The Old Man Mad About Painting

I Everybody was the best at everything

Across the whole of the closed run, counting every settler who ever crossed into a new word at a trade — 372 person-branches in total:

Mara held the top word in eleven branches of eleven. Mining, hauling, toolmaking, forestry, building, farming, sawing, trading, mending, scouting, herding — all of it. Sula in nine. Nim, Ferro, Ysolde, Cato, Halla, Pike, Rowan, Juno, Dask, Vell, Osk and Lune in nine or more each. Twenty-seven people lived in that valley and most of them were, at the same time, the best there was at nearly every trade it had.

The beat that fires for it says: “It is not a title anybody gave them. It is the count.” The count was twenty-eight.

II The curve was never the problem

Five hundred and twenty-six against twenty-eight. The difference is real, it is written down, it was updated every single time somebody made something — and after the twenty-eighth nothing in the game ever mentioned it again. The valley kept a perfect record of a thing it had stopped being able to describe.

III Hokusai kept changing his name

From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. By fifty I had published a universe of designs, but all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy-three I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying I will surely do better still by eighty-six, so that at ninety I will have got to the root of things; at a hundred I shall have reached a divine state, and at a hundred and ten every dot and every line will have a life of its own. Katsushika Hokusai, postscript to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, 1834, signed GAKYŌ RŌJIN — the old man mad about painting

He was seventy-four when he wrote that and he had already been six other people: Shunrō, Sōri, Hokusai, Taito, Iitsu, and at the end Manji. The renaming was not branding. It was the only honest way he had found of saying I am not the person who made those — a ladder of names, taken up and put down, with no top rung, kept by a man who thought his entire published output before seventy was not worth bothering with.

That is the shape this valley was missing, and it is not a difficulty curve or a prestige system. It is a way of continuing to say something true about somebody who has not stopped.

IV Four more rungs, at the spacing the curve dictates

1. 1–2learning
2. 3–6competent
3. 7–12practised
4. 13–27good at it
5. 28–53the best here at itwas the end of the road
6. 54–113a master of itnew
7. 114–233a master twice overnew
8. 234+past anything this valley can teachopen, and stays open

Each rung is about twice the last, because that is what the next slice of an asymptote actually costs. Nobody chose the spacing; it fell out of the curve that was already there.

Deepest career on that coast: Pike, five hundred and twenty-six at trading, skill 0.989, and still climbing.

V What a master is for

The ceiling had a second victim and it is the more interesting one. teachAt looked for somebody in the settlement whose skill was more than two-tenths above the learner’s. Skill is squeezed into nought-to-one by the asymptote, so the moment a settler passes 0.8 the largest gap anybody in the world can have on them is 0.2, and the test can never be true again.

Five hundred planks against thirty is 0.988 against 0.833. A gulf — and fifteen thousandths short of being allowed to count. Teaching stopped working in this valley on the day it stopped being for beginners.

It is reckoned in things made now, which do not compress: half again as much work, plus a few, is a teacher at six against four and at seven hundred against four hundred and fifty. So the part of a career past the flat of the curve stops making the master better — the curve sees to that on its own — and starts making everybody else better. Which is what mastery has always actually been for, and it is the one form of progression that cannot inflate, because it is spent on other people.

VI The mark that cannot run out

Four more rungs is still a list, and any list ends. So underneath the words there is a mark at every doubling of the count — the thirty-second, the sixty-fourth, the hundred and twenty-eighth, and on, for as long as anybody keeps working:

The gap doubles with them, so a settler forty years at one bench is marked about as often at five hundred as at fifty, and the feed never fills up with it. Sixty of them had already passed the first mark by tick sixteen thousand on the test seed. The line reads: “Mara has made their 256th wood. Nobody asked them to count.”

Nothing here makes anybody stronger. No rung grants a bonus, no mark unlocks anything, and the quality curve is exactly the curve it was this morning. What changed is that the valley can now say what is true about a person who has not stopped — and that a master has something left to do with the part of their life the curve has stopped rewarding.