Free The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth

into my mind, seeing the relationships between abstract concepts as though they were the physical features of a landscape. I tell her about the marathon hacking runs I used to go on, first when I was a teenager and again in the desperate early days of Demo1, spending twenty hours at a stretch making a program more sprawling and complex and powerful but also more elegant, more beautiful. (It feels risky, using the word
beautiful
, but there’s no other way to say it.) I try to convey the experience of settling into hack mode, the way the cruft and chatter of consciousness quiet down, stripping away the self’s topsoil and allowing the deeper, truer self to emerge.
We are most ourselves when we subsume ourselves in something greater
is a paradox at the heart of every mystical practice, programming not excepted. This experience of logical-reasoning-as-metaphysical-transcendence has been observed in older vocations like chess and mathematics. A mathematician presented with a clever proof, or a grandmaster lighting on a devastating move, might replay the sequence in his head just to savor it, as though humming a passage from a Mozart concerto. I feel the same thing when I read or write a well-constructed chunk of code: this is logic so artful it’s indistinguishable from art.
    While I put this into words, Maya listens carefully and says “Uh-huh” and occasionally shuts her eyes and nods as if swallowing an idea, in what appears to be a kind of mental note-taking. If she’s bored, she’s good at disguising it.
    “Thanks,” she says. “Now I know something important about you.”
    “No problem,” I say. I’m not used to being reassured like this.
    “This is going pretty good, huh?” she says. At first I don’t understand what she’s referring to, and then I get it and I desperately want to kiss her.
    “I think so, yeah,” I say. “Ha! I’ve never tried evaluating a date while it’s still in progress.” By introducing the word
date
I’m trying to match her audacity.
    “It’s such an artificial thing,” she says, resting an elbow on the bar and propping her chin in her palm. “We both know what we’re doing, but we’re not allowed to talk about it.”
    “No, you’re totally right,” I say. “I love it. Listen, if we’re going to externalize: you have reminded me of an anecdote. Are you interested in hearing an anecdote at this juncture, or would you rather the conversation progressed in a different direction?”
    “An anecdote would be terrific,” she says. “Let me order another drink, and then you can tell me the anecdote. Is it funny?”
    “Oh, I can’t answer that,” I say. “Starting an anecdote with
This is a really funny anecdote
would be a gross violation of sound anecdote technique.” We are both grinning.
    “You’re right, you’re right,” she says, holding up her glass in Freya’s direction. Freya gives me an interrogative look, and I respond with an affirmative nod.
    “This anecdote falls into the world’s-worst-date genre,” I say as Freya sets down the new drinks and removes the old, using both hands to perform the operations in parallel on Maya’s glass and mine. “It happened not to me but to my mom.”
    “Before your mom and dad were married?”
    “After they got divorced,” I say. “I remember when this happened.”
    “Got it,” she says. “OK, go.”
    “So they’d been divorced for like two years,” I say. “My mom was really wanting to start dating someone, and she wasn’t meeting anyone through her job or anything, and this was when dating services operated by mail and catered chiefly to the desperate. So she’d asked her friends at work to fix her up, and one day her friend Doreen was all like
Oh my God, I have found the perfect guy for you
!
    “My mom is pretty short, and she says that whenever anyone says
the perfect guy for you
they mean
short and divorced
. She meets the guy for dinner, and it’s confirmed that these are the only qualities