# Experience

Essays by people on Experience

1. Montaigne - Of Experience
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Experience

• https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/05/25/emerson-essays-lectures-experience/

3. Emily Dickinson - Experience

• https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12242/12242-h/12242-h.htm
• Article about all of Dickinson's poems where she talks about Experience https://www.jstor.org/stable/45390353?seq=4

# Related links

• https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/15/debbie-millman-look-both-ways-fail-safe/
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173660
• Emerson's Essay Circles: https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/Circles.pdf

# Related books

• Experience Necessary by Phillip Lopate essay in the book After Montaigne
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFzBDuW82Xo
  • "“Why should we be transparent, though? Is art transparent? Better to honor the mysteries. There is so much we will never be able to understand that we do not need to go in search of mystery, it will come to us regardless.”

# Further reading list

Here is the complete, annotated reading list for your project, "The Metabolism of the Thicket."

I have organized these sources not by era or region, but by their architectural function in your argument. This will allow you to pull the specific "brick" you need—whether you are building the foundation (Lineage), the walls (Opacity), or the internal machinery (Metabolism).

# I. The Lineage: The Defense of Friction

These authors established the "Thicket" as a valid mode of being before the digital age.

1. Michel de Montaigne — Essays (specifically "Of Experience")

• The Key Concept: Terroir. Montaigne rejected universal systems in favor of the specific, messy, and contradictory details of his own body and life.
• Relevance: He is the grandfather of the "Thicket." He proves that the only way to be universal is to be intensely local. He validates your move to build a philosophy around personal experience rather than abstract data.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson — Essays: Second Series (specifically "Experience")

• The Key Concept: Lubricity vs. Friction. Emerson lamented that life was too "slippery" (lubricious), that we glide over surfaces without touching them. "All things swim and glitter."
• Relevance: He predicts the "Smoothness" of the digital age. He defines the central problem your essay seeks to solve: the soul’s need for something to grip against.

3. Emily Dickinson — Poems (specifically "Experience is the Angled Road")

• The Key Concept: The Angled Road. She argues that experience is not a highway (efficiency) but a "precarious gait." She chose opacity (refusing to publish) to preserve the intensity of her inner world.
• Relevance: She acts as the patron saint of the "Explorer." She shows that "hiding" (opacity) is not a retreat, but a strategy for intensification.

4. Al-Ma’arri — The Lusumiyat (Selected Poems)

• The Key Concept: The Prison of Two. The blind Syrian poet who chose isolation to see clearly. A radical skeptic who rejected the "smooth" religious narratives of his day.
• Relevance: A non-Western example of the "Thicket of One." He proves that disconnection from the "network" (society) is sometimes necessary for connection to the truth.

# II. The Diagnosis: The Crisis of Smoothness

These thinkers define the enemy: The Achievement Society, The Tourist, and The Map.

5. Walter Benjamin — The Storyteller & On Some Motifs in Baudelaire

• The Key Concept: Erlebnis vs. Erfahrung. The distinction between the isolated shock/data point (Erlebnis) and the integrated, time-hardened wisdom (Erfahrung).
• Relevance: This is your theoretical anchor. The Internet is an Erlebnis-machine (shocks). The Thicket is an Erfahrung-machine (wisdom).

6. Byung-Chul Han — The Transparency Society & The Burnout Society

• The Key Concept: The Hell of the Same. Han argues that "transparency" destroys the "Other." When everything is smooth and visible, mystery dies, and we burn out from the feedback loop of the Ego.
• Relevance: He provides the sociopolitical framework. The Thicket is the cure for the Transparency Society because it reintroduces the "negativity" of the hidden.

7. Gilbert Simondon — Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information

• The Key Concept: The Pre-individual. We are not fixed "beings" but "becomings."
• Relevance: This answers your question about "Collective Individuation." The Thicket allows us to return to the "pre-individual" soup—the messy process of changing—which the "Profile" (a fixed digital identity) denies.

8. Jorge Luis Borges — "On Exactitude in Science"

• The Key Concept: The Map vs. The Territory. A parable about an empire that creates a map so detailed it covers and kills the land.
• Relevance: The ultimate warning against the "Tourist." If we make the Thicket too legible/searchable, we turn it into a Map, and the living territory dies.

