Our changing world

( We were talking about the space between our souls )

After the rush of yellow toned tactile lightweight metallic substances

Last night I was strangely comforted by the very young twentysomething married couple in the row in front of me on the Vegas to Dallas leg of my flight. He spent the flight playing one-handed video Monopoly, and she was deeply embedded in a Harry Potter novel. I like that even when I've been through a personally quite grueling week, the world is still a place with room for Baltic Avenue and quidditch.

This morning I slept in, breaking my rest only to further progress on the very entertaining Daw-type science fiction novel (by a woman whose name begins with Cz with whom I am unfamiliar) I bought at the Vegas Waterstone Books. I tend to like golden-age-ish space opera-y stuff, so this one hits the spot, although I wonder if we really always have to call people who stayed on Earth "Earthers" and people who fared out "Spacers" and people who couldn't even get along with people in space "Outsiders". I get a form of 'future nostalgia' from books such as this. I am so pleased I got to see the pioneering space explorations--the moon walk, the first space station, the unmanned exploration of the solar system, and the confirmation of planets in other star systems. But I am nostalgic for a world I will not live to see, in which we discover things about the wide universe which will make all we know about the universe fit, like the old Guess Who song, inside one's little sister's purse.

I am grateful that we now live in a time when the first effective chemical treatments for various emotional conditions are finally having limited good effect for a material group of the afflicted. But wouldn't it be wonderful to be alive when all these mental challenges are history, in the way polio and smallpox are now? Wouldn't it be wonderful to see the same enthusiasm devoted to putting a man on the moon be devoted to solving the vast uncharted frontier of the mind? That will happen someday. I am nostalgic for that future time, although I have never seen it occur.

So many times science fiction confirms for us our essential humanity posited among fundamental social change. Whether the future is seen as rosy or as horrendous, the novels make the point that people will still be people, faced with the choices of love, hope and annihilation with which people are always faced.

But although I know that the human spirit is the human spirit, I am wistful today for a world in which democracy and human rights exists world-wide, hunger, disease and poverty are distant memories, and we all look up at the stars as a destination rather than a daydream.

at age eight I read the entire world

When I started school, my family got the World Book Encyclopedia. There were 20someodd volumes, nearly one for each letter of the alphabet. From almost the time that I learned to read, these books were some of my best friends. The pages with the articles on the Civil War and the pages with the articles on the two world wars were crinkled, from times when I set the book down with the pages open during a bath, and then the water spilled onto the book. I loved that feeling that the whole world, more or less, was in those books, and one could open up the encyclopedia to any page at random and find out some historical fact one never dreamed existed. They say we learn from history how never to repeat it, or some such, but I always find that books of history are like African violets, quite ornamental if you don't overwater the leaves. There are so many wonderful facts, glittering from the pages like honey on home-made bread. I sometimes think that life has too many facts, and would benefit from a bit more digesting. If we could only abridge all the things we know into manageable volumes, things would be so much simpler. It's like that song about how "it's a gift to be simple", only, when you think about it, the little gaelic air to which that song is sung is not really a simple song at all--it's got all these lilts in it that require a bit of focus to sing. If it were all sung in a single note, it would be a bit more chant-like, but it would more clearly illustrate that it's a gift to be simple. Lately I imagine learning to play the recorder, so that I could play simple little notes in simple little airs. But how many airs would I learn before I had burned out on it? More pragmatically, why not just play the kazoo, because it requires no further education, and while I could only learn "Red River Valley", "Born Free" and "Greensleeves" and such on the recorder, on the kazoo I can play the searing guitar solo in "Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape", the jazzy break in "Time Out of Mind" and do a particularly soulful, if duly obnoxious, "Letter to Hermione". Although I long for simplicity, I think that what I really mean is that I want my life to be effortless, and don't really mind if it is effortlessly complex. When I was 14, I built a replica of the stained class window in the cathedral of Chartres from cellophane and construction paper, as a geometry class assignment. When I first stood inside the Chartres Cathedral, it looked nothing like my stained glass replica, but it still felt like a long-forgotten friend. But as much as I admired this place, I want my own cathedrals to be built of paper, quick devotions, easy to make, easy to dismantle.

Today I spent time on the telephone with two college friends, and sent an e mail to a third college friend. It is hard to imagine that I am now over 20 years out of college. It is even harder to imagine that it was 35 years ago that I was reading the World Book, learning about Mussolini and Antietam, between trips outdoors to throw footballs, pick and eat pecans, and try to catch mosquito fish from the huge community drainage ditch, with tiny minnow nets taped onto broomsticks. Sometimes I am in a thrift store and I'll see a set of World Book or The Book of Knowledge or Collier's or even an old Encyclopedia Brittanica. I'm always tempted to get a set, although now a set of books would just be too many pages and too many facts. Even a simple telephone call is filled with facts and associations--people I've known, things I've felt, emotions I've shared, things I've forgotten. Even the spaces during a call--those interval-of-time spaces, are pregnant with meanings, filled with history. Sometimes I want to pull the volume G, read the entry for Gurdonark, and try to memorize both paragraphs. Then I'll set it up as a song, play it on my kazoo, and no doubt annoy the heck out of any listeners who are melodically inclined. But maybe if my life were recast as a brief song, I'd treat the melody with a bit more respect, and get busy adding to the tune.