Books

I haven’t been writing because I’ve been reading so much. One book leads to another and the Kindle Reader has a lot to answer for. Snuggled in bed late at night, cradling the thing in its handsome leather case and its own light just bright enough to illuminate the page of black and white e-inks, I reach the point where my brain can no longer process the sentences, but I’m not ready to fall asleep. So it’s now that I click “Kindle Store”, and am wafted to a vast virtual space, not the Web that I know how to get lost in, but a different Aladdin’s cave: a shop of invisible books that I can browse with samples or buy with a single click, for download in seconds, all while half-asleep. More prudently, I can wait till morning and order the desired item in hardback, second-hand, for a fraction of the price—less instant, but more satisfying, like many things in this world. For the hardback is a physical possession that you can enjoy all the time, even when not taking the trouble to read it. Either way, Amazon is the wish-fulfilling genie, rejoicing in its escape from that mysterious bottle which contains all the things that haven’t yet been invented, which are virtually impossible to persuade back into the bottle thereafter.

If there were any justice, Amazon would pay me for my product-placement efforts; but I’m still a stranger to the brave new world of sponsored content, innocent as an Eden-dweller for whom everything grows on trees. What happened to Eden, anyway, after Adam and Eve were driven out of it? It was a pretty good asset. I imagine people still want to get back there. Our new shopping mall is called Eden. After the English fashion, I shall go on calling it ‘new’ forever, long after it has shown signs of old age. Our town of Newcastle, proudly straddling the river Tyne, is named after a castle built there in the year 1080 AD.

I detect in this post so far certain stylistic signs of an Emersonian ramble. What you read definitely rubs off in what you write. John Myste in a comment on my last mentioned Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”. Without benefit of the Amazon-genie for once, I’m proud to say, I was able to locate it on my own groaning shelves: groaning as in heavy-laden, not as in complaining. It’s a faded little volume published by G Bell & Sons in 1913 for Bohn’s Popular Library. Turning to the fly-leaf, I see that it previously belonged to E Ellis, 5 Percy Rd E11 [London]. Its spine was torn and hanging off. I felt the kind of reverence one might have towards an unkempt tomb made venerable by age, and mended the book carefully with some paper reinforcement and PVC adhesive mixed with red and black powder paint to match the faded cloth cover. Only after it had dried did I read the essay itself, and must confess to you, dear patient reader, that I haven’t read it all through yet. I got enough to blow my mind from the first ten pages: the other fifteen will have to wait. Thanks to the Amazon empire and my own squirrel-store from charity-shops, I’ve enough to read for a very long time, for literature is a branching path, as I shall illustrate, below.

Annie Dillard in The Writing Life describes the windowless dens in which she has at various times confined herself to perform the curious alchemy of extruding strings of words from the crucible of her brain to congeal on the glaring white page. At one point her routine was to go in the dead of night to a hired room in a city library for this purpose, and leave at dawn. She learned to feel her way to the room in the pitch-dark, counting her way through the bookstacks till she reached the turn-off for her door. In the brightening sky of one early morning she retraced her steps to go home and noted that a book on a corner that she must have fingered like a signpost the night before happened to be The World I Live In, by Helen Keller. In this manner, a book inadvertently conveyed the essence of its content without her having to open it—or even look at its cover. Look on such books, thou Kindle, and despair! For a few seconds, feeling her way in the dark silent library, she had stumbled on the deaf-blind world that Helen Keller knew so well. She remarks: “I read it at once: it surprised me by its strong and original prose.” This was hint enough for me, and I summoned the Kindle-Genie for the complete works of Helen Keller, price £0.72, only to discover that Dillard’s sensuous appreciation of the world and lively intellectual curiosity is matched by that of Keller. Yet the chain of reference continues, for Keller mentions that one of her favourite books of childhood, which she re-read till the Braille dots wore smooth, was Little Lord Fauntleroy, familiar from my own childhood, another item to download in a snug late-night session, transmitted by Whispernet® for a princely £0.00.

