Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Writers often talk of the torments of writing, of “the fear of the blank page,” of nights waking in a cold sweat because suddenly they see the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, of the story that they have been writing, sometimes for years. This distress is certainly real, but I insist also upon the pleasures of creation, of inventing an entire fictional world out of thousands of facts and details. There is a particular kind of wonder that I feel when a character I have invented begins to overtake me, to run ahead and pull me forward: suddenly this imagined character knows more than I do about its own fate, its own future, and also about other characters in the story, and I must learn to follow, to catch up. In a way that I do not fully understand, my invented person infuses me with the materials of life, with ideas, with plot twists, with understandings I never knew I possessed. A creative work represents, for me, the possibility of touching infinity. Not mathematical infinity or philosophical infinity, but human infinity. That is, the infinity of the human face. The infinite strings of a single heart, the infinity of an individual’s intellect and understanding, of her opinions, urges, illusions, of his smallness and greatness, her power to create, his power to destroy — the infinity of her configurations. Almost every idea that comes to my mind about the character I am writing opens me up to more and more human possibilities: to a lush garden of forking paths. “To be whole, it is enough to exist,” wrote the poet Fernando Pessoa. This wonderful observation pours salt on the wounds of every writer who knows how difficult it is to translate a character born in the imagination into a character that contains even a particle of the Pessoan “wholeness,” even a fraction of the fullness of life that exists in one single second of a living person. It is this wholeness — made up also of infinite flaws, with defects and deficiencies of both mind and body — to which a writer aspires. This is the writer’s wish, this is the writer’s compulsion: to reach that alchemical develop-ment at which suddenly, through the use of inanimate matter — symbols arranged on a page in a particular order — we have conjured into being a life. Writers who have written characters and dissolved into them and then come back into themselves; who have come back to find themselves now composed in part of their character; who know that if they had not written these characters they would not truly know themselves — these writers know the pleasures to be found in the sense of life’s fullness that lives inside each of us. It is almost banal to be moved by this, but I am: we, each and every one of us, are in fact a plenitude of life. We each contain an infinity of possibilities and ways of being inside life. Yet finally such an observation is not banal at all. It is a truth of which we regularly need to remind ourselves. After all, look how cautiously we avoid living all the abundance that we are, how we dodge so many of the possibilities that are broached by our souls, our bodies, our circumstances. Quickly, at an early age, we ossify, and diminish ourselves into a single thing, a “one,” a this or a that, a clearly delineated being. Perhaps it is our desire not to face this confusing and sometimes deceptive welter within us that makes us lose some part of ourselves.   Sometimes the unlived life, the life we could have lived but were unable to live, or did not dare to live, withers inside us and vanishes. At other moments we may feel it stirring within, we may see it before our eyes, and it stings us with regret, with sorrow, with a sensation of squandered chances, with humiliation, even with grief, because something, or someone, was abandoned or destroyed. It might be a passionate love that we renounced in favor of calm. Or a profession wrongly chosen, in which we molder for the rest of our lives. Or an