For Christmas and New Years, I went to Japan with my wife Z, my mom, my older sister, her boyfriend, and my younger sister.

Z & I flew with Air Canada. We upgraded to Premium Economy to avoid being stuck in a couple of middle seats. It was expensive, but it made our flight much better. I spent the whole flight reading and writing. I read the first 150 pages of Normal People and

, pausing only to eat meals. I couldn’t believe it when it was announced that we were beginning our descent.

I had severe allergies until the early evening. This happens to me whenever I travel somewhere new. In 2017 I went to Europe for the first time and I spent the first full day sneezing and oozing. Same thing this time in Tokyo for the first 24 hours. Reactine didn’t seem to make a difference, just had to wait it out.

The architecture and spatial planning of the theme park was really impressive. It seemed like every corner we rounded we encountered another stridebreaking view of the park. It reminded me of the architectural tactic of constraining the height and width of hallways to reinforce the impact of emerging into a bigger space. It’s a method that’s been employed by Tadao Ando of Osaka and other famous architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

Tokyo station was huge and very busy. It felt like being in a beehive. It took me and Z a while to figure out how to pick up our tickets. One machine gave us an error message but then we tried a machine in a different section and it worked. Then we circled through the masses, trying to figure out which screen listed our train’s platform. When we finally found it, we struggled to pass through the gate. Z put in the two tickets as the ticket machine had instructed but that wasn’t enough. We had a confusing interaction with a worker there, who we finally understood was saying to scan our IC card after inserting the tickets. We made it through and with thirty minutes left until departure time, we lined up to buy food and drinks to take onto the train. It’s good we came an hour early.

This was one of the best days of the trip.

A thunderstorm began while we were in a taxi on the way to the Kanazawa train station. Flashes of lightning so bright I thought for a moment our driver had run a red light and triggered a super powerful automated stoplight camera. We tried a coffee shop near the train station but it was closed for New Years, which is the biggest national holiday in Japan. Train station was full of stores and flooded with white overhead lighting. Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift playing in the overhead speakers. We sat in Tully’s Coffee lounge with our bags piled around our ankles. On the far wall a horribly sappy and nonsensical marketing poem for & Tea. I felt like I could be in any other manufactured commercial center around the world. Soulless places like these often have this sort interchangeability, lack of identity. Being there, it doesn’t feel like you’re in an actual place. You’re just temporarily detained in a massproduced commercial limbo.

Grateful to be back in the sun.

It was certainly a mistake to visit Japan in the first few days of January. As noted all over the internet, New Years is Japan’s major national holiday and many things close not only on the first but for a week. I’m sure Z would’ve determined this if we had been more involved in planning the trip. Lesson learned, I suppose.

I had

. Or, I don’t know, maybe I just needed a meal. Or a better sleep. Or to feel like I chose to go there. Or to have had a period earlier in the day where I’d gotten to direct my attention to things of my choosing. Or a period to produce something, so that I might be in a more

. That certainly makes me feel better about socializing aimlessly in the evening, when I feel like I’ve done something productive with my day.

The Digital Art Museum was really cool. It was a dark maze on the bottom floor of a fancy mall where myriad projectors shone moving patterns and images of light on walls, floors, and ceilings. This by itself might’ve been a gimmicky socialmedia tourist trap, but embedded throughout the large labyrinthine gallery were rooms where sculptural elements combined with light, music, and mirrors to create surreal experiences.

My intention was to browse Hands and Itoya in Ginza, but I came across the flea market when I stopped for coffee by Ginza station. There were dozens of stalls selling ceramics, porcelain, kimonos, jackets, bluedyed fabrics, and so on. The orange tinted glass I bought was only 400 yen, less than three dollars in USD, and I could see it selling for tens times the amount at trendy stores in the USA and Canada. I’m still sour about going to the East Vancouver “Flea Market” to find they charge an admission fee and sell priced up secondhand and vintagestyled clothing.

I heartily agree with Crawford’s emphasis on the importance of embodied experiences and his warning that virtual worlds can promote passivity, technology as magic, and false agency. However. I am also very enthusiastic about technological tools as real tools and virtual worlds as deeply enriching. Consider books for example. They are a virtual, symbolic world of their own and were object of

in their own time. But I think most of us would consider them indispensable now. Books are fictions divorced from physicality, but is that inherently bad? I don’t think so.

I am several chapters in but already think Crawford’s argument needs work. His critique of “representations” and “abstractions” needs a lot more development in my opinion. I’d invoke him to reflect on his own life to rebalance his argument: he loves to ride motorcycles and fix them up, but he also loves to read books and write them. Surely he needs to make space for symbolic experiences alongside physical ones? I say this despite agreeing with his insight on the surprising hollowness of Choice as Freedom and the way resource-extractive corporations exploit this to harvest wealth from consumers.

