In which I develop a functional definition of "quality"

So yesterday I did this post in which I argle bargled for 1,287 words on problems I was not prepared to solve, such as:

• Whether children should be allowed to spend their money as they choose (yes, also this does come down on the side of private property, oh dear)
• Whether this obliges children to earn money (oh double dear)
• Whether this obliges children to earn real money by providing real value (I mean, some kids are going to figure this out on their own, I did, but also TRIPLE DEAR)
• Whether all people are capable of providing real value, whether or not that value is correlated with a job (DOES ANYONE HAVE A DEAR LICENSE)

And also, you know, a bunch of questions about what college could be capable of.

But in the middle of all this, and this is the reason why we write these things (and this is also the reason why I don't let any of you leave comments, because I don't want you to derail what I'm actually going to end up thinking about), in the middle of all this I came up with a functional definition of quality.

Let me remind you what it was.

quality in this case referring primarily to its ability to provide new information (longevity, which is correlated with quality, implies that new information will continue to be provided and/or extracted over time)

I told this to Larry last night, and he said it effectively explained what he and I had often called "monoliths," which is of course a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you may be able to see the image even if you've never seen the movie because the concept itself is memetic.

War and Peace is a monolith; Anna Karenina is not.

Beethoven's fifth and ninth symphonies are monolithic; the seventh and third, although beloved, are not.

Les Miserables (book and musical) are monolithic; Miss Saigon (which was created by the same team that brought us Les Mis) is not.

But I'm getting off topic, because monoliths are slightly adjacent to quality (monoliths change the framework of possibility), and monoliths also imply that quality may have a continuum. Anna Karenina is an excellent novel. I've read it three times, and I started reading it again about a year ago and it just didn't hold my interest the way it did when I was a teenager and a twentysomething and a thirtysomething, which leads me to suspect that there may be only so much you can extract out of the book – whereas War and Peace and Les Miserables seem inexhaustible.

This brings us back to the idea of quality referring to the ability to provide new information – by which I really mean that a quality item or idea has the ability to provide new information continuously, and by which I really really mean that a quality item or idea has the ability to provide unforgettably new information continuously.

In other words:

Every time you interact with the item or idea, it 1) teaches you something new and 2) you do not forget what you learn.

At this point I'd like you to pause and find a piece of paper and sketch Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

(pause)

(pause)

(pause)

(these parentheses represent time passing)

Obviously I don't care if you drew anything, and I bet most of you didn't, but I also bet that many of you imagined yourself drawing the painting, and I bet you imagined the elements of the painting you would draw.

The two figures in the lower-right-hand corner, for example. The monkey.

You know this painting even if you've never looked at this painting, and once you start looking at it you find elements that are newly indelible, figures you hadn't noticed before, details you hadn't been aware of, bits and pieces that become part of the whole when you discover them.

Larry and I have a reproduction of this painting hanging above our fireplace, and we've spent more than one evening just sitting down and looking at it and finding new things in it that we've never seen before, and the interesting thing is that I've various reproductions of this painting taped or sticky-tacked into various places in my successive homes for about twenty-five years.

And the other art I stucky-tacked to the walls, such as Jack Vettriano's Dance Me to the End of Love or Dominque Appia's Entre Les Trous De La Memoire, got taken down when I moved because I wasn't compelled to continue looking at them.

One could say that I outgrew them, and there's an element of outgrowingness that needs to be considered whenever you're discussing quality, because – wow, this seems like an extremely complicated thought to think all of the way through, especially because my mind gets stuck on "but babies like human faces and rings of keys" and I have a piano student who keeps forgetting ("forgetting") her brightly colored primer but is fascinated with the book of "Great Piano Music" that I got as a promotional thing, it's a bunch of public domain classics on cheap glossy paper and I went ahead and loaned it to her and her brother because they know there's something there.

And then the converse of all of this is the ugly noisemaking toy that does one thing, and the toddler is happy enough to make the noise until it's obvious that the toy only does one thing, and then the toddler either loses interest in the toy ("what a waste of money," says the parent, and they're not completely wrong) or tries to find out what happens if they break the toy ("no no no no no!" says the parent, and they're only right in the sense that breaking the toy prevents another toddler from learning how it does its one thing).

But the trouble is that I'm stuck here, with a thought in the middle of its process, and so I will end this post with the Seurat, the Vettriano, and the Appia:

(good gravy I'm supposed to be writing a musical)