4 ms·

Sprezzatura

145 points by nreece 17y ago

fnid 17y ago
I'm not sure I like the idea of inventing external imaginary beings that grant us extraordinary powers for no other reason than it makes it easier to accept those powers. It seems dishonest.
- tel 17y ago
  Are you advocating total awareness of the world? Total immersion in both refulgent horror and terrible wonder? Constant consideration of ounce of harm you inflict on the world around you? An unclosing eye toward this miracle of entropy we call home? Unending empathy toward every single person you pass and even those you never meet. Total awareness that your own personal self has quite possibly culminated and now has only got forty years of slowly turning to dust. At some point you've got to shield your eyes; or, put it differently, find an interpretation you're comfortable with and settle down. Who can claim to not lie to themselves every day just to put their next foot forward? Even if you can see the honor, the honesty, in living that way I highly doubt you can survive. If you can, write a book about it. I think David Foster Wallace tried. Life isn't science. If you can go to a museum and enjoy the paintings, you can embellish the way you interpret your own sight. And if you're going to do it, why not pick a beautiful story?
  - fnid 17y ago
    I'm not advocating total awareness, though that would be cool and it is achievable according to some philosophies. I'm advocating the pursuit of an honest interpretation of the world. We know there aren't little trolls living in our walls that grant us creative powers. We know that isn't true. I believe it is possible to be aware of our impact on the world, even negative and continue to live. On 60 Minutes tonight there was a story about a recycling center in Colorado that was illegally shipping used computer monitors and televisions to Hong Kong. People there disassemble them and in doing so pollute their environment and damage their health. But I'm using a computer. There are two monitors in this very room. My behavior indirectly harms the world. I am aware of that. Perhaps I am adding a bit of negativity to the world, but that doesn't mean I should choose ignorance of that. It doesn't mean I should invent a little troll in the wall that is actually creating that monitor. I think it is okay to acknowledge the accomplishments of the creative. I think it is okay to accept responsibility for the good that we create and the harm that we inflict. I'm advocating honesty and pursuit of truth. Sometimes that requires that we forgive ourselves for that which we do that harms others. Those apologies can be truthful as well.
    - tel 17y ago
      Can you say there aren't trolls in the walls that grant us creativity? Can you assume that genius still happens in a vacuum? Can you hope to describe these things fully, attribute it to humanism? Perhaps the human achievement is in becoming an antenna for the inspiration of our chaotic world? I mean, no. I don't advocate intentional blindness to problems in our world. I would even go so far as to actually advocate a greater awareness of the weight of our impact in the world. We can learn something from knowing more what the impact of a dollar is. But humans are nothing if not machines for selective attention. If every time I bought my lunch I thought about the fertilizers dripping into the ocean causing immense algal blooms full of asphyxiated fish and oh the smell! I'd probably starve. If your life, the thing that puts you closest to your own understanding of divinity, is being creative; if you honestly have to face the idea of never being able to communicate like you did that one time not so long ago; if you have to keep going in face of that, well, I know what I'm not going to expend my attention toward. But even so, the speech wasn't about finding ways to ignore some nasty personal tragedy. It's about finding an interpretation on the charity and capriciousness of the creative process. What really is the best way to contextualize the immense amount of discipline and work and training that goes into creation that can all amount to precisely nothing without something widely considered to be external to us? Genius is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. Even when we can assume the sweat, we're still might end up short one spark. What gives? (I apologize for the waxing here, but god this is such a fascinating philosophical question.)
- thristian 17y ago
  In The Salmon of Doubt (I think), there's a transcript of a talk that the staunchly atheist Douglas Adams gave, and one of the things he mentions is the concept of Feng Shui, which he explains as the notion that the contents of your house should be arranged such that a Chinese dragon would be able to walk through it without scraping itself on corners or getting stuck in dead-ends. Clearly, to a rational scientific mind, the idea that your belongings should be organised for the benefit of magic invisible dragons is ridiculous. And yet... there's no doubt that some particular furniture layouts are more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing than others, and without a rigorous, mathematical function for deciding the optimum layout, perhaps the metaphor of a dragon walking around the house is a useful one - that is, it's not true in a scientific sense, but it's a concept that turns a relatively abstract and complicated problem-space into something concrete enough for the human mind to grapple with. I take this notion of "daemons" or "geniuses" to be something similar - it certainly doesn't pass Occam's Razor, but in this case we're not looking to discern Ultimate Truth. We just want to find a way of looking at the world that defuses the complex and oppressively powerful psychological feedback-loops that seem to be associated with creative vocations.
