Now we live in the virtual shadow cast by the algorithm, a mathematical formula and researcher’s that only adds a tighter set of specs to the suffocating feeling of predictability.
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In the face of all this, I recently felt the giddy, heady and joyful feeling that I’d somehow been freed from beneath the crush of numbers and taken a fresh breath that brought me back to full consciousness.
It was as though Gandalf had walked out of Middle Earth, waved his wand, obliterated the numbers and said, in his knowing way, “Yes, the power of magic is still alive in the Middle West, too.”
The feeling came with my discovery of a new book. Well, the book was used but new to me.
I came across it not in an online search, but in the old fashioned way, by blindly stumbling across it on a shelf of used books. Later I would wonder whether it somehow had been left there just for me, just as I was approaching my 63rd birthday, and just as my mind was making the transition from the full time workaday world to one that allows time and space for a wider look around.
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Way too out there for the Oprah book list, it’s more the kind of book Sheldon Cooper of “The Big Bang Theory” would give a four galaxy rating in his list of books “How to get in touch with your inner Geek.”
If the book’s subtitle title served as bait for me, the author’s introduction set the hook.
At first, it wasn’t so much the subject matter as the writing. I felt like a fish chasing a lure as I read this series of long sentences that should have run me out of breath before I reached the end but never did. Each passage was not only incredibly packed with meaning, but astonishingly clear.
The depth and clarity brought to mind standing on the rocks above Lake Superior and seeing 30 feet to rocks on the bottom.
In those sentences, the writer managed to bring together what had been a host of impressions I’d collected over a lifetime but never been able to put into order.
It was as though he had broken into some dusty closet in my brain, pulled out thoughts I’d collected over the years like old pocket watches, button hooks or railroad locks, and displayed them in a way that made sense.
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That the book was a few years old didn’t bother me. There was a time when I was wanting to get the latest, most cutting-edge bit of writing on a subject. But by now, I know human knowledge is so vast that it would take me light years to catch up and all I can do is burn the midnight oil. Aware that I’m decades behind on most things, a sense that moving from 35 years behind to just 15 years or so feels like progress.
Then there was the theme of the book itself, which I’ll use an illustration to explain.
I remember some years ago listening to arguments about justifying what seemed merely good acts in terms of a bottom line. It was as though giving to charity couldn’t be done just for charity’s sake, it had to be done in the cause of strengthening the community, its economy and attractiveness to outsiders who were arriving here.
All those seemed like secondary reasons to me, not at the heart of the matter, which was somehow cheapened by the dollars-and-cents justification someone felt compelled to offer.
Well, the book offered the same sort of argument.
It said that much of philosophy being produced in recent years appeared to be for everyday use, to provide theoretical justification for things going on in the working world. That its purpose was not so much to explore new ideas as to produce theories that could be used like some multi-tool being sold on late night television.
I suppose the reason I most liked the book wasn’t a reason at all. It was a feeling. I’ve sometimes looked at something and felt this sense that what was in front of me was shimmering with meaning, but with a meaning I don’t have words to articulate. That there are parts of living and the experience of it that we’re missing out on because they are beyond, if not words, at least our current vocabulary.
In the end, I’d say my present state was once famously stated by the great philosopher Elvis, who once sung, “I’m all shook up.”
And more alive for it.
P.S. Why didn’t I share the title? This book was my connection to what lights me up. It’s up to you to stumble across your own.
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