Patterns

The concept I described yesterday — the difference between those we love and the generic idea we have of those we love — is a kind of pattern. You can transcribe this pattern to many different contexts, and yet it remains surprisingly robust. Othello’s tragedy was linked to his problem in seeing Desdemona — he was too invested in his idea of Desdemona.

Similarly, we often have trouble distinguishing between our leaders — with all of their strengths and foibles — and our idea of a leader. This is one reason we often feel so betrayed when they turn out to have the same human weaknesses that we regularly observe — and tolerate without difficulty — in others.

There are many such patterns in the relationships between people, from the way we tend to see the woto the ways we often reenact our (possibly dysfunctional) childhoods in relationships with friends, lovers and co-workers. It would be easy to see how one could build an architecture of human relations from such patterns and the larger patterns that form as they combine.

Which puts me in mind of “A Pattern Language”, the groundbreaking 1977 book of Christopher Alexander and others. That work pulled together many connected ideas about architecture — buildings, gardens, communal spaces, windows, entrances, pathways, and all of the many elements in our built world — to create an entire language for describing good architectural design.

Perhaps we can do the same with patterns of relationships between people. I wonder, would it be possible to build “A Pattern Language” to describe the many pathways, roads and bridges, hidden rooms and secret fortresses that we build upon the human heart?