henrybrook.com

I went walking, trying to find a coffee. Feet took me down to the train station and the only place open at eight in the morning on a Sunday. I stood sipping the java juice and staring up at the copper tower that flanks the station’s omnibus esplanade. Steps to take you closer to the gods, or the safety and secrecy of higher ground. Is that where the idea came from, to escape the sand floor of plain existence? And if AI is the endgame of human evolution, could we build machines that are smart enough to dream new ziggurat shapes and sanctums? There’d be some sweet magic in that.

we had minders and drivers, a promoter to guide you through their city. We had a working reason to linger, to enter the backstage rooms and bars, to learn a little of another life. Books are my escorts now. I laze in the apartment with Isherwood, sink a beer with Fallada, swollen red hands trembling on his prescription hunt, even share the cold in those first great pages with Leamas at the checkpoint hut. These visions of the city seem true as the thoughts of what I did yesterday, the places visited. But book memories are fixed and locked in print, whereas the next corner turn or swinging bar door grants future secrets. Read all you want, but keep riding the rails.

after the Wall came down, I was in a backing band on a Golden Oldie tour, with a high-rise hotel room to myself overlooking Alexanderplatz. I was greenhorn lonely and homesick until The Troggs took me under their wing. Out for a walk with Reg Presley, we cut through a casino lobby, trying to get out of the cold. I’ve never known a summer in Berlin, each time I’ve been there’s that raw wind blowing and the trees bare and brown. Presley was telling me about crop circles and other reality irregularities; I think he ended up writing a book about them. It was before he made a pile from royalties on one of his love songs, before he could say no to the Euro gigs if he didn’t feel like going. We killed an hour at the casino bar, waiting for the bus. And I remember thinking, this is pretty cool. A quarter century later, I stumble out from the U-Bahn exit with my kids hunting for a tram connection. We disturb a Japanese film crew, furtive – no permits – in the dark, get shushed and waved away, and I see the hotel and the tower against the winter sky and I remember. I don’t feel as though any of what’s happened has been under my control. And I wouldn’t change a thing. It rolls by. Until the next time, Alexanderplatz.

ain’t bad, as palaces go. The Tor, the tower, the Tiergarten and the galleries, Foster’s dome peeping from the rooftops, this town is full of treasures. But I wouldn’t trade them all for my first glimpse of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum. The beautiful one has come. I near swooned at her limestone profile. Worth flying around the world for. Worth more to me than any tin machine or grand building, well-polished or stately they may be.

in the acres of the Holocaust Memorial, glimpsed between the rows and cut corners of blocks. You retreat into yourself until a face flashes by in one of the broken corridors, inquiring eyes, another Berlin tourist not sure how to react to the empty perspective lines, powder blue sky overhead, black walls all around. People, strangers found, not lost.

here in Oxford town, three days walk from any sea. I get my salt air from books, ocean-roving across the pages. But they’re hit and miss; I thought I was in for the duration with Patrick O’Brian then slipped away in the second title, with his captain shipless and hunting foxes. I need the spray and the coming storm, coast no more. Landlocked in Ox, I dream of getting lost in the great, watery immensity, gone with Pip into the azure world. But in truth, I tremble whenever I bob out onto the extreme irreverence of the flood. Working sailors don’t yearn for these driftings, they cling to the charts and the sat nav. We humans plot ourselves at a footprint point on the globe, map every alleyway and net the world in satellites. And when Turing set out for uni across the Atlantic, he carried his own antique sextant aboard the liner, always certain of his locus under the stars.

maybe we could use AR instead, for Aerial Robots, with a nod to AI? These terms are still settling and changing in the comings and goings of the language. I don’t mind drones so much, we can reclaim the word for new world uses. Drones are cheap to build and easy to find at the moment, I hope they stay that way. Flight is exciting, liberating. For any worries about privacy and observation, drones prompt new ideas and ways of seeing things. The AI that guides and governs them is improving weekly. It raises other questions about AI, how it will merge into our lives and whether our evolution will lead us to construct equals – or as some fear, betters. But, in the study of machine intelligence I’m certain we’ll learn more about ourselves and what we need to preserve and protect of being human. Fear not the tech, make the tech your own.

but not much else has changed. Cracked grey paving slabs, a splash of red paint, banks of brick terraces and the background semaphore of cranes, this late-morning approach to the London pub. I meet a friend of thirty years to swap tales over the jars. Every meeting has its theme, but it was only on the train home that I mark the wisdom, the unspoken message of the day. There’ve been failings, but the quiet successes of life don’t get their fair mention. So many good times, beyond any measure.

and the side streets are iffy this morning. I walk the ice, chat with some other parents dropping off their kids. They all saw it coming down, though it was late and silent. All of them keen to it somehow, a lonesome sharing.

they often suffer a spell of turbulent craziness, it strikes me. Out of all Kerouac’s books, his breakdown narrative, Big Sur cuts deepest. All that was rational, all those invisible threads tethering you to sanity, are hacked away when fame and money rush in. You can walk away from the little obligations and resentments of an obscure life, the shopping to carry in, tedious arrangements, the phone never ringing, to flood your days with new pursuits. They won’t mean anything more, in fact, there’s a good chance that you’ll leave a lot of what was profound in your life behind – but you have to evolve. The famous go through the transition churn of making it for a year or two and then emerge, into their different life. And even if they cling to the invisible threads, their identity has to change. For most of us, the ride in a limo is a giggle, a mask, a dress-up game. But for the famous, it’s who they are and if they try to mock it, those that stare will call them false.