To be honest, there are 1000 ways to see this work, and he probably had a very different view of what he was doing than "chipping a the same rock for 5 years". Here is a proposal that might be closer to what he was feeling: carefully revealing a creature no eyes saw since millions of year as carefully as if you were unclothing your first love. With each movements, getting more intimate with it, more familiar with every detail of its skin, until you know its features better than your own. For millions of year, it was encased in cold stone, as a fairy tale princess enclosed in a cold room, that you would be preparing for its first night in the world.I do not mean to diminish the level of discipline and patience required, just to point that the fantasy you have about your work is much more important than the work itself, and that there is a lot of beauty into that task, certainly much more than in creating data pipelines to decide how to better trick unsuspecting web users to click on ads (and there, again, people who do that kind of thing probably have a very different fantasy than mine).
Ruthalas|3 years ago