Even more satisfying was the fact that every pitch was a strike. By some miracle the cowboy had it that day, power and control. For five or six innings he held the other team to no runs and struck out eight or nine batters along the way. His face was pure joy. As mine must have been. Then, just like that, he lost it. The ball started drifting. Left, right, up, down. It started sailing, bouncing in the dirt. Uncle Charlie sighed. Here it comes, he said. Ball four. The cowboy walked a batter. Ball four. He walked another batter. Along with his control, the cowboy lost his composure. He started to sweat like the guilty man in a police lineup. I looked at Uncle Charlie, frantic. Do something. Uncle Charlie looked at me with the placid frown of an ancient Stoic. What are you gonna do? Another walk. The crowd stirred. Groans and boos rained down from the nosebleeds. What’s going to happen? I asked Uncle Charlie. He lit a Marlboro and slowly held up four fingers. Sure enough, one two three four, the cowboy threw four straight balls, issuing another walk and forcing in a run.At last the manager came out to lasso the cowboy. By then, however, it was too late. The other team had seized the lead, and the momentum, and the Mets did what they always do. They lost.On the drive home Uncle Charlie went from Stoic to philosophe as he discussed the case of this pitcher. To have such a gift, he said, and to waste it like that---how sad. To me, it was more than sad. It was tragic. Years later I still think of that pitcher, still use him as motivation. He’s an object lesson for anyone struggling with this question of control, which is to say: everyone. We all make the mistake now and then of thinking the great athletes, actors, painters, doctors, entrepreneurs, et al., are gifted with special powers. In fact everyone has special powers. The ones who succeed are the ones who find ways of achieving durable, consistent control over their powers. Glenn Gould, the fearsome pianist, obsessed about his beat-up old Steinway CD 318, and his special wooden stool with the legs sawed off, because both gave him maximum touch, feel, connection with the instrument. “This is the secret of doing Bach on the piano,” he said. “You must have that immediacy of response, that control over fine definitions of things. ”Georgia O’Keefe, one of America’s most important artists, a towering figure of Modernism, soul, mystery, passion. But in a famous letter to her dear friend she singled out the importance of keeping cool. “Self-control is a wonderful thing [...] I think we must even keep ourselves from feeling too much [...] often [...] if we are going to keep sane and see with a clear unprejudiced vision. ”This war between power and control is woven into our DNA, because it’s woven into the DNA of the universe. It was there at the start, moments after the Big Bang, physicists tell us: Energy versus Entropy, locked in a knife fight. The fight rages to this day. All energy, unless constrained, veers toward entropy, or chaos. Energy equals power; constraint is control. It’s so simple, we forget. Performance experts say the best method of cultivating control is to form good work habits, develop simple and repeatable mechanics, then practice, practice fiendishly. But this is only one path to control. There are many. Of course, too much control creates its own problems. If power without control is nothing, control without power is death. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out... ball four. The struggle begins again. Actually it never ends, a realization that can be hugely discouraging. On such days I think back to a wild cowboy, and a beloved philosophe, and with a sigh I ask myself: What are you gonna do?

But are they also the virtues of literature? In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, written in 1985, Italo Calvino proposes five qualities that writers working in the 21st century might aspire to attain in their work: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. Presumably Calvino would find little to argue with in The Elements of Style, for the elemental style it champions facilitates the very qualities he prescribes. Yet in his memo on Quickness (in the original Rapidità), Calvino also makes a counterintuitive case: for lingering, for diversions, for narratives that give an impression of nonlinear or dilated time. There is value, Calvino believes, even in stories that seem never to arrive at their destination. “The digression,” he writes, “is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight.” He also quotes Carlo Levi’s introduction to Tristam Shandy (a novel, according to Calvino, “completely composed of digressions”):If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows—perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places. Immortality through perpetual digression. The idea is consistent with what Calvino, who died before he could write his sixth memo, calls his personal motto: Festina lente. Hurry slowly. The Elements of Style teaches us that our writing should be rigorously streamlined. Not incompatibly, Calvino advises that even frictionless prose can seem to tarry and meander, backtrack and lose its way. In fact, such controlled discursions are often what turn merely elegant sentences into something transcendent. Not only do the deviations seem to defy death and time, they also resonate with the unstraightfor-wardness of life itself. If an artist can simultaneously evoke two seemingly opposite impressions—lightness and weight, quickness and slowness, exactitude and uncertainty, visibility and opacity—he in turn evokes the multiplicity of human experience. Frequently the more pleasing quality prevails as a style while its foil serves as the subject. For example, a story’s theme might be life’s detours and delays, but these are communicated in a sleek, aerodynamic style that speeds the narrative up or slows it down according to the author’s intuitions as to what is beautiful and apt. Art is a journey, a distance traveled by the consciousness. This is true for both artist and viewer, performer and audience, writer and reader. The power that propels such a journey is nothing without control because control is what harnesses artistic potential and directs it. (Control imposed by someone other than the artist, such as censorship or state control, does something else: it can be an obstacle but also an impetus, spurring art in the form of protest or radical experiments devised to circumvent it.) A propulsive narrative is propulsive because authorial control minimizes pointless deviations. It also admits meaningful ones and keeps their proportions in check. Generally, we like to feel agile, efficient, unimpeded. At the same time we appreciate art that conjures a world that is realistically chaotic and ensnaring. We want, through art, to feel that even if we cannot avoid the inexorable we are approaching it with cognizance and grace. A good writer takes the reader on a ride the reader wishes won’t end; an artist sets in motion a journey that continues long after the last word is read.

