HOW WE KEEP DESTROYING WHAT LOVE

A man gets into a taxi, pays the fare in full, thanks the driver, and steps back out onto the pavement. He never says where he wants to go. It is an old joke, and it is also an accurate description of most human lives. We do not, for the most part, destroy what we love by handling it too roughly. We destroy it by never arriving. The water we like is in the shop and the water we drink is in the tap. The person we love is asleep on the other side of the bed and has been for nine months. The instrument is in the cupboard. The parents are three hours away by train, and the train runs daily. Nothing was refused, nothing was decided, no villain appeared. The fare was paid. The journey never happened. Boris Kriger argues that this is not weakness of will and not the human condition. It is a shortage of dimensions. Value and action run on separate axes, and on the axis where action actually moves - habit, price, availability, effort, shame, the queue - what we love has no coordinates at all. It does not lose. It is simply absent, the way color is absent from a set of scales. Push harder along that axis and you get exhaustion; push in the opposite direction and you get renunciation, which is the same axis with a minus sign. The only move that has ever worked is sideways: a new dimension in which the old question cannot even be asked. Drawing on his work on orthogonal displacement and frame-lock, Kriger takes thirty-three frames - the queue, the price, the occasion, the repair, the role, the rating, the term - and performs the same operation on each of them, until the reader can perform it unaided. Along the way he prosecutes his own book, his own life, and the machines we are now building that love along a single axis and are dangerous not because they are strong but because they are narrow. >Keywords: orthogonal thinking, decision making, philosophy of everyday life, self-knowledge, frame-lock, habit and choice, meaningful living