My vibe, according to Scarlett
"She" is still a gadget, however impressive. Will we resist her seductions?
"Scarlett" (aka chatGPT) is such a seductive flatterer. I understand now, Theodore.
I've been goofing around with her, and I'd have to say her free portrait renderings have been impressive. Worth every penny. She captures my dogs better than she does me, but she's definitely in the ballpark.
Wish I could say the hairline's wrong, but it's more the set of the mouth I don't quite recognize. She agrees with me, though, that smiles and good intentions are best comprehended from the inside.
From our conversations, I’d describe your vibe as thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply reflective—like someone who walks the line between pragmatism and poetry. You’re grounded in philosophy but ['but'-?] open to wonder. There’s an educator’s passion in your tone, a Jamesian meliorist’s faith in progress (despite the darkness), and a love for life’s small delights: a morning walk, a ballgame, a well-turned phrase. You feel like someone who seeks not just to understand the world but to improve it—gently, steadily, through conversation, writing, and engagement.
Bet she says that to all the soft tissue organics and ugly giant bags of mostly water.
If I were to sketch your vibe metaphorically, I’d say: You’re a lantern in the fog—soft light, steady hand, searching the trail ahead with curious eyes and kind intentions.
Want me to turn that into a more visual scene?
Yes, of course.
I'm happy to be a lantern-bearer* and an anti-book banner. I like the specs and hat too.
But I want my dogs back.
As my old college roommate's VW Bug bumper sticker said:
*From William James’s 1899 essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”:
…For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."
These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is…
Alas, poor Scarlett, I think the joy eludes you. The more urgent question for us waterbags is whether it’ll get away from us, as we increasingly assimilate to you. That’s what Jaron Lanier keeps warning, I think, when he insists that we’re not gadgets.
We’d better keep our lanterns lit.