It’s the last day of the year. I send out my newsletter every Friday but for obvious reasons I thought I should wait one extra day.
The Jayary has been the most interesting project I have undertaken and the most difficult one. It’s a form of insanity, not to say narcissism, to unleash one’s ambitions against a mountain.
Like every good bhakt, I too want to say “I have learned a lot from this experience,” and that would be true. I can also add a couple of cliches about miles to go before sleeping and knowing that I don’t know and those cliches would be accurate as well.
But the cliches can wait. I am exhausted. I like reading everyday. I like writing everyday. I even like reading and writing every day. But reading and writing everyday about the same topic and to retain a continuous thread while doing so - that has proven to be more tiring than I ever imagined.
I am going to take a break. No Jaya for a month. Or more.
But when I come back - and I will - I want to go back to the drawing board and craft new tools that will help us imagine and reimagine the Jaya. Not as a novel. Not as a philosophical text. Or rather, both and neither. But most importantly, tools that will help me transplant the Jaya into a medium that’s made for it: the web.
Sample thought: if Donald Knuth created TEX to write the books that he wanted to write, what do we need to do to write the Jaya the way we want to write it? There are no firm answers to such questions, only some promising directions that I will explore in 2017 and come back to you in 2018.
Until then: goodbye.