The world of pointers to pointers, arrays of pointers, pointers to structures containing pointers to strings. In comparison to which the death of Foucault meant nothing.

Or no: his death seemed perfectly timed, emblematic, a pointer backward to something I was finished with. I was suddenly glad to be rid of the drag of philosophy, freed from the whole morass of convoluted academic thinking. The cleanliness of programming was a balm. I had spent months unlearning the desire to be unique. I was trying to write code so standard in form, so common in expression, that my work, ideally, could not be distinguished from another programmer’s. I was striving for a certain clarity and simplicity, a form of impersonal beauty. To achieve an odd transparency designed to let the human reader slip past the code’s wordlike representation and see, as directly as possible, the bit written to disk, the block read from tape, the value stored in memory—the ephemeral electronic moment of what the program does. It was a release from the personal: the program, not the programmer.

And now I felt oddly whole, liberated from something that up until that moment I didn’t know I was suffering: a kind of enfeeblement I’d been imposing on myself by keeping myself separate from the work going on all around me. I’d been holding on to another reality, my lost life as a professor. I’d been belittling the programmers as uneducated dolts, beneath me; it had made me resentful and feeble and pitiful; and all because I was holding out for a life that didn’t exist.