal takeaway from reading Livio’s book, I feel a bit better about spending time thinking about mathematics per se without worrying whether it is particularly relevant for my field of research or whether a particular research question has already been answered. It is also kind of amusing to learn that even intellectual giants like Richard Feinmann went through a variation of this thinking process with surprising results, e.g. when he consciously decided to apply himself to re-tracing the steps of a well-known solution describing spinning plates that eventually lead to a Nobel-prize-level breakthrough.

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Self-determination theory in action

I’ve just finished listening to a good audiobook called “Indistractable” by Nir Eyal and Julie Li. Since I’ve started keeping track of what I read/listen to in a series of annual blog posts, I developed a personal criterion for the quality of the book based on whether it makes me want to read more on some of the topics it covers. in that sense, “Indistractible” is good because it pointed me towards several rabbit holes to explore. One of them is the self-determination theory (SDT) in psychology. It argues that for achieving optimal performance, in addition to (indeed, more than) the carrot-and-stick of external motivation, people need emotional nourishment in the form of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to agency – the ability to make independent decisions and take responsibility for their consequences.

Competence is the opportunity to become better at the activity.

Relatedness is the social aspect of the activity – it is the sense of appreciation of your achievement by other people.

My daughter told a story the other day that perfectly illustrated the SDT concept. She entered middle school this year, and they were having a get-together with other students during a recess, where everyone shared a talent they had. My daughter showed a combo of hip-hop moves that she’d been working on in a dance class outside of school. She was delighted that it was met with enthusiasm, particularly by older students. Clearly, she was quite happy about her hip-hop endeavours and was keen to keep exploring it further – thinking about getting together with other interested kids to learn new break-dance moves. It was just what SDT requited: she had autonomy (hip-hop was her activity of choice), competence (several years of practice) and relatedness (the other kids like this stuff and want to learn it).

I thought that perhaps by being conscious about the daily emotional diet, where autonomy, competence and relatedness of the mundane activities play a role of macro-nutrients, we could deliberately manufacture positive experiences like that, rather that occasionally stumbling upon them.

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What I learn while learning to play violin

When my daughter started taking violin lessons, I joined her in this adventure without having any prior music experience until that point. I still enjoy keeping her company, but more than my miserable advances in playing skills I enjoy learning about the learning process itself and the techniques for developing complex skills that have been distilled in the musical field over the centuries. I should mention that the mathematical aspects of music and the physics of sound generation are always fascinating to me, since they are very close to to what I do professionally as a professor in fluid mechanics.

Once of the things about complex task performance that caught my attention recently was a profound comment made by out teacher, Simon, about multitasking. “A popular view these days is that multitasking is not possible,” he said, “but in fact, I am doing it right now: I am breathing, standing, holding my bow in one hand and my violin in the other, looking at the music score in front of me and talking to you.” “The trick is,” he continued, “to turn all these separate things into one action and mentally treat them as such.”

I found this mental model quite helpful in my music practice. There is one exercise in particular, where you set a metronome at a given tempo and play a sequence of 4 notes, 1 note per beat, in a single draw of the bow. Then, you double the tempo of your playing, keeping the metronome and the bow speed constant – that is, you would play 2 notes per beat, and 2 sequences of the 4 notes per length of the bow. After that, you quadruple the tempo: 4 notes per beat, 4 note sequences per bow. And so on (I couldn’t get past the third step yet on even the easiest of the note sequences). The trick that seems to be working for me for this exercise is to treat the group of notes that are played on the same beat of the metronome as one motion of the fingers of my left hand. So I would focus on individual notes (and fingers that play them) in the first pass, on a pair of notes on the second, and on a group of four notes (as a single motion of the fingers) on the third.

This apparent work-around for the “there is no such thing as multitasking” idea also came up in the book I am listening to (“Indistractable” by Nir Eyal and Julie Li). This phenomenon is well-known in psychology, and it’s called multi-modal stimulation and perception. It means that two or more of our sensory systems – vision, hearing, proprioception (perception of the body position), smell and taste – can process information simultaneously. There is even evidence that human performance of certain tasks can be enhanced if multi-modal stimulation is present. For what it’s worth, I certainly like working while listening to music or even while sitting in a relatively-noisy environment such as a cafe.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that multitasking in a conventional sense of the word is possible (otherwise, as Nir Eyal points out, we could listen to two different podcasts at the same time – one in each ear). But if it’s possible to combine many complex activities into a single one, such as “teaching a violin lesson”, perhaps by applying this mindset wider we can manage something like “going through a day” or even “living a happy life” without being pulled in a million directions by conflicting goals and obligations. Perhaps, there is no conflict, and this goals and obligations are all part of one thing. And, with some practice, we can do one thing at a time.

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Travel photos

This summer, we took or first post-COVID long-distance trip. I had a conference in France, and my wife and daughter joined me. Afterwards, we followed up the conference with a few days of family vacation in Antibes. It was a great trip overall, and it reminded us how much we missed travelling. Looking back at my photos, though, I realize that it has always been a bit of challenge for me to enjoy the experience of the foreign locale at the moment. Interestingly, my photography interest is both the reason and the cure for this difficulty.

This disconnect with reality is described by Anthony De Mello in his book “Awareness” (the book has been largely a disappointment, but that is a different topic). He says that most people plan their vacations, book flights an, but when they get there, they immediately start worrying about their flight back home. So they are not fully present to experience their travel destination. They take pictures, but they miss the smells, the tastes, the sense of the place. So people bring back pictures of the places they didn’t actually see.

On the other hand, taking photos gives me focus by providing motivation for visiting specific sites, waiting for a certain time, when the sun hits the subject with the golden light. These are the moments that I tend to remember afterwards. During this trip, for example, we were having dinner at a street-side restaurant just steps from the Eiffel Tower, and I kept popping out from the table to peek across the corner to see if the setting sun had hit the tower.

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Samurai Tales book

While browsing through my bookshelf, I stumbled on a book called “Samurai Tales” by Romulus Hillsborough. I bought this book at an airport, during one of my first trips to Japan. I read it then, during the flight, and found it to be a nice match for my interest in Japanese history and all things related to kendo, while unmistakably written for a by a foreigner. Incidentally, an advice for foreigners that I came across early on in my becoming fascinated with Japan and found to be absolutely essential for adjusting to living there – while being eager to adapt to the Japanese culture, do not try to “become Japanese”. First, this attempt would be doomed to failure by its objective impossibility, and second, being authentic (yet considerate to others) is perhaps the most valuable trait that allows one to bridge the cultural gap.

This time, what caught my attention was the photo on the cover of the “Samurai Sketches” book. It’s the last portrait of Sakamoto Ryoma taken in 1885, just days before his assassination. The remarkable feature is how relaxed he looks. I realize of course that this is probably due to the slow shutter speed used in those times. Yet, the contrast between the national-scale turmoil of the Meiji Restoration period and the personal-scale tranquility that the key players of that drama were able to project, even if temporarily, is amazing. Somehow, when I initially read this book, I didn’t pay much attention to this aspect, being mostly engrossed in the excitement of the quintessential samurai saga of loyalty, individual bravery and martial arts. This time, I am looking forward to re-reading it from a different perspective.