The World We Live In

Thursday, 03 February 2011

This has been an unusual day. I could tell you about how I began a new semester at Hamline today, or how I took the day off of work, or that I picked my son up from Kindergarten, or that I took part in another episode of Atheists Talk. Heck, I could even talk about the fact that it’s the 52nd anniversary of the Day Music Died. Instead, I am going to talk about this book:

My great-grandma gave me this book as a gift 20 years ago today. The book is basically a compendium of natural scientific findings. It was published in 1955, so, even at the time she gave it to me, big swathes of it were already out-dated. Still, as it is lavishly illustrated, it was fun to page through; astronomy, biology, geology, paleontology, it’s all there. It was actually the first adult-level book I owned on the sciences. Of course, I had read plenty before, but always books for kids and teens. This was a real book – a bok for grown-ups.

My great-grandma was not a Witness, thank Thor, so she probably wasn’t put off by the naturalistic explanations of cosmology, origin-of-life scenarios, and evolutionary history that fill the book. The introduction states: “Yet our interest in the world, even when it is narrow or specialized, stems mainly from a craving to know and understand, which has developed through ages of evolution as an essential part of our character.”  Though I often took the book out and read parts of it, no one in my family was worried that I was reading information that systematically disproved the Greatest Story Ever Sold (or, as I used to call it, “the Bible”).

This tall book, being over a foot in height, never quite fit right on any book shelf, and I was always making concessions for it in ever home I lived in and every shelf I owned. During the past half-decade, it’s become a laptop desk – a great way to keep the heat from my hard drive from killing off my reproductive capabilities.

Often, I’ll close up my computer and set it aside, and then just page through the book for a few minutes. It’s how nerds unwind.

My great-grandma passed away over 11 years ago, though her mind had faltered a few years before that. I recall one evening, when my parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents all went out for an anniversary celebration, it fell upon me to sit with my great-grandma for the evening. She sat in one chair, playing solitaire,  and reading a magazine. I sat in the chair next to her and read a book about Alfred Hitchcock. We spoke a few times, but her memory was nearly gone, and I couldn’t think of much to say. