Man Spends 23 Years Carving Sprawling Underground Temple Under His House | Hacker News Reader

Man Spends 23 Years Carving Sprawling Underground Temple Under His House

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167 pointsrmason65 comments

Frankly, I find it refreshing.

Here is a man who found Quality in his life. He didn't care about the market. He eschewed the call of mammon. This gentleman dug himself a glorious hole, and worshipped in the one way he knew how.

Building.

You can laugh or call him insane if you like. Here was a man who knew what he wanted and hew it from the earth itself.

Gaze in awe mortals. This man has truly exercised his free agency.

If I had basalt under my house I would dig a system of tunnels too. But our water table is basically 2 feet under ground. :(

Wish I could get a house...

If you're posting on this website, you can probably get a house. Just not the house you want, where you want.

The vent control officer has logged on.

Many folks are unemployed.

Not if you're posting on this website from Sydney

To be fair, he did say you might not be able to get it WHERE YOU WANT. There are houses in the west that are cheaper than the northern beaches. There's also QLD and other areas of AUS.

I do agree generally to be honest. However I can also understand people who end up in a scenario where they don't really have an 'easy' option to move location.

Ah... It's a common problem: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Double-slit_me...

Yeah, but it's not free agency in the sense of someone saying, "To heck with cultural norms, I'm gonna follow my own whims."

AFAICT from the article, he felt drafted into this project from a voice in his dreams, which I'm guessing he reckoned to come from a different agent.

Those are two different things. The agency of his actions, which he exercised using his free-will as his own free-agency is orthogonal to the impetus that kicked-off his desire to engage that agency.

I've yet to see anyone come up with a definition of free will that makes sense without discarding the intuition people have about free will and instead tacitly accepting it's only "free" if you insist on not looking too closely. But doubly so in the case of actions like these, that people feel strongly compelled to.

My will is free if, from my vantage point and current knowledge, I reasonably believe I am making a choice between multiple valid options.

Anything else by definition requires omniscience on the part of the exerciser.

So, if I force someone into a work camp and have them dig for 23 years, or put a gun on their head and have them dig for 23 years, or scared them about eternal damnation and have them dig for 23 years? All these cases are free will?

Of course. You are presenting a false dichotomy. By its very definition, each of those acts engages one's free will.

People have escaped from work camps or revolted. Others have resisted armed attackers. Some have used their god-given intelligence to question other's interpretations of scriptures. and so on...

I don't think resisting armed attackers is technically an act of free will, as it seems quite costly.

It is an act of free will among 2 options, the risky but valuable and the safe but miserable. The "poor" you end up is not a lack of ability to choose - just that you start from a shitty place.

My apologies, I've misunderstood.

To me this definition is meaningless. For you to be "making a choice" implies that you have the ability to influence the outcome in some way that is not deterministically dictated by the laws of physics, yet that is also not merely non-deterministic or a combination of some part of each.

You seem to basically be arguing that we should define free will in a way that makes it entirely an illusion, yet treat it as meaningful.

Any other definition supposes we have the ability to look at ourselves (who we have the most knowledge about) from an external, omniscient perspective.

Otherwise any definition trivially collapses under "Well how do you know that you're acting freely?"

Which makes other definitions functionally useless in terms of communicating an idea.

I'd rather have a meaningless definition that's useful than a philosophically pure one that's useless. But maybe that's why I'm an engineer. ;)

He was also a 'naive architect'. Which is a good thing and the world needs a good sprinkling of naive artists at all times. There is much to learn from them. They create their own art with its own rules and own style.

This reminds me of a recent talk on YouTube - 'the naive programmer' where Henri Rousseau is discussed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnlQW0BfZk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Rousseau

The naive programmer brings stuff to the table even if what they do is not best practice and even if they are not a 'team player'. A recommended watch.

It's perfectly simple," said Wednesday. "In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or...well, you get the idea."
"There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow.

"In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog, and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.

This is a quote from Neil Gaiman's _American Gods_

It was this (and Sam & Max Hit the Road) that first got me interested in roadside attractions. I've since visited a ton of them, generally guided by https://www.atlasobscura.com/ and https://www.roadsideamerica.com/ - it's a very rewarding hobby.

I read American gods and played Sam and max (in scummvm) over the same summer. They’re inextricably linked in my head, now...and I think a good deal of why the tv adaptation doesn’t work for me is because the vibe isn’t lucasarts enough.

Man, this is Armenia we're talking about. Carving into rocks is a national idea here.

see Geghard monastery, for example http://www.ancientpages.com/2016/03/09/fascinating-geghard-m... - one of the churches is just a giant boulder cut from inside. And khachkars everywhere in the country and outside (in Turkey, Azerbaijan, in a whole greater Armenenia of the past), some of them older than 1000 years.

This is basically how I play Minecraft: seeing how many pointless, elaborate rooms I can build below an unassuming surface structure.