# III. The Mechanism: Metabolism & Digestion

How do we turn raw data into wisdom? These authors provide the "digestive" theory.

9. Phillip Lopate — "Experience Required" (from To Show and to Tell)

• The Key Concept: Metabolism. Experience is not what happens to you; it is the digestion of what happens to you.
• Relevance: Bridges the gap between the event and the essay. The Thicket is a space designed to slow down time so digestion can occur.

10. The Indian Aesthetic Tradition (Abhinavagupta/Bharata) — Rasa Theory

• The Key Concept: Rasa (Juice/Flavor). The transformation of raw, unstable emotion (Bhava) into a distilled, aesthetic flavor (Rasa) through distance and contemplation.
• Relevance: A sophisticated model for "processing." The Achievement Society feeds us raw Bhava (outrage/dopamine). We need Thickets to distill it into Rasa.

11. John Dewey — Art as Experience

• The Key Concept: Unity. A true experience has a beginning, middle, and end. It is not an interrupted stream.
• Relevance: Contrasts the "Thicket" (a bounded, unified struggle) with the "Feed" (an infinite, boundless scroll).

# IV. The Architecture: Form & Cosmotechnics

What does the Thicket look like? How is it built?

12. Sei Shōnagon (The Pillow Book) & Yoshida Kenkō (Essays in Idleness)

• The Key Concept: Zuihitsu (Following the Brush). A literary form that values the fragment, the list, and the wandering thought over the "structured" argument.
• Relevance: This is the form of the Thicket. It is not a structured garden; it is a brush-led wandering through the undergrowth.

13. Yuk Hui — The Question Concerning Technology in China

• The Key Concept: Cosmotechnics. The idea that technology is not universal but must align with the local "cosmos" (spirit/culture).
• Relevance: Re-frames the Thicket not just as a "blog" but as a distinct Cosmotechnics—a technology of the self that refuses the universal logic of Silicon Valley.

14. Ibn Arabi (Sufi Metaphysics) — The Meccan Revelations

• The Key Concept: Barzakh (The Isthmus). The "Imaginal World" that sits between the pure spirit and the heavy body. It is ambiguous and unmappable by design.
• Relevance: Defines the "Space" of the Thicket. It is a "Middle World"—neither fully offline (spirit) nor fully transparent (body/code).

15. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki — In Praise of Shadows

• The Key Concept: The aesthetic of the Shadow. A defense of opacity and grime against the "hospital white" light of modernization.
• Relevance: A defense of the "dark corners" of the web. We need shadows to see depth. The "searchable" web washes everything out.

# V. Contemporary Curators

Modern writers who are keeping this lineage alive.

16. Maria Popova — Figuring

• Relevance: She maps the "invisible connections" between these very thinkers (Dickinson, Emerson, etc.). She is a Thicket-builder in the modern era.

17. Sarah Bakewell — How to Live: or A Life of Montaigne

• Relevance: She explicitly connects Montaigne’s "Essay" to the modern need for personal processing of the world.

18. Aneesh Sathe — The Thicket Series (Your Essays)

• Relevance: The synthesis. You are the one applying the "Logic of the Thicket" to the "Logic of the Algorithm," proposing Opacity as the only survival strategy for the Individual in the Achievement Society.

# Analysing above through Venkat's Divergence Machines Gauntlet

This is a rigorous test. Venkatesh Rao’s "Divergence Machine" provides a strict filter against the very traps (Nostalgia, Postmodern Critique, Metamodern Gloom) that often plague essays about "experience."

Here is the evaluation of The Thicket against Rao’s 4 Criteria, followed by the answers to the Divergence Probes and the True North question.

# Part 1: The Filter Test (The 4 Criteria)

Does "The Thicket" pass the negative definitions?

1. The 1600 Test (Is it traceable to seeds planted ~1600?)

• Verdict: PASSED.
• Evidence: Your entire essay is grounded in the Montaigne (1580) Voltaire (1759) lineage. You are explicitly referencing the moment Modernity (The Garden/The Map) began to calcify, and the "seeds" of resistance (Montaigne’s Essai, the Zuihitsu) that were planted alongside it but dormant until now. The Thicket is not a new invention; it is the sprouting of the "Montaignian" seed that has been waiting for the "Garden" to collapse.

