Dear Unknown,

I had a perception I wanted to share with you. It's long; bear with me?

I was thinking of my friend Carrie, who moved to Seattle right after falling in love with a boy. This in itself has perplexed me, but that's not what I was thinking about.

I was thinking about how he moved to New York at the same time, and during that year in Seattle, she would fly there to spend a few days with him. She would come back and say, "He lives in this little Polish neighborhood, and we love to go to the Polish sausage place right across the street, and we sit out on his balcony and listen to the Polish guys outside the shop telling jokes in Polish."

Picture it, then: her, ferocious and descending on Seattle, then flying to New York and spending a few days smoking on a balcony with her boyfriend. I imagine her sitting there, smoking and watching the raindrops and listening to the Polish men yelling, and knowing that in just a few days she'd be flying back to Seattle to do something completely different: edit magazine articles, write copy for a small theatre, and pay the bills, too.

This reminds me of a state of mind I used to occupy from time to time. It's a state of mind that occurs when you're away from your Main Goal, and you're Elsewhere for a bit. You're away from your usual life but you're still present—still noticing and observing and gathering experiences—living. If anything, being Elsewhere, where everything is strange, mundane things call out to you. Your flywheel is still spinning, but it doesn't power the usual Tasks. You see someone driving down the street in a rusty WWII-era three-wheeled traffic enforcement vehicle, saying "Hi" to friends, you might come back to your other life and tell a story, "I saw this guy driving this rusty three-wheeled..." This bit of texture, this surface that you touched, is a tiny piece of the content of your life.

Being in the line of a teacher, or a writer, or a photographer, or a filmmaker, your job is partly this, to be present, to be attentive, to gather experiences from wherever you go. If you are a financial trader, or a marketer, or a computer programmer, or a mathematician, on the other hand, experiences are not your line of work—experiences are a luxury only to be indulged in the off-hours, and only for selfish gain.

Or so I thought. When I was about 13, I went to math camp. The first day I met a guy showing off his collection of Douglas Hofstadter books—heady stuff, but fun, about math, cognitive science, music... This guy, Jacob, soon became one of my best friends and we spent the rest of two summers at camp together. He remains the smartest person I've ever met, and it's autoflattery to say that I could hang with him, mostly.

We were taking a class in theoretical computer science together, and my mind was being blown by such things as first-order logic and finite automata theory. If CS Theory were a drug, it would be acid. He thought this stuff was a bit dull, and hoped we would soon get into issues like computability (the limits of computation). We used to go on fun, giddy "random walks" around the grassy Franklin & Marshall campus, taking random turns wherever the paths joined up, and he'd muse about idle thoughts, like whether some restriction to classical logic would produce a complete system, or how Gödel's incompleteness result boded well or ill for the prospect of Artificial Intelligence. I understood about a third of what he said; I peppered him with questions, and I learned more than most kids did that summer.

After that, a couple of summers running, I'd go to his house or he would come to mine, for a week, and we'd talk about the evolution of co-operation or the merits of object-oriented programming (that was my own crass interjection), or we'd bring up some area of science or math and ask, was it really deep?

There was a clear ethic that stood between us, an ethic of math: the importance of pursuing generality and abstract knowledge, and the appreciation, if not the creation, of formidable, pretty ideas. I remember Jacob saying that he didn't think Physics was truly deep, not deep enough, because although it deals with phenomena that underly our entire universe, it stops there, at the phenomena that happen to exist, in our vain, contingent world. Physics didn't aim for the ultimate truths, the provable mathematical facts of what is. That's a bit of the flavor of Jacob.

One summer when we were about 16, I was at his house and we drove down to the UVA campus, where he had procured a library card, and he fetched some stuff from the math library—maybe something about surreal numbers, something far beyond my ken. Once he'd gotten what he needed, we started random-walking through the halls and grassy slopes of the school; but I was getting tired of this drive toward ever-higher abstractions. At 16, I was becoming interested in other things, and was starting to feel that this absolute ethic of math left us arid and probably lifeless. I imagined myself spending eternity in that Platonic heaven (or hell) where there is no change, where there's only a great static net of permanent Forms, locked like the atoms in a stone.

I said to Jacob, "You're working for abstractions all the time—nothing but abstractions. Aren't you curious about other things? There's so much stuff in the world. Aren't you worried about missing out on experiences?" Unlike the worldly folk I knew back home, Jacob was a kindred spirit to me, someone sharing my background, my passion, and maybe someone who felt as alien as I, to this "world of experience." As two outsiders, we might descend on the world together, like Grinches on Whoville, and together we'd dig Scuba, Jazz, Machines.

Certain he was closeting his lust for the material world, I pushed and pushed. Finally, he came back sharply and calmly: "You say I should take my head out of the clouds and have 'experiences,' and you say that math is not an experience. Where do you get off? I am having experiences. How can you say mine are less than yours. Mine are mental experiences; you want a different kind—fine! I go after the kinds of experiences that interest me, and I don't need you telling me they're not real." I'd been struggling and groping my way toward a certain notion, reaching for common ground, but his response was as cogent and precise as one of his mathematical arguments, as if he'd been preparing for this conversation for a long time.

Jacob was apparently more moral than me in every way. He didn't eat meat; he had disdain for lower math or science (I thought his "Artificial Intelligence" magazine counted as an intellectual challenge, but he called it just a trade publication; which it probably was) He didn't think about girls or boys or life or how you can sometimes be grateful that your friend has a role of twine. I'd brought with me an R.E.M. tape. I was enthralled by this band, and in my lowness, I wanted to grok its emotional landscape of yearning and collapse. That summer, Jacob listened only to single tape of Vivaldi, on repeat. In fiction, he read only fantasy novels. He was a real-life Howard Roark, and years later when I read The Fountainhead, it felt like watching my old, lost friend come back to haunt me, still scolding me silently with his actions, still much purer than me.

I finished out that week with him and went back home to my emotionally-complex pop songs and my weak efforts to connect with people. Jacob went on the next year to win a prize for a paper he wrote on "the effectivization of surreal numbers," and then he started at Harvard, beginning with second-year graduate math courses.

Carrie is a teacher, a writer, and a scholar of theatre, to varying degrees. When she goes away for a week, and sits on a balcony smoking, each moment is grist for the mill of her work and life. Jacob, too, wherever he is, doing math: if he lives in a world where there are no iron-railed balconies, he lives in a world with toposes and functors, and his experience with those objects feeds his life and work. Whatever work you or I do, we should be alert, and ingest whatever we find. And digest that matter into our lives, and our work. That's the perception I wanted to share with you, Unknown.