In the afternoons, I would walk across the courtyard to the humanities building (Building 14 in MIT parlance) and talk to my students about the messy nature of human affairs. The dimly lit alleys of the mind. Greed, jealousy, love thwarted, happiness, revenge, complex and ambiguous motives for action. Students who wrote stories with self-consistent characters, characters whose movements could be predicted and who always acted with rationality and reason, were roundly rebuked for having created nothing more than lifeless hunks of pulp. Real people are unpredictable, I said. A character who
...more