It will be true of any situation in which there’s some gap, some slippage between one’s capacity to exert raw force upon the world and their ability to direct that force with any particular finesse. And this is why it has never rung truer than it does at this very moment in history, for the distinction between power and control ranks among the central challenges of our time. Our Promethean technologies offer us more and more power by the day, but the plain fact is that we haven’t yet learned how to control them. Equipped with an array of shiny new tools, we clumsily intervene in systems of the greatest complexity — systems like the climate, the genome or the sum of interactions we think of as h man society, whose cross-connections, interdependencies and feedback loops produce emergent order in ways far subtler than we currently understand. These are situations and contexts that confound our ordinary, everyday sense of causality. They break the push-harder-to-go-faster logic of the simple Newtonian mechanics we learned in earliest childhood — a logic most of us long ago internalized, and still unconsciously rely upon even in circumstances where it simply does not apply. In short: systems like these don’t respond to our desires in straightforward, linear ways. If we ever hope to operate effectively in such domains, we must give up our simpleminded insistence onlinear force, and learn how to apply the power of our tools with all the suppleness, tact, insight and discretion the situation calls for. And make no mistake, that power is all but unprecedented. In no previous moment of our history as a species, excepting only perhaps that in which we first acquired the mastery of fire, have we found ourselves equipped with such transformative capabilities. The entire globe is girded with networks that reach into every household on the planet, and touch just about every life. The sensing devices connected in this way span from the surface (or even the interior depths) of the individual human body straight up to the constellation of platforms glittering in their geostationary orbits. Taken together, they register our doings, comings and goings even if we ourselves believe we’ve opted out, along with the state of every other system we interact with. As a result, it is now given to us to perceive patterns of rise, fall and flow that (whether because they transpired beneath or beyond the threshold of sensibility, in either their temporal or spatial extent) have eluded us since time out of mind. Increasingly we aim to rearrange the very bonds of life. Truly the reach of our ambitions is unlimited. But again, we lack control in any of these dimensions. And that is why, before departing entirely from the realm of the literal, we should note that the interface between engine and road has one final lesson to teach us. Where driving is concerned, control requires traction, and traction upon a road surface in its turn depends on friction — that is to say, on difference, even resistance. Control, in other words, is an emergent property: a dynamic negotiation of the interface between differences as it is expressed in any given moment. Even US military doctrine recognizes this, defining “command” as “the exercise of authority,” and “control,” by contrast, as “feedback about the effects of the action taken. ”It is, to be sure, an open question whether there can be any progress in human affairs but that which is strictly technical. But in 2019, with the evidence of ourfailures of control piling up all around us, perhaps we’re finally learning respect for the complexity of the circumstances in which we’re embedded — for nothing teaches respect quite as effectively as having once been burned. Power in this sense is an adolescent thing. But it is not completely ridiculous to think that at least where our capacity to wield and control powerful tools is concerned, we may at last be nearing childhood’s end. As never before, there is quite literally a world to win. The hard work — and with any luck, the earned satisfaction and pride in a difficult job well done — begins now. I can’t wait to see what we do together.