I started the Coder’s Errand in 2018. Part of the reason I did so was that I needed change, I felt the urge to move forward in my career and explore things that were happening in the technological world outside my normal reach.
But when searching for a theme, I found inspiration elsewhere. 2017 was unusual for me in that I read several books in quick succession, in a deliberate attempt to diversify from technical literature and search from rest and inspiration in fiction. Most of those books left no mark, but one in particular did. It touched me, reached into my core, and moved me deeply: the Buried Giant by Kazuo Ichiguro, published in 2015.
The Inspiration
It was my first book by Ichiguro, and the delicateness of the writing style and the tenderness of the characters immediately announced to me this was on some other level. Indeed, later in the year, Kazuo Ichiguro would be awarded the Nobel Prize.
The book is not for everyone’s tastes, as it is a fantasy book from an author that is not a fantasy writer. But maybe because of that, I felt there was more to this book than pure fantasy cliches and that, although on the surface it is very much a fantasy book, its focus was not on the fantastic. That was only an incidental choice to support the story the writer wanted to tell.
In Tolkien’s work, it was the other way around. The author created a world, myths, legends and wrote books to tell them. In The Buried Giant, the author had a story first, and then looked for a world that could sustain it, a world that he could populate and explore without contradicting historical verisimilitude and where the readers’ knowledge would not prevent them from getting the main message. The fantastic feels almost incidental in here, useful but non-essential.
The book is set in a Post-Arthurian world and although it has its share of battles and high-powered magic, even possibly an evil enemy to be confronted at the end, it all feels very low-key: latent, threatening and subdued.
The main theme, for me, is the manipulation of memory to keep peace and prevent war. In that sense of rewriting history, it has echoes of 1984, but in a more benign and hopeful world. But again this is a delusion. This is a world recovering from almost apocalyptic destruction, imperceptibly rotting over hidden unforgiven grievances, that may destroy the fragile recovery and destroy it all again.
The Book
Permeating the book, though, is a deep sense of Quest, of moral duty that is very much in the tradition of the Arthurian literature. There are tragic heroes who know a single final duty awaits them and, fail or succeed, only death will follow.
But the main arc of the story is driven by two characters in search for lost memories to redress their own personal loss, which may well have consequences beyond their private interest. The troubling issue is whether a personal choice should prevail over the peace of a whole country, a decision that balances extremely opposites.
On the one hand, the intimate, long lost memories of a loveable old couple, which represent in effect at the same time their love and mental health.
On the other scale lies the liberation of dark forces of resentment, grievance and vengeance that will plunge their whole world, inevitably, back in war, hate and destruction. But, pointedly, a destruction that will very much happen when the interested couple will no longer be part of this world.
Given the author is British, I wonder how much of this reflects undercurrents of the British society that Kazuo had perceived and correctly interpreted as he wrote the book, in the years leading up to Brexit.
The central couple reminding me of Baucis and Philemon from classical Ovid in their impossible gentleness and unfailing politeness. But they are also very improbable, and Ichiguro writes them in an uncomfortable way: they are old, non-adventurous, and absolutely non-confrontational.
The writing style was a surprise to me, and was initially very hard. The text does not flow, and I could not relate to the characters, but after a while I realized that is quite intentional. The characters are a mere reflection of the world. It has been stifled under a permanent fog that is uncanny for the characters but has more than a simple meteorological effect.
The stilted language and manners are, after all, a way for the reader to feel the same oppression and the same discomfort. But it pays off, or at least it did for me. The book starts to shine when the character’s journey unfolds and when they meet their companions on the road. And especially when their discussions start bringing some understanding to the nature of that fog.
I will not go into more details so as not so spoil the book. I’ll just say that for me the book works more for the atmospheric description and the theme than for the characters or the fantasy elements.
The Quest
All of the above made the book well worth my time, and is one of the few books I read once and remember for years. But what is more important for this blog, perhaps, is the inspiration.
