jo

there is ego there, in holding onto this belief that you are even capable of creating something perfect and undoubted. you come full circle and realize that even your insecurity reveals a self-obsession.

i don’t know who needs to hear this but you are worthy of respect even if you are mediocre. your writing will find a home, no matter how you feel about the sentence structure. your thoughts are important, even if they come out ineloquent. not every piece you create will be life altering; every artist, no matter how brilliant, has a skip in the discography, albums we like less than others because they are people.

sure, your perfectionism might make you exceptional but it will certainly always make you miserable. i think you deserve more than that. may you never sit alone in the dark with only your cruelty to keep you company. may you cloak yourself in the same kindness you so readily lavish upon others.

This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect—like the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in ’60s Liverpool met John Lennon.

For sometimes the culture surmises an individual personality, collectively. Or thinks it does.

Watching him interviewed I found myself waiting for the verbal wit, the controlled and articulate sarcasm of that famous Zuckerberg kid—then remembered that was only Sorkin. The real Zuckerberg is much more like his website, on each page of which, once upon a time (2004), he emblazoned the legend: A Mark Zuckerberg Production. Controlled but dull, bright and clean but uniformly plain, nonideological, affectless.

Software may reduce humans, but there are degrees. Fiction reduces humans, too, but bad fiction does it more than good fiction, and we have the option to read good fiction.