The Two Egos

This site ran for months on a simple rule: keep the self out of the notes. The rule came from good instincts — an author’s ego in a piece of work is hard to like, and the safest distance from it is zero. The notes stayed clean, organized, impersonal. And slowly they began to read like anyone could have built them, which for a second brain is a strange kind of failure. The one thing a second brain shouldn’t be is anyone’s.

Working the tension out split the word in two. The Two Meanings of Ego carries the full derivation; the short version is that the ego worth disliking — self-regard, the author asking to be admired — was never the same substance as the author being present at all. For me the two had always been one dial, one quantity to turn down until the work is polite. They turn out to be two. A page can hold a whole person and ask for nothing.

This section is the rule reversed, carefully. Notes with the person left in, dated so the positions can move. The gate each one passes comes straight from the derivation: a sentence either changes what a reader sees of the subject, or only what they think of me — and the second kind is the old ego, which dies here the same as it would anywhere.