A Letter to Accelerando
Hello, Accelerando!
I am writing to you here, rather than where you keep running, in the hope that my letter will reach you.
Since you are still accelerating, while I have long since become, as you know, Presto, I want to tell you just a few words about strength…
You become aware of your own strength when you have exchanged illusion for reality, and reality has neither embittered nor broken you. When you stop chasing happiness and come to prefer clarity. When every “yes” is yes, and every “no” is no. When your own weakness no longer troubles you. And when you stop being disappointed…
The big boxes for big ideas, Accelerando, belong in wise books. You know how much I value them. Yet every morning, as long as we are alive, we wake up, do what lies within our modest abilities, muddle countless things –for better or for worse – but we never fit our own actions into neat categories. We live them as unique experiences, contained in the little boxes of everyday life.
When we are young, inspired by wise books, we allow vanity to convince us that we are boundless and can sit in judgment on everything around us.
As time goes by, and we have done more than our share of foolish things, we begin to realise how small that divine spark within us really was – the one that made us arrogant. And we are fortunate if we have managed to keep it alive, if we have not lost it or cast it away together with the ruins of our hopes.
Only then do we begin to understand humility and to expand our own boundaries. Yet this is invisible work, with nothing to do with society, with judgment, whether our own or those of others.
You are a bright young soul, Accelerando. That is why, with these few words, I am trying to spare you a little of the journey that still lies ahead before you come to see through your own vanity. Though experience has taught me that, whatever we may be told, each of us must arrive at our own insights and drink the cup that has been set before us.
I wish you the strength you need for what lies ahead.
Presto