All in all I think he makes some fantastic, nuanced points but builds a shaky overarching argument from it. I would love to him to take a second crack at it.

I originally wrote the above on Reddit after reading the first half the book.

As I’ve said

, I really appreciated that this book resisted taking the reactionary stance against technology as inherently insidious and unavoidably corruptive of our psychological wellbeing. In the epilogue, Crawford summarizes his alternative critique of technology’s role in leeching on our attention:

This perspective excites me not just because it rings truer but also because it prevents indiscriminate rejection of technology and instead makes possible a judicious trust that allows us to make good use of it.

From where I am sitting on my balcony I can see the TV out of the corner of my eye and it’s very difficult to ignore it. I keep turning my head away to think of what to write next, but then when I turn back to resume typing on my computer, the flashes of color and light from the TV make it very difficult for me to focus. I just went inside and turned it off, but still my mind keeps diverting attention to the now black rectangle in my peripheral vision. Let me draw the curtains.

Sometimes when I want to be alone I come out and sit here. It’s a lovely little space detached from the living room. However, if Z is sitting at her desk on the other side of the glass where I can see her and if my need to be alone in that moment is particularly potent, I draw the curtains. Her presence remains exactly as it was and I remain aware of it, but it doesn’t intrude on my attention in the same way.

In his book

, Matthew B. Crawford points out that this involuntary aspect of attention makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint. New information demands attendance. Is it a predator? Prey? Or just a gust of wind? Regardless we must pay attention to it so we can make sense of it and integrate it into our mental model of the current environment.

Crawford appropriates the term ecology – the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings – to describe this fundamental relationship between our attention, our life, and our environment. He describes, for example, the “ecology of attention” in airport lounges where the news stream endlessly on TVs oriented in various directions. Even if the talking heads are muted, the infinite sideways scroll of symbols at the bottom of the screen will hijack the attention of travelers who would rather rest idly.

(Crawford astutely points out that the advertisements shown on these TVs exist to continue the transfer of wealth from these common travelers to the ones in the VIP lounges, who rest comfortably without having their attention exploited by their surroundings without their consent. I find these socioeconomic analyses of technology much more relevant and important than the technophobic ones. The same goes for Artificial Intelligence. I don’t worry that AI will take over the world, I worry that those who already rule the world will use AI to accelerate and automate processes of wealth extraction.)

I think the evolutionary perspective can also help explain why time in nature feels so right. This is the primordial ecology of our attention, the environment in which our brains adapted for us to live and thrive. And yet I don’t think we need to draw purist or atavistic conclusions against technology from this observation. Feelings of connection and coherence arise in us not only from time in nature, but also from time using artificial tools and inhabiting constructed environments.

The humble coffee shop for example is a place where many of us go to read, write, think, converse, and do other things that require our focus. The intricate weave of activity and mixture of sounds create a conducive ambience for our attention. How is it that such a busy, public space is so popular for quiet, private activity? This is only counterintuitive if we think distraction is the only unneutral effect our environment has on our ability to focus. From experience we know that it can be easier to focus in spite of extraneous sensory information rather than in absense of it. Perhaps because our cognitive capacities evolved in settings where total absence of sensory input was rare, our minds focus more easily against a backdrop of mundane information. Certain kinds of technologies are essential here and even computer screens are welcome, but not TVs because they would be too disruptive. A good ecology of attention not only prevents distractions, but encourages focus.

I’ve moved into my apartment now, into the warmth. Out in the balcony my fingers were getting too cold. Above my head the clock ticks and farther away traffic brushes by in irregular strokes. The faint wail of an ambulance emerges suddenly and then fades quickly. Occasionally in the hallway outside our apartment a door opens and then shuts a moment later. Our little dog scurries about the living room looking for amusement. My wife Z works intently at her desk a few feet away in silence apart from intermittent bursts of typing and muted clicks of her mouse. Attention to my writing flows easily despite all these things, except when my gaze drifts over to what is happening on her computer screen. So I adjust my sitting position to make it vanish.

From where I am sitting on my balcony I can see the TV out of the corner of my eye and it’s very difficult to ignore it. I keep turning my head away to think of what to write next, but then when I turn back to resume typing on my computer, the flashes of color and light from the TV make it very difficult for me to focus. I just went inside and turned it off, but still my mind keeps diverting attention to the now black rectangle in my peripheral vision. Let me draw the curtains.

Sometimes when I want to be alone I come out and sit here. It’s a lovely little space detached from the living room. However, if Z is sitting at her desk on the other side of the glass where I can see her and if my need to be alone in that moment is particularly potent, I draw the curtains. Her presence remains exactly as it was and I remain aware of it, but it doesn’t intrude on my attention in the same way.

In his book

, Matthew B. Crawford points out that this involuntary aspect of attention makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint. New information demands attendance. Is it a predator? Prey? Or just a gust of wind? Regardless we must pay attention to it so we can make sense of it and integrate it into our mental model of the current environment.