fizx 17y ago
Somehow, it's fabulous to have words for concepts you've fuzzily known about for a long time.
vibhavs 17y ago
That's a great word. It's really fascinating how certain words need a sentence-long definition when translated from other languages to English. So much is captured in one word! And that's an incredible TED talk. I recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it that they watch it when they have a chance. The best part in my opinion: "That's not what my creative process is - I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too."
- vijayr 17y ago
  That is one of the best TED talks I've ever watched, and I've seen it many times. I read her book, "Eat Pray Love" and googled her, when I came across the TED video. If anyone reading this hasn't watched the video yet, please do.
  - diN0bot 17y ago
    can you explain more of the appeal? (apologies, but i am going to explain my opinion here before waiting for you to answer. eit.) i stopped watching 75-85% of the way through. i couldn't take all the "you know"s, "like"s and "um"s. i'm not sure if the content wasn't appealing to me, or if her explanation was unexciting. when i see great art or learn something awesome i feel something lift inside me. i have an emotional connection. this drew a blank. i was a little surprised, since the blog post made sense to me. i agree with other commenters who mention have this fuzzy concept but not seeing it discussed in public much less defined. for a "best" TED talk i'd recommend http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke... she's a good speaker. there are other excellent speakers, too. maybe the "worked on 8hrs a day for 6 weeks" build up raised my expectations, but she sounded nervous, laughed at her own unfunny and irrelevant jokes, and didn't create anything wondrous or lifting inside either my heart or my head.
    - kringz 17y ago
zackattack 17y ago
Kobe Bryant is the best example of sprezzatura in sports, especially when you see him drive to the rim with four defenders on him. Kobe also speaks italian.
- petermarks 17y ago
  Agreed. This account of his 4am workouts and non-stop icing routine on gameday is truly inspiring: http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=4068270 http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=4068270 I like Kobe more than Lebron more for this very reason. He compensates for his relatively inferior size with superior work ethic.
  - dhyasama 17y ago
    His work ethic is legendary (and rubbed off on Lebron at the Olympics last summer). FYI, Kobe is 6'5" which is exactly average for NBA shooting guards.
jamesk2 17y ago
As someone who as explored both "creative" pursuits such as art and the technical pursuit of coding, i explain to my techie but creatively challenged friends that pursuing art is like hacking your brain's kernel while it is running. A bad line of code can bring down the entire OS. It might be why traditional creatives have the reputation of being unstable. You can't really take your brain offline and debug if something goes wrong with refactoring your aesthetic assumptions. If a creative is hacking their visual identity, they can get to look pretty weird through the major releases and might require several dot releases to look "right." But then we encounter the creative coder. Those people are freakiest of all and for that we are all better off.
rabidgnat 17y ago
The TED talk mentioned reminds me of "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html Hamming asserts that people who have done great work fail to "plant acorns." They chase another great revelation instead of stepping back to the fundamental level where they started, and spend the rest of their life only working on great problems, not useful subproblems. I see no reason an artist's success would be different.
10ren 17y ago
pronunciation (the red loudspeaker icon) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sprezzatura http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sprezzatura It's quite hard to pronounce, but the speaker makes it sound easy.
scm007 17y ago
This is brilliant.
balding_n_tired 17y ago
Might I recommend going back to the source on "sprezzatura"? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=castiglione+book+of+the+courtier&x=0&y=0&sprefix=castiglione http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dst...
stuntgoat 17y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470695 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470695