As a long time fan of the Matter of Britain, the Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the notion of Quest is well ingrained in me. The image of a journey where a Hero/in faces his/her fears, ventures into the unknown, matures and grows (whether s/he achieves or not the final goal) has a magical, perennial place in my imaginary.
It was in that spirit that I created the Coder’s Errand. This blog represented a step into the unknown, a public exposure of myself writing for others and subject to their criticism, with the expectation of a continuous production of content. Moreover, I was going to write about things I did not yet know, possibly illustrating the same difficulties shared by so many other developers, so it felt more like overcoming common obstacles than writing from a teacher’s standpoint. It felt, very much, like an exploration of an unknown land, an adventure about exploring new technologies.
I started with a hazy goal at first, setting myself at an early junction between Machine Learning and Blockchain. I have, ultimately, chosen Blockchain, and since then I have even refined that choice into the much narrower field of Zero-Knowledge proofs.
Many times I felt like a single post was the result of a process that could be likened to a mini-quest in a game, or a book. A process that involved reading papers (charting a new land), testing assumptions (exploring dark places), coding a solution and banging your head at all the bugs and unexpected problems (fighting the dragon) and then finally deploy the code (bringing the boon back to the tribe, or the King).
I had felt this before. In my PhD, studying a new paper would often call for reading many other papers, sometimes in different areas. It was like playing a role-playing game, and finding new areas to explore with in a new quest-chain. Such games can be fully open-ended, and you can stay for ever in an area without making progress towards the final goal.
Such is research as well, where you can spend your life reading papers wihtout exhausting all the areas you want to learn. You must find the discipline yourself to narrow your scope, explore only the papers/quests that matter and then proceed to your goal.
With each new paper conquered, your understanding increases, as if you had gained experience points. You’ll have new techniques (gear) to tacker other problems (new quests).
I’m sure by now you get the idea, but I admit the tone of this blog has been rather technically and drab instead of “adventurous” or “exploratory”. I have avoided explicit metaphors for fear they would turn out to be cheesy or even ridiculous, but why not? After all, that was meant to be the distinctive feature of this blog.
The Magic of Holidays
As I write this, I am sitting on the sea front, on the very same beach where I spent so many summers of my childhood. The sea is gentle, inviting, placid and misleadingly serene.
The sun sparkles on the low crests of distant lulling waves, evoking images of the magnificent underwater palaces of Celtic mythology; in the distance, merchant ships accompany the circle of the horizon, setting off from the harbour to other distant shores. The boulders that crown the beach and set a low wall against the sea remind me of imaginary castles, of tales and legends emerging from the ancestral memories of men and women that lived before me in these lands, and left them as a legacy of their troubles, their anxieties, and their desires.
It makes me think I should bring back this sense of wonder to the blog, and show how learning coding on the limits of the new technology is very much an adventure of its own. Maybe, from time to time, I’ll allow myself to bring to these pages something else that will not be about mathematics nor cryptography, but will plunge its roots in those energies of long past ages and memories of human creation.
I don’t claim any art or craft; any remarkable skill or any reason why the world should read or even enjoy what I write. I’m not a trained writer, I have not studied their techniques, I don’t even read so much anymore. Whatever I write will probably be naive, flawed, derivative and inconsequential.
But this may also be a training ground, a personal gauntlet, another Quest that I start without a well-defined goal, in the spirit of the Knights Errant of yore, that once upon a time set out into the world with only the desire to do good and uphold the values of Chivalry, knowing not where the road would lead nor what perils they would find.
If you end up accompanying me in that journey, let me know: a knight always needs support along the way, a hermit to share bread and advice, or friendly castellans that open their doors for a night. Leave me your messages in the comments below, and let me know of corners of this technological world you yourself would like to explore. Perhaps I can go there with you.
Meanwhile, travel long, travel safe, and keep asking questions.
I hope to meet you on the road. Farewell.