Crawford appropriates the term ecology – the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings – to describe this fundamental relationship between our attention, our life, and our environment. He describes, for example, the “ecology of attention” in airport lounges where the news stream endlessly on TVs oriented in various directions. Even if the talking heads are muted, the infinite sideways scroll of symbols at the bottom of the screen will hijack the attention of travelers who would rather rest idly.

(Crawford astutely points out that the advertisements shown on these TVs exist to continue the transfer of wealth from these common travelers to the ones in the VIP lounges, who rest comfortably without having their attention exploited by their surroundings without their consent. I find these socioeconomic analyses of technology much more relevant and important than the technophobic ones. The same goes for Artificial Intelligence. I don’t worry that AI will take over the world, I worry that those who already rule the world will use AI to accelerate and automate processes of wealth extraction.)

I think the evolutionary perspective can also help explain why time in nature feels so right. This is the primordial ecology of our attention, the environment in which our brains adapted for us to live and thrive. And yet I don’t think we need to draw purist or atavistic conclusions against technology from this observation. Feelings of connection and coherence arise in us not only from time in nature, but also from time using artificial tools and inhabiting constructed environments.

The humble coffee shop for example is a place where many of us go to read, write, think, converse, and do other things that require our focus. The intricate weave of activity and mixture of sounds create a conducive ambience for our attention. How is it that such a busy, public space is so popular for quiet, private activity? This is only counterintuitive if we think distraction is the only unneutral effect our environment has on our ability to focus. From experience we know that it can be easier to focus in spite of extraneous sensory information rather than in absense of it. Perhaps because our cognitive capacities evolved in settings where total absence of sensory input was rare, our minds focus more easily against a backdrop of mundane information. Certain kinds of technologies are essential here and even computer screens are welcome, but not TVs because they would be too disruptive. A good ecology of attention not only prevents distractions, but encourages focus.

I’ve moved into my apartment now, into the warmth. Out in the balcony my fingers were getting too cold. Above my head the clock ticks and farther away traffic brushes by in irregular strokes. The faint wail of an ambulance emerges suddenly and then fades quickly. Occasionally in the hallway outside our apartment a door opens and then shuts a moment later. Our little dog scurries about the living room looking for amusement. My wife Z works intently at her desk a few feet away in silence apart from intermittent bursts of typing and muted clicks of her mouse. Attention to my writing flows easily despite all these things, except when my gaze drifts over to what is happening on her computer screen. So I adjust my sitting position to make it vanish.

I almost quit this book as soon as I began it. It launches the reader into the mind of an unnamed character lying on his deathbed and babbling on about basic details that he himself did not know or understand. He then proceeds to tell a mundane story in unfocused detail and with distracting metacommentary. Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler begins in a similar way. Perhaps Molloy was an inspiration.

The text was dense not only in style but also in line spacing. A paragraph break on the second page and then no more in sight. But I decided to push through. I motivated myself by striving to read as many pages as possible in one sitting. This worked well. Once I’d waded in far enough, giving up was much less tempting. It was satisfying to have made ample progress and, along the way, I’d begun enjoying the book. The experience was like going for a run. The first few minutes were uncomfortable and almost nauseating, but then I hit my stride and momentum carried me forth.

I read most of the book in two or three weeks. Then I let my attention drift towards other things. (Movies including The Godfather, YouTube videos, the audiobook

, and the book The Neoliberal City.) Then I returned to it and read the last chunk over a few days. Soon after I finished the book I watched several reviews about it on YouTube and even ended up rewriting the Plot Summary section of the Wikipedia page because I found it unclear and partly contaminated with the writer’s interpretation that the two protagonists must be the same person. (I included my version of the plot summary at the end of this piece.)

I am not surprised to read on the Wikipedia page about Samuel Beckett that he is a contributor to Nonsense Literature and the Theatre of the Absurd. Molloy is strangely interesting despite its bizarreness and the apparent pointlessness of its story. One of its obvious qualities is the distinctiveness of each protagonist’s inner voice. You feel like you are inside their head, and the inscrutability of certain passages heightens that experience.

The novel is also very thoughtprovoking to consider in retrospect. There are strong hints that Molloy and Moran are the same person, but it also isn’t clear that they are. Moran never completes his mission of finding Molloy and instead begins to resemble him more and more. For its structure and the enigma at the heart of it, Molloy reminds me of David Lynch’s movie Mulholland Drive. Lynch tells the story of an envious actress who arranges the assassination of her former lover and consequently plunges into deeper despair and intolerable guilt. Lynch represents the irreparable shear that this trauma inflicts on the protagonist’s psyche by telling the story in two realities, a false sublimated one and then the real one. Perhaps Beckett is doing something similar in Molloy.

