Time & Perspective Quote by Ted Nelson

Nelson’s sentence reads like a self-mythologizing shrug: he didn’t abandon filmmaking because he failed at it, but because the world hadn’t caught up to his job title. The wit is in the mild arrogance, delivered as plain autobiography. “At the same time” does a lot of work, turning what could be a binary choice (art or intellect) into a claim that the categories themselves were too small. He’s not choosing between cinema and ideas; he’s diagnosing the available careers as inadequate containers for his ambition.

The subtext is a refusal of inherited lanes. “I was an intellectual” isn’t just status-signaling; it’s a declaration that his primary medium was going to be systems, not stories. Then comes the sly pivot: “some field, as yet, not invented.” That phrase is both prophecy and critique. It implies that institutions lag behind imagination, that the future’s most consequential work often begins as an illegible hybrid, dismissed because it doesn’t map onto existing departments, budgets, or grant categories.

Context matters because Nelson is one of the early minds behind hypertext: a person who treated information the way filmmakers treat montage, editing meaning through links and structure. Read this way, the line isn’t a detour from cinema but an upgrade of its grammar. He wanted narrative, cut, juxtaposition, and audience agency; he just suspected the screen wasn’t the final canvas. The quote works because it frames invention not as a gadget but as a personal necessity: he had to build the field that could hold him.