Angst
n: an acute but unspecific feeling of anxiety; usually reserved or philosophical anxiety about the world or about personal freedom.

There are more than a few tricks in public speaking or writing. The first involves starting one’s passage with a definition and then using that definition as a cantus firmus for one’s argument or discussion. I’m explaining this, not because this isn’t common knowledge, but because while I’m not intending to spend the entire post discussing Angst and Her Sisters, it’s plain to me at least that everything from the coffee I’m drinking right now to my general world view is tinged by this uninvited (and unjustified) guest.

I was called yesterday and informed of the death of Luciano Berio on Monday. He was, and probably always will be, one of the composers I respect the most; his balance between the intellectual and the whimsical, between High Music and the rest of human thought and activity was sublime, and while I will admit to not understanding or agreeing with all of his works, there was always respect. “There is nothing left now but the music,” my informant told me; as far as nothings go, it’s quite a bit of high-quality nothing.

While Berio was possibly experimenting with his new state of being a Dead Composer, I was tinkering with XML-RPC in attempts to keep my upper lip stiff and my jaw squarely set. It’s a light-weight protocol which allows platform-independent clients and servers in various languages. What it boils down to is the potential of novel and/or useful ways to access and manipulate data. I’m not sure if information wants to be free, but it doesn’t mind being organized, and if there is one thing that we as contemporary human beings suffering from sporadic bursts of acute yet unspecified feelings of anxiety produce and consume, it is data.

One of the most enjoyable things about tackling a new technology is that one of the best ways to learn it is to build something using it. Reading the specification on paper is one thing, but actually getting your hands dirty and coding something, now that’s something else! I attempt to build things that are useful to me; the applications are at core as much an exercise as writing a short fugue. The number of small programs written in this way is staggering, and the vast majority are only useful in the eyes of the programmer herself; such a though can lead to feelings of anxiexty if approached properly. One worthless program in a sea of worthless programs. In a world where cameras are prolific, what is the value of yet another Picture of the Eiffel Tower? Is that the nothing I’m going to leave behind, the same sort of nothing as millions others? What do you say, Luciano?

I wonder if this is what causes much of the acute philosophical anxiety floating around like a malicious Zeitgeist. The fact that the desire to leave one’s mark on the world is contrasted with the knowledge that one’s mark amounts to nothing more than a “Kilroy was here” graffiti on the wall of the men’s bathroom of Earth. There’s no point in striving for unique; I’m certain that even this very train of thought has been repeated with insignificant variations hundreds upon hundreds of times. Unique is a happy accident.

I have a picture of the Eiffel Tower I took in 1995, pretty as a postcard but for the thumb in the corner. This would be point in the post where I would smugly insinuate that I had a direct line to the secret of life, that I was somehow just a bit more clever or with-it than the average bear, and would be able to sign off with a single short sentence which would ring in your ear like the “Hmph.” sound the world’s most elitist food critic would make when you told them you were looking forward to a fine meal from Taco Bell. Goodness knows I’d like to, but the fact is that I can’t.

I’m going to take my implement of creation and write my programs and my music and live and love and work like the rest of us, because there’s not much else I can do.