The grass

There was a grass at the top of the street.

I will not tell you where. It does not matter where. Every reader has had a grass at the top of some street, somewhere. The book works better if you put your own grass in the place where mine would have been.

I am going to describe mine anyway. Because the detail is how you find your own.

There was a grandmother who taught me the Romans through card games, in her kitchen, without either of us knowing the cards were the lesson. There was an uncle who walked me to a river that ran along the bottom of her garden. He did not explain why we were going, and we did not look for anything in particular when we got there. The walk was the lesson. The lesson was the walk.

There was football on the grass. There were older boys who did not explain the rules and younger boys who worked them out by watching. There were mothers watching from windows who saw more than they said. There were fathers who were not often home and who, when they were, did something with their hands in the garden that was both the job and the way they showed up.

Nobody called any of this anything. It did not have a name. It was the air. You breathed it and you became the person who had breathed it. Decades later you would do something that surprised you. Back a teenager with a cardboard sign, say, against a pitch you had not heard. And only much later would you understand that the thing you did had been practised on the grass before you could remember.

None of it is written down anywhere.

The grandmother did not write a book about the cards. The uncle did not write about the walks. The mothers did not publish anything. The fathers fixed things in the garden and did not leave papers. The older boys got older and became men. The rules they had passed to me through their feet were passed on again to the next generation through their feet, or they were not, and either way nothing about the process entered any archive.

The machines we are building will be trained on what is in the archive. They will know a great deal about what was written down and very little about what was not. The part of humanity that did not write is the part the machines will not have been shown.

The grass is where that part lives.

Without the grass, no architect. Without the architect, the machines will build whatever they are asked to build, well, and the buildings will point at nothing.