Sounds like you've got a future in amateur templing! Immortality is only a drill hammer, chisel, and cooperative geological formation away!

I did build a temple to an imaginary fire dragon once. Unfortunately, this was before I discovered WorldEdit and its schematic saving functionality.

Reminds me of Manjhi, another guy who also kept chiseling a mountain for 22 years to create a path for fellow villagers (1).

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

Pictures aren't loading on the link above but this one didn't give me any trouble. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-587011...

See also the Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno, dug by one man over a period of 40 years from 1906 to his death in 1946. He came to Fresno from Sicily and when he couldn't productively grow citrus on his property, he began digging. The tunnels are nice and cool in the hot Fresno summers and there are fruit trees growing in open-air sections. They give tours.

http://www.undergroundgardens.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens

This is being framed as a great accomplishment, and it is, but the details seem disturbing. Working 18 hours a day, every day? Barely sleeping? I wonder if there was some kind of mental illness at play, and what about the wife? What kind of life would that be, having a partner who is essentially avoiding you at such an extreme for 23 years? And "donating" rubble, 1 bucket at a time, to other construction projects? What kind of construction projects can use material in any meaningful way at such a slow rate? And how did they survive if he wasn't working a job?

So many questions.

> " Levon Arakelyan pulled out an estimated 450 truckloads of rubble, exclusively by metal bucket. He gave it all to a local company which used it in various construction projects."

Sounds like he didn't profit from it during his lifetime but his wife now runs it as a tourist attraction. Perhaps would have been appropriate for the construction company to have contributed something along the way.

This reminds me of a far better executed version of London's "Mole Man" [1]. I think it must've been linked on HN a few months back, but I can't find the link now.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2006/aug/08/communities....

Reminds me of "The Underground Man", a book I bought second hand just because I liked the title.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_Man_(novel)

Loosely based on John Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Por...

Seymour Cray (the supercomputer designer) famously dug tunnels underneath his house when he lived in Minnesota. It sounds like fun, really.

I'm reminded of https://singularityhub.com/2012/02/19/canadian-man-excavates...

Every winter he's been using small remote controlled vehicles to dig out his basement.

Since nobody has mentioned it, a French postman was known for building a palace with stones he picked up during work over 33 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval

You think that's something, you should see this documentary called CAVEDIGGER about a guy named Ra Paulette in New Mexico who carves exquisite caves for customers. It's really something. Watch the trailer: http://cavediggerdocumentary.com/

The question was never answered: did she ever end up actually getting the storage space for the potatoes?

In the first few lines, "after finishing work on the pit" refers to the potato storage pit

Most spouses would not be so tolerant!

I wonder what the HOA thinks about that :P

If you are ever in the Fresno area, there is an underground garden built by a single man also.

http://www.undergroundgardens.com/

Reminds me of this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city

Interesting. I liked the 'Burro' Schmidt project as well. http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/human-mole-the-man-who-s...

Unlike Ozymandias, his monument ain't goin' nowhere.

In a similar vein there's these Italian carve outs. [1]

[1]https://www.google.ca/search?q=italian+subterranean+temple&r...

Check out the Australian city of Coober Pedy where half of the residents live underground:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/unearthing-coober-pedy...

Reminds of the rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia[1] or the underground cities of Cappadocia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela "Each church was carved from a single piece of rock"

I totally grok this, he's not the first or last: http://www.kuriositas.com/2015/05/the-mystery-of-margate-she...

It's like a real-life minecraft.

I dunno, that's pretty badass. I have clay soils so it's out for me, though.

this sounds just like my father's long long legs, eek! http://correlatedcontents.com/misc/Father.html

How does it not flood?

23 years a spiral?

just sayin big up the one like Levon Arakelyan for his human accomplishments

O Nariz de Isabelle.

It's always a man. No matter that most differences between the sexes approach zero when examined in a large sample, males seem to be way more prone to undertaking a single project with this kind of obsession.

Is this trending on hn because “working yourself to death by digging an empty hole in the ground you’re obsessed with, that some VC you’re married to will spin off and profit from” is so analagous to generic tech startups?

“working yourself to death by ______"

Analogous to life cough cough

Not sure why this is of interest to this crowd. Must be a slow day, these are dangerous to build. Unfortunately no background on the persons engineering experience or mental health... https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/mysteriou...

> Not sure why this is of interest to this crowd

I like looking a quirky, interesting, and pretty things.

Yeah, why would a bunch of basement-dwelling computer nerds be interested in a giant underground tunnel?

I kid, I kid! :-)

I thought Levon Arakelyan was a true hacker. I can relate this to my own side-projects. Most of them start with a simple "what-if" question in my head. Once I've started writing code, I won't stop until I have some kind of prototype ready. That aside, agreed that for digging tunnels it could be dangerous.

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