I remember when I first read the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." I was twenty. In those days The New Yorker used to publish before the longer-form pieces in the regular magazine, brief capsules of reviews of plays, movies, concerts and gallery shows.
Many of these were written by Pauline Kael or James Agee. You could read worse.
I'd read these with some care. These were pre-VCR days, pre-cable even. And it took work and attention to learn about and see the classic movies that today you can just "stream," though no one does because they're considered old and we scorn anything in this country older than two years.
Especially me.
I read ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in a movie review I believe of "The Man Who Fell to Earth in The New Yorker.
I had no idea what it meant, and it took me a week to find its meaning. However, having made the effort to find it, I deemed it important, and never lost it.
It's funny how hard it was to find things out.
It's funny how back in my youth knowledge didn't come from something like a vending machine like it does today. You couldn't, back then, just pull and handle and a small bag of unique thinking would be dispensed. You had to hunt and ask and red herring.
Desmond Morris, the great anthropologist, wrote a worthwhile book called "The Nature of Happiness." The embarrassing cover makes the book look like a Cialis ad. But if you can look past its aggressive stupidity, you'll find wisdom.
Morris believes, as do I, that happiness often comes, not from getting what you want, but from searching for it. The hunt, the forming a group, the assigning of roles, the physical chase and the capture, is generally when people are happiest. The searching very often surpasses the getting. The chase is often better than the capture.
As Galen of Pergamum said almost 2,000 years ago (he was clearly politically incorrect) “post coitum omne animal triste est sive gallus et mulier." After sexual intercourse every animal is sad, except the rooster and the woman. Again, the chase is better than the capture.
For twenty years I searched for a book by Joseph Mitchell, "My Ears Are Bent." He published it, just once, in 1938--and later somewhat disowned it. My wife finally found it from a bookseller occupying space below ground in Muncie, Indiana. There were old Carole Landis movie posters on the wall, like in Laird Crager's room in the 1941 noir "I Wake Up Screaming."
She paid a lot for the book (but did not pay $11,000 for it.)
I first read it on microfiche, deciding to spend the day in the main reading room of the New York Public Library.
Today, I fear the joy of the hunt is gone.
Or not understood.
Or at least under-valued.
AI will not help us here.
The easiness of AI, in fact, has overwhelmed the essential humanness of hunting.
Most people don't even know, anymore, about the importance of the hunt and the happiness derived from it.
Life is not supposed to be easy. Quests are supposed to be fraught. Scylla and Charybdis can kill you. But there's nothing like the excitement and accomplishment of having survived them.
Ask Don Quixote.
Or Odysseus.
Or someone fat who got in shape for a marathon.
Or anyone who's sold a big ad campaign to a giant client.
Or just a jerk like me who's built a business based on orare est labore. To work is to pray.
Years ago I was lucky enough to get to spend three hours working with Milton Glaser. We sat elbow to elbow at his table.
I was due to arrive at his townhouse in the east Thirties at eight.
Of course I got there at seven and stared at his place.
I wanted to see the Karatydides not just the Parthenon.
I took this photograph of the transom above his front door.
AI wants us to forget this.
We want push-button ease in everything.
We want miracles cheaper by the dozen.
But Art is Work.
I don't think we should forget this.