Date: 2015-06-17
Categories: misc

J. M. Coetzee novel, Youth

A quote from the book "Youth" by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel prize for literature. The book describes Coetzee's stay in the UK, when he worked as a computer programmer.

Finally he has no respect for any version of thinking that can be embodied in a computer's circuitry. The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them.

I hope the rules aren't made up...

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