When the Student is Ready, the Master Will Appear

April 26th, 2006General4 comments

Frank Gehry is being tapped to revitalize downtown L.A.; I like his crazy metal-skinned architecture that fries sidewalks and looks all wafty and cool. I wonder if the new Guggenheim will ever become a reality.

For a long time I thought that if L.A. was granted a wide-ranging, high-speed subway it would become the greatest city in the world. Imagine taking the subway to the beach or to work. You could live anywhere and work anywhere.

But recently I remembered that in an earthquake, the subway would pretty much be the worst place to be. True, San Francisco has BART, but the vast majority of BART exists above ground.

Have you ever read Flatland, the classic 19th century novella about geometry?

In it (if I remember correctly) a sentient square exists in a two-dimensional world and is visited by a sphere from the third dimension. The visit is surprising and magical, like the appearance of a wizard. The square is astounded by the sphere’s ability to move in and out of his two dimensional plane, becoming a smaller then larger circle (by moving up and down in the z-axis, which the square can’t quite comprehend), and sometimes disappearing.

If I recall properly, by the end of the encounter with the sphere, the square “gets it” and understands the existence of a third dimension. Until this encounter, the square was happy to go on with his regular life, not at all aware that other dimensions even existed.

I think that along the long path of my development, I was never even aware of each new level until I grew enough to make sense of it. When I was, the next level automatically presented itself. Some person or some event appeared, seemingly in just the nick of time, to induct me into it. All I ever had to do was get better at what I do.