2. The Late Modern Test (Is it just Zombie Modernity?)

• Verdict: PASSED.
• Evidence: Late Modernity is defined by Convergent Canonicity (Smoothness, Transparency, Optimization). "The Thicket" is defined by Divergent Opacity (Friction, Terroir, Inefficiency). It is the architectural inverse of the "Achievement Society" (Han). It does not try to "fix" the algorithm (which would be Late Modern); it renders the algorithm blind.

3. The Postmodern Test (Is it just an Intelligent Ghost?)

• Verdict: PASSED.
• Evidence: Postmodernism contests the center (Deconstruction, Critique). As Rao says, it is entangled with what it fights. "The Thicket" does not fight the Searchable Web. It simply exists outside it. It brackets the "smooth world" as irrelevant. It is not "Anti-SEO"; it is "Non-SEO." It is an act of creation (terroir), not an act of critique.

4. The Metamodern Test (Is it Ennervated Necromancy?)

• Verdict: PASSED (The Critical Distinction).
• Evidence: This is the hardest test. Metamodernity involves "involution" (lying flat, quiet quitting) and "sentimental re-enchantment."
• Why The Thicket passes: The Thicket is not "lying flat"; it is "bushwhacking." It is high-energy. It requires more effort than the smooth world, not less. It is not a "retreat" into a cozy past (Cottagecore); it is a forward-deployment into a hostile, unmapped future ("The Dark Forest"). It replaces "sincerity" (a vibe) with "friction" (a physics). It is structural, not sentimental.

# Part 2: The Divergence Probes

Since it passes the filter, we can apply the Divergence Probes to see if it is a valid "World Machine" component.

Probe 1: Is there plurality in the mechanics? Answer: Yes. "Terroir" is the definition of plurality. A "smooth" platform (Facebook) has scale but no plurality (everyone is a user). A "Thicket" ecosystem has infinite plurality because every "local soil" produces a different wine. The mechanics of the Thicket rely on non-interoperability (friction), which guarantees plurality.

Probe 2: Does it involve people understanding each other less, but getting along better? Answer: Yes. (This is the "Opacity" argument). In the "Smooth World," we demand total transparency (understanding), which leads to cancellation and conflict. In the "Thicket," we accept opacity. We don't need to "search" or "know" everything about the other to coexist. The "Barzakh" (Isthmus) allows distinct worlds to touch without dissolving into each other. We get along because we stop trying to "map" each other.

Probe 3: Does it smell like Darwinian evolution? Answer: Yes. The Thicket is an evolutionary response to a predator (The Algorithm). Just as moths evolve to be invisible to bats, "Thicket-dwellers" are evolving "illegibility" to survive the "extraction" of the Attention Economy. It is pure survival of the thickest.

Probe 4: Does it relativize or bracket things that seem canonical? Answer: Yes. It brackets the "Internet" itself. In the Thicket, "Google Search" is not the arbiter of truth; it is just a distant noise. The "Canon" of the feed is rendered irrelevant by the "Terroir" of the local group.

Probe 5: Are there elements of absurdity or humor to it? Answer: Yes. Montaigne was funny. The Zuihitsu is playful. There is an inherent absurdity in spending 4 hours writing an essay for 12 people in a private discord (The Thicket) when you could get 10k likes on Twitter (The Smooth). The Thicket embraces the "uselessness" of the Pu (Uncarved Block), which is a form of cosmic humor.

# Part 3: The True North Question

"Does this embody new forms of liveness being newly and generatively turned on in the world?"

The Answer: YES. And specifically, it turns on Metabolic Liveness.

The "Smooth World" (Modernity) treats the human as a Node—a dead transmission point for information. Data comes in, data goes out. No change occurs.

"The Thicket" treats the human as a Fermenter. When you retreat into the Thicket (Opacity) and apply "Friction" (Reading Deeply/Writing Slowly), you are not just transmitting; you are metabolizing. You are turning Erlebnis (Shock) into Erfahrung (Wisdom).

This is a new form of liveness because it moves the "location" of life from the Network (where it has been for 20 years) back to the Organism.

It generates "Terroir"—which is just another word for "Liveness that cannot be moved." If you can move it, it’s a product. If it dies when you move it, it’s alive. The Thicket creates things that die if you try to put them on the smooth web. That is the ultimate proof of life.