I keep the cube on my screen longer than I mean to. A tesseract is a cube in four dimensions, and four dimensions are not anywhere I can stand, so the thing I am turning with the cursor is only its shadow, the way my shadow on the pavement is a flat and honest lie about a solid body. I move it, the shadow moves, and for a second I am sure I have seen the shape itself. I know I have not. I keep turning it anyway.

A few years ago this was closed to me. A tesseract was a set of coordinates in a book, and I could read the numbers and believe the mathematician and still never feel the shape. Now I catch it with a finger and roll it over on a lunch break. The distance between a hard idea and a person who only wants to feel it has quietly closed, and almost nobody mentioned it happening.

Plato would have loved this and been annoyed by it. His prisoners sat chained in the cave, watching shadows thrown on a wall, certain the shadows were the world, and he meant it as a warning about how little we see. I am doing the opposite of his prisoners. I know it is a shadow, and I am the one turning the object that throws it, reading the shape from the way the shadow behaves when I push it. The cave was a prison. The same wall, with my hand on the object behind it, is a workshop.

I think about Bach when I do this, because Bach built the same kind of object out of sound. A fugue takes one plain line and turns it against itself, forward and backward, until something stands that you could draw on graph paper. On graph paper it is arithmetic. In my chest it is grief, or something near joy, and it never stopped being arithmetic in order to become that. It was both the whole time. Bach trusted me to feel the second thing without him pointing at the first, and the cube asks for the same trust. Sixteen points and a few rules about which of them connect. Watch it long enough and the arithmetic turns into something I would call beautiful without flinching.

This is the part I did not expect from tools everyone keeps selling me as productivity. They gave me back the kid who used to take the back off the radio to find where the voice lived. School trained that kid out of me, gently, by deciding some subjects were not mine. Now I can ask a machine to build me a four-dimensional object and let me shove it around, or to sit with me through a proof I walked away from at seventeen, and it does not sigh or bill me by the hour. The price of being curious fell to almost nothing. What used to need a degree needs an afternoon and a question I would once have been too proud to ask out loud.

Camus told me to imagine Sisyphus happy. The man rolls his rock up, the rock rolls down, forever, and Camus says picture him content anyway, because the meaning was never waiting at the summit. It is in the pushing, in the attention he gives the stone. The cube is my small stone. It has no use. It will not ship a product or move a number I get paid to move. I turn it because turning it means something to me, and Camus would say that is not the lesser reason, it is the only kind there is. The meaning was never in the object. It is in what I bring when I look at it.

So I turn the cube, I let it stay useless for a few minutes, and then I go back to work. I have stopped believing those are two different things. Following an idea past its structure into what it means is not a break from the serious work. Most days it is where mine starts.