Comment by fao_

5 years ago

He actually at one point wrote that he was a reincarnation of the god Pan, so he has/had a very literal god complex, too. It's such a shame that he was the person to interpret hacker culture for those of us in the future, because he's hardly a good lens

2 comments

fao_

setpatchaddress 5 years ago

I don’t disagree with your sentiment, but that wasn’t meant as a literal “I am the god Pan” — it was figurative, hyperbole. At least, that’s my recollection from when I read it a couple of decades ago.

fao_ 5 years ago

I've read it more recently, and he did mean it literally. I've cut this together because it's far too long to quote en masse, but the full thing is at [1]

    Desperate for something to feed my jones, I snaffled my other sister's 
    abandoned flute. And wow! I was a natural...immediately better with it than 
    with the guitar I'd been hacking at for months. [...] This was delightful but 
    mystifying. All I'd had to do was learn to play a scale, and this amazing river 
    of music poured forth with barely an effort on my part. It seemed almost as 
    though my hands and lips had always known what to do, had been waiting for me 
    to pick up the flute. [...] I got these stunning rushes of pure timeless joy, 
    when my consciousness seemed to expand outwards from the limits of my skin to 
    fill the universe and I could no longer tell whether I was playing the music or 
    the music was playing me. Nor were these effects just going on inside my own 
    head. [...] I was walking home, idly puzzling over this peculiar incident, and 
    damn near fell over when I finally got it. That girl had been trying to cope 
    with a theophany; she had looked at me and seen a god. A particular god. And I 
    knew, suddenly, with utter shattering certainty, which one it was. And that it 
    probably was not the first time I had inadvertently triggered such an 
    experience, and would almost certainly not be the last. [...] Not that I took 
    any of it seriously as a description of the real world. It was an intellectual 
    chew-toy, perhaps at best a way of understanding the pathologies that prevented 
    human beings from living the infinitely more desirable life of reason and 
    science. Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. 
    Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!". And 
    his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too 
    the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I 
    knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry. 
    [...] (And, oh, yes. The first time I handled a set of pan-pipes I could play 
    them. Fluently. Effortlessly. And knew I could before I touched them.)

[1]: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/dancing.html