As interpreted by the psychoanalyst Dr. Olga Cox Cameron, the first part reproduces Freudian Dream Logic by obsessively approaching objects of trauma with sublimated meanings and then fleeing further into fantasy when they become too intolerable to consider.

The novel is about two characters and is divided into two parts. Each part is an internal monologue, the first of Molloy and the second of Jacques Moran.

Part One consists of two paragraphs: the first spans about two pages and the second more than eighty. The book opens with the narrator stating that he lives in his mother’s room, but does not remember how he arrived there or when his mother died. In this room he writes and every Sunday a man visits to pick up what he has written and bring back what he had taken last week “marked with signs” that Molloy never cares to read. Molloy writes to “speak of the things that are left, say [his] goodbyes, finish dying”. In the second paragraph, which comprises most of Part One, Molloy recounts a journey he took supposedly to find his mother. Throughout the journey, he struggles to remember that his aim is to meet his mother and finds himself endlessly sidetracked and delayed. Molloy suffers from severe physical disabilities, and so relies on his bicycle and his crutches for mobility. At one point, he gets momentarily arrested for resting on his bicycle in a lewd way. It is when speaking to the police in the station that we finally learn his name, which suddenly comes to him and he cries out while being questioned. Soon after his release, Molloy wanders through town and accidentally kills an old dog by running over it with his bicycle. A vicious mob starts forming, but then Molloy is rescued by the dog’s owner who forgives him and takes him into her home. He is fed, bathed, clothed, and allowed to live on the premises for free. Despite this, Molloy resents the woman – whose name he can’t quite remember: “a Mrs Loy… or Lousse, I forget, Christian name something like Sophie” – and after a long time finally musters the determination to leave, without his bicycle. Soon afterwards, he finds a place in an alley to harm himself, which brings him satisfaction. He remembers an old woman who used to compensate him for having intercourse with her and with whom he considers, absurdly, to have known true love. Molloy then journeys out of town towards the shore, having again forgotten his objective of finding his mother. He tells of living by the ocean for a while and describes in excruciating detail his process of circulating sixteens “sucking stones” across his four pockets to maximize the amount of time between which each stone is sucked. Eventually he leaves the shore and journeys through the woods. There, he encounters a man who appears to need help but Molloy ignores him. The man insists until Molloy becomes suddenly violent, beating the man until he stops moving. Soon afterwards, Molloy makes it out of the woods and Part One abruptly ends.

Part Two is narrated by a private detective by the name of Jacques Moran, who is assigned the task of tracking down Molloy and carrying out specific instructions. The task is given to him by a man named Gaber, who is apparently his supervisor and takes order from a higher boss named Youdi. This narrative (Part Two) begins:

It becomes immediately apparent that Moran is a cruel and arbitrarily abusive father. He sets out on his journey to find Molloy and forces his son Jacques to come with him. They wander across the countryside, increasingly bogged down by the weather, decreasing supplies of food and Moran’s suddenly failing body. He sends his son to purchase a bicycle and while his son is gone, Moran encounters an old man with a large, but light walking stick. Later, Moran is confronted by another man, who he murders in a sudden violent outburst reminiscent of Molloy and hides his body in the forest. After a few days, the son returns with a bicycle and is aghast at his father’s appearance. Immediately, Moran resumes his senseless, violent treatment of his son and the two continue on their journey to Bally. In the outskirts of Bally, they encounter a shepherd with his dog and sheep. For some reason, Moran is transfixed and enchanted. In the morning, Moran wakes to find that his son has fled with the bicycle and most of the money. Moran takes the news with strange warmth and optimism. Moran finishes his provisions and gives up on his journey. He waits for starvation to kill him. Every night, he crawls out of his camp to look at the lights of Bally in the distance and “laughs” strenuously at the sight of it. One night, Moran finds Gaber outside his camp. They have an absurd exchange in which Moran pleads with Gaber to divulge what Youdi said. Gaber disappears quickly thereafter. Moran then embarks on what he understands to be his new assignment, returning home. He limps and drags himself through the countryside through the fall and winter at an excruciatingly slow pace and poses bizarre questions to himself about biblical topics and matters of the church. His ramblings begin to resemble Molloy’s from Part One. During his journey home, he is confronted by an angry farmer who demands to know what he is doing on his land. Feeling that preferred strategy of violence is too risky, Moran makes up a story about doing a pilgrimage and requests a tea to send the farmer away so that he can escape. When Moran finally arrives home, several months later, he laments the death of his bees and hens, which were left out all winter. He settles back into his home and begins to use crutches, like Molloy. Not for the first time, Moran mentions a “voice” that has been gradually speaking to him more and more, and which he claims to understand better now. The novel ends with Moran sitting down to write the report that his boss Youdi, his supervisor Gaber, and the mysterious voice keep demanding he write: