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Trinkets of Virtue

So here is a musing on a interview with Ken Kesey for Paris Review. I read it long time ago so no much is left in my memory of it and when I found my little piece in the archives, it sounded ok so I decided to publish it again. I don’t think that many people would have read it before anyway. I wasn’t a part of the Beat generation, neither of its later sprout, the Hippy flower child. On The Road was not yet translated in socialist Bulgaria when I was at school in the late 70s. Fly over the Cuckoo Nest was translated but ‘of course, everybody knew it was written against the Capitalist society’. LSD, mescaline, the Doors, the Byrds and anything of this sort did not even exist in our world – ‘the dust bowl of reality’. My father was arrested for dancing rock&roll on a table and girls with short skirts had stamps put on their hips so they cannot ware them again.Even religion wasn’t there to give some kind of hope to the searching minds.  But both the Beat generation and we, behind t...
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Some rambling about stars, Amazon and space travel




Some of us hate Amazon, some of us love it. Yet, it is difficult to find a person in the modern world who has never bought anything on Amazon. I always had the feeling that buying goods on Internet destroys the conections between people and in general try to avoid it but in spite of my strong feelings, I have used the Amazon online shopping many times. It is so convenient! It saves time - everything is just one click away. It is one of those things that makes you dislike yourself - the gap between conviction and reality. 

Yesterday I took the time to read an interview with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and for the first time I saw the picture in a very different light. It made me think: may be the dislike of Amazon is based on our fear of change. We want to stop it and have everything we have known for years, everything with which we feel comfortable. What made me questioning my believes was Bezos’ idea of space travel. I always thought them useless. Why go somewhere else if we haven't even put in order everything on our own planet? - I thought. However Bezos puts it in a different way. ‘I believe if we don't we will eventually end up with a civilisation of stasis, which I find very demoralising. I don't want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in a civilisation of stasis.’ ‘Now take the scenario, where you move out into the solar system. The solar system can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in.’

I am not sure if he is right or wrong because of course  the thousand Mozarts will come together with the thousand Hitler, Stalins and the rest who most likely will want to colonise the space regardless any other rights of life. Yet, we need to think big. If we could predict every outcome of our actions we will, most likely, never have the courage to do anything in life. To quote Edward Young: ‘Too low they build who build beneath the stars.’ 

So how did I get from Amazon shopping to space travel! I know they are ridiculously different from each other in essence but so close in the spirit of innovation, of thinking big. If we succeed of doing things with attitude devoid of arrogance and everything new is inwoven with the old, then our world will be OK. But then, we will not be ordinary human beings, will we? If we could do this, we will be in harmony with the balance of the universe. Then we will be able to build above; we will build up there, among  the stars.

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