145 points by nreece 17y ago

fnid 17y ago

I'm not sure I like the idea of inventing external imaginary beings that grant us extraordinary powers for no other reason than it makes it easier to accept those powers. It seems dishonest.

tel 17y ago
Are you advocating total awareness of the world? Total immersion in both refulgent horror and terrible wonder? Constant consideration of ounce of harm you inflict on the world around you? An unclosing eye toward this miracle of entropy we call home? Unending empathy toward every single person you pass and even those you never meet. Total awareness that your own personal self has quite possibly culminated and now has only got forty years of slowly turning to dust. At some point you've got to shield your eyes; or, put it differently, find an interpretation you're comfortable with and settle down. Who can claim to not lie to themselves every day just to put their next foot forward? Even if you can see the honor, the honesty, in living that way I highly doubt you can survive. If you can, write a book about it. I think David Foster Wallace tried. Life isn't science. If you can go to a museum and enjoy the paintings, you can embellish the way you interpret your own sight. And if you're going to do it, why not pick a beautiful story?
- fnid 17y ago
  I'm not advocating total awareness, though that would be cool and it is achievable according to some philosophies. I'm advocating the pursuit of an honest interpretation of the world. We know there aren't little trolls living in our walls that grant us creative powers. We know that isn't true. I believe it is possible to be aware of our impact on the world, even negative and continue to live. On 60 Minutes tonight there was a story about a recycling center in Colorado that was illegally shipping used computer monitors and televisions to Hong Kong. People there disassemble them and in doing so pollute their environment and damage their health. But I'm using a computer. There are two monitors in this very room. My behavior indirectly harms the world. I am aware of that. Perhaps I am adding a bit of negativity to the world, but that doesn't mean I should choose ignorance of that. It doesn't mean I should invent a little troll in the wall that is actually creating that monitor. I think it is okay to acknowledge the accomplishments of the creative. I think it is okay to accept responsibility for the good that we create and the harm that we inflict. I'm advocating honesty and pursuit of truth. Sometimes that requires that we forgive ourselves for that which we do that harms others. Those apologies can be truthful as well.
  - tel 17y ago
    Can you say there aren't trolls in the walls that grant us creativity? Can you assume that genius still happens in a vacuum? Can you hope to describe these things fully, attribute it to humanism? Perhaps the human achievement is in becoming an antenna for the inspiration of our chaotic world? I mean, no. I don't advocate intentional blindness to problems in our world. I would even go so far as to actually advocate a greater awareness of the weight of our impact in the world. We can learn something from knowing more what the impact of a dollar is. But humans are nothing if not machines for selective attention. If every time I bought my lunch I thought about the fertilizers dripping into the ocean causing immense algal blooms full of asphyxiated fish and oh the smell! I'd probably starve. If your life, the thing that puts you closest to your own understanding of divinity, is being creative; if you honestly have to face the idea of never being able to communicate like you did that one time not so long ago; if you have to keep going in face of that, well, I know what I'm not going to expend my attention toward. But even so, the speech wasn't about finding ways to ignore some nasty personal tragedy. It's about finding an interpretation on the charity and capriciousness of the creative process. What really is the best way to contextualize the immense amount of discipline and work and training that goes into creation that can all amount to precisely nothing without something widely considered to be external to us? Genius is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. Even when we can assume the sweat, we're still might end up short one spark. What gives? (I apologize for the waxing here, but god this is such a fascinating philosophical question.)
thristian 17y ago
In The Salmon of Doubt (I think), there's a transcript of a talk that the staunchly atheist Douglas Adams gave, and one of the things he mentions is the concept of Feng Shui, which he explains as the notion that the contents of your house should be arranged such that a Chinese dragon would be able to walk through it without scraping itself on corners or getting stuck in dead-ends. Clearly, to a rational scientific mind, the idea that your belongings should be organised for the benefit of magic invisible dragons is ridiculous. And yet... there's no doubt that some particular furniture layouts are more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing than others, and without a rigorous, mathematical function for deciding the optimum layout, perhaps the metaphor of a dragon walking around the house is a useful one - that is, it's not true in a scientific sense, but it's a concept that turns a relatively abstract and complicated problem-space into something concrete enough for the human mind to grapple with. I take this notion of "daemons" or "geniuses" to be something similar - it certainly doesn't pass Occam's Razor, but in this case we're not looking to discern Ultimate Truth. We just want to find a way of looking at the world that defuses the complex and oppressively powerful psychological feedback-loops that seem to be associated with creative vocations.

fizx 17y ago

Somehow, it's fabulous to have words for concepts you've fuzzily known about for a long time.

vibhavs 17y ago

That's a great word. It's really fascinating how certain words need a sentence-long definition when translated from other languages to English. So much is captured in one word! And that's an incredible TED talk. I recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it that they watch it when they have a chance. The best part in my opinion: "That's not what my creative process is - I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too."

vijayr 17y ago
That is one of the best TED talks I've ever watched, and I've seen it many times. I read her book, "Eat Pray Love" and googled her, when I came across the TED video. If anyone reading this hasn't watched the video yet, please do.
- diN0bot 17y ago
  can you explain more of the appeal? (apologies, but i am going to explain my opinion here before waiting for you to answer. eit.) i stopped watching 75-85% of the way through. i couldn't take all the "you know"s, "like"s and "um"s. i'm not sure if the content wasn't appealing to me, or if her explanation was unexciting. when i see great art or learn something awesome i feel something lift inside me. i have an emotional connection. this drew a blank. i was a little surprised, since the blog post made sense to me. i agree with other commenters who mention have this fuzzy concept but not seeing it discussed in public much less defined. for a "best" TED talk i'd recommend http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke... she's a good speaker. there are other excellent speakers, too. maybe the "worked on 8hrs a day for 6 weeks" build up raised my expectations, but she sounded nervous, laughed at her own unfunny and irrelevant jokes, and didn't create anything wondrous or lifting inside either my heart or my head.
  - kringz 17y ago

zackattack 17y ago

Kobe Bryant is the best example of sprezzatura in sports, especially when you see him drive to the rim with four defenders on him. Kobe also speaks italian.

petermarks 17y ago
Agreed. This account of his 4am workouts and non-stop icing routine on gameday is truly inspiring: http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=4068270 http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=4068270 I like Kobe more than Lebron more for this very reason. He compensates for his relatively inferior size with superior work ethic.
- dhyasama 17y ago
  His work ethic is legendary (and rubbed off on Lebron at the Olympics last summer). FYI, Kobe is 6'5" which is exactly average for NBA shooting guards.

jamesk2 17y ago

As someone who as explored both "creative" pursuits such as art and the technical pursuit of coding, i explain to my techie but creatively challenged friends that pursuing art is like hacking your brain's kernel while it is running. A bad line of code can bring down the entire OS. It might be why traditional creatives have the reputation of being unstable. You can't really take your brain offline and debug if something goes wrong with refactoring your aesthetic assumptions. If a creative is hacking their visual identity, they can get to look pretty weird through the major releases and might require several dot releases to look "right." But then we encounter the creative coder. Those people are freakiest of all and for that we are all better off.

rabidgnat 17y ago

The TED talk mentioned reminds me of "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html Hamming asserts that people who have done great work fail to "plant acorns." They chase another great revelation instead of stepping back to the fundamental level where they started, and spend the rest of their life only working on great problems, not useful subproblems. I see no reason an artist's success would be different.

10ren 17y ago

pronunciation (the red loudspeaker icon) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sprezzatura http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sprezzatura It's quite hard to pronounce, but the speaker makes it sound easy.

scm007 17y ago

This is brilliant.

balding_n_tired 17y ago

Might I recommend going back to the source on "sprezzatura"? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=castiglione+book+of+the+courtier&x=0&y=0&sprefix=castiglione http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dst...

stuntgoat 17y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470695 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470695