Life is too short to tell you all the books I have been reading and the way they cross-fertilise in this seething brain. Add provocative remarks from bloggers and their appended comments, and you have a volatile explosive mixture, hard to keep stable, even in laboratory conditions—which my own strewn desk-tops, actual and virtual, certainly do not maintain.

Bryan, for example, in Making Contact on his Nuclear Headache blog, discusses whether contact with intelligent life from outer space would give us humans a better sense of our own tribal unity, if we perceive “Them” as our prime common enemy. I invite you to join me in speculating how “intelligent life” is to be defined. We have no choice but to examine our own intelligence with our own intelligence, a type of procedure which in most disciplines would be proscribed as totally invalid, on account of prejudice and vested interest, not to mention something vaguely incestuous. By intelligent life, I conclude, we mean nothing more than “someone like us”, for on earth, we are alone: a weird species separated from all the others by myriad distinguishing characteristics. You could write a book about them all. We look around at the various kinds of organic life on Earth and don’t find any that come close. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and palæontologist rolled into one, tried to explain it—you and me and why we are here—in terms of increasing intelligence which will one day make manifest its already latent Omega Point, at which Christ’s Kingdom will be realized, evolution will be revealed as teleological all along, and the universe will end with a final big bang like the one which started it. But when we use human intelligence to study its own place in the universe, we are in a speculative realm where we can invent anything we like for our own comfort, ambition or mere intellectual challenge. The very word ‘universe’, as understood today, seems to carry the implication of a vastness that could and probably does contain anything: just the thing to please scientists, professional and amateur, as the Trinity was for centuries just the thing to please theologians, for it gave them something to argue about.

The way I see evolution, human intelligence is a kind of weapon, the result of hardship, danger and rootlessness. I can imagine other planets which evolve an amœba (just one species) and then stop, as would undoubtedly happen if the formula remained successful and unchallenged. The amœba can eat, drink, swim and reproduce—by the unexciting method of dividing its nucleus in two and separating. The joys of sexual intercourse are outside its scope but such a lack does not trouble it, for Nature has not provided it with the means or taste for this flight of Divine fancy. Imagine all the trial and error involved in the invention of sex!

I heard on the radio this morning that the diminution of ice in the Arctic Circle has encouraged or forced grizzly bears to mate with polar bears and produce golden-haired offspring. We may think this is exotic fun for the bears, and who knows? But it’s my intuition that every one of the creative twists and turns which Evolution has thrown up has been Nature’s response to a desperate, near-disastrous situation. None more so than the string of disasters which, I suspect, conspired to beget homo sapiens.

We are the feral children of Nature’s favelas, who had to learn by our wits, for we lacked the claws of bears, the armoured hides of crocodiles, the speed of wildebeest, the tree-climbing agility of monkeys. Human babies are the most helpless for the longest. Never mind, we have made ourselves artificial claws and have clawed our way to the top, dominating Nature with the wilfulness of a mad-dog dictator. The human being over the last one or two centuries, depending on which society you live in, has increased its power and even its longevity. But in a Faustian contract, it has had to sacrifice sanity, almost down to the last vestige, in a mad gambling game of strip poker.

To be human is to be neurotic. That’s what I think, my own brain perhaps overheated with too much reading. Not that all my reading inflames the ideas I’ve expressed above. Hayden, for example, extols ‘being’ above ‘doing’. I’m all for that, dear Hayden, as it suits my stage of life (more or less retired from hunter-gathering, I mean earning money, for survival). But hardship, danger and rootlessness are somehow in my genes. I don’t want to live my days in permanent siesta. Not yet! They say that Goethe’s last words were “Mehr licht! More light!” Well I cry, “more life!” Or as Richard Bach says (in his short novel, Illusions): “Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.”

So I have chosen a 2003 photo of Richard Bach as the top illustration, ©2009 Isaac Hernandez, All Rights Reserved. The others are of Helen Keller graduating from Radcliffe College, Boston, Mass. in 1904; and an old cover for Little Lord Fauntleroy illustrating a little of what one misses with only a Kindle edition.