My life as an encyclopedic narrative
I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
So I am currently reading Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and it is one of the most painful books I've chosen to read "for pleasure." The reason why is because every time the story gets going, Melville interrupts it with one or more chapters on more than you ever wanted to know about whales, whale hunting, whales in art, how whales are eaten, the different parts of the whale, whale oil, different whale species, and so forth. You basically get an 1850s whale encyclopedia, along with a story that is being told on the side. Or so it seems.
I almost quit that book. But I decided to stick with it, and I'm very glad that I did. Because it turns out what Melville is doing is giving you an exhaustive characterization of the big mysterious whale to show you that when you really get into the granular details of the whale, it becomes almost impossible to simply put it into a category in your mind and be done with it. He has this chapter in there called The Whiteness of the Whale that is almost a compression of this, the way the psalms are a compression of the Bible. In this chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, argues that while the color white is associated with heavenly things, like angels, it can also be associated with things like blankness or the inhospitable arctic in the winter, in which case white can also represent something closer to hell. The whale they are hunting, Moby Dick, is of course the color white.
What happens when you read a chapter like this, alongside exhaustive chapters on all things whales? Well, you start to associate the whale with something closer to God. Not the nice bearded man in the clouds sort, but closer to the Old Testament God, where you don't really know what he is. Nice in some passages, horrifying in others (hey Abraham, kill your son!). At the secular level, it's the whole "the more you know, the more you realize you don't know" thing. But on steroids.
Anyway, I found out that this is actually a genre in literary fiction, called the encyclopedic narrative. The general definition is a book that tries to represent an entire field of knowledge within the story itself. Other examples include Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow.
Why should you care about this genre, if I've already said that it's painful to read? Well, I just got back from Rome. Every day, we visited another multi-thousand-year-old thing. And when I got to my Airbnb, I would go on ChatGPT and ask it about various aspects of things that I saw that day. Be it paintings or monuments, or the history of gladiatorial combat, or whatever else. This is how I processed the information that I got.
Especially important was the Sistine Chapel. It was the second time I have been there and one of the only places in the world where I have been beaten into submission by art. There were all kinds of little corners that I had questions about. Various characters in The Last Judgement. The mind-bending shade of blue behind the characters in the same painting. A painting on the wall depicting Jesus giving keys to this bearded man. Even a small piece of ceiling that was missing.
What did I get out of the extra inquiries? Well, that shade of blue described above is called ultramarine. The rocks responsible for the color are mined out of the mountains of Afghanistan, and then sent on complex trade routes around Europe and Asia. In other words, getting the rocks needed to make the color is a ton of work. So it was only used in the most sacred parts of a painting. Depictions of the Virgin Mary for example. But here, Michelangelo uses it as the entire background of The Last Judgement, which covers the entire wall of the chapel. This painting depicts Jesus returning at the end of history, to determine who goes to heaven, and who goes to hell.
Now, thanks to innovations in chemistry ultramarine is easy to make synthetically and therefore quite cheap, and found all over the place. For example, it is commonly used in whitening products to counteract yellowing. You'll find it in rubber, cement, soaps, paper, cosmetics, and the background of The Last Judgement, in one of Earth's holiest sites, which people go on pilgrimages to visit, featuring a figure that more than two billion people believe is the son of God. Reminds me again of the chapter on whiteness described earlier. Is this blue sacred? Profane? Humdrum? Expensive? Cheap? Boring? Fascinating? "Yes."
But my point here is this: there were amazing tour guides and explanatory material at each site, but no one person can answer all the questions, do the proper ELI5 to a guy like me who is not a historian, or answer follow-up questions that I have later that day. It would otherwise take me a very long time to collect all the proper information and whatever else if I was just googling it, but current AI systems make getting a direct answer to a question much, much easier.
In sum, this has sort of turned into a general protocol as I go about my day. Whatever I'm doing, I ask questions to ChatGPT (or whatever AI system…ChatGPT is sort of like saying "Kleenex" for tissues) that would otherwise have led me down weird internet rabbit holes and whatever else without the LLM interface blocking me from all the clickbait, or in the case of Wikipedia, the infinite hyperlinks. Today for example, while I was waiting for my toast this morning, I asked about the chemistry around the toasting of bread, in which case I learned about the Maillard reaction, which actually reacts amino acids with reducing sugars to produce hundreds of flavor and aroma compounds. It was not just some random "did you know" fact. It stuck because every day for breakfast I toast bread, saw the browning of the bread every day, and did not think to ask what was actually going on at the molecular level. And now bread is a much more interesting thing. As are sugars and amino acids.
Similar to the experience of reading Moby-Dick, my head is now much more full of questions than random trivia. My relationship with the world around me has deepened substantially. And like the whale, I am now awash in the mysteries of the cosmos that present themselves in the everyday humdrum of modern life. In short, my life has become an encyclopedic narrative, like Moby-Dick. And has been made more meaningful as a result.
If you want a more substantial example: if you read my other work, you probably saw a research article I wrote on a multi-acre lot that was one block over from my childhood home. A weird anomaly that we drove by all the time growing up is now a gateway to a bygone era of Sacramento history. And because that mapped to my childhood, it has added all kinds of meaning to these memories, and has deepened my relationship with the neighborhood and the community, as per the people I've been talking to about this.
Anyway, this has shifted my perspective toward AI in the following way. I used to think that getting an instant answer to a question all the time would ruin curiosity, awe, and wonder toward the world because I wouldn't give myself time to really wrestle with these questions myself. Which is a fair point. And a proper steelman of this is warranted and would require an entire separate article.
But I think what has changed for me is the realization that a lot of the initial instant answers can lead to deeper inquiries. The research article I linked above was not an instant answer from ChatGPT. It was multiple inquiries after a simple answer led to a "whaaattttt??" This was followed by extensive research on the neighborhood, browsing flyover pictures, Google Maps, and even finding relevant legal documents from the 1870s. Additional work included AI-assisted 3-D reconstructions based on satellite images. So I think the dialectic here would be that instant answers can satisfy superficial curiosity, but also produce deeper curiosity that requires much more than just a single query to an AI system. Right now I'm in the phase where I'm talking to people, for example.
All in all, I can report from the vessel that is my life that getting instant answers, and really indulging myself with instant answers, has actually enriched my life quite a bit, and has actually revealed the world's mystery more so than it has killed it. The same way that Moby-Dick gives you that sense of mystery by bombarding you with an encyclopedia of whales. So in short, I'm glad I continued reading Moby-Dick. As it is in art, it is in life: not all of it is supposed to be pleasurable. Sometimes the painful stuff is where the growth is.
I never thought I'd be writing about how an 1850s classic would change my entire relationship with AI systems, in the middle of this weird AI transition we find ourselves in. But here we are, in a world that is looking increasingly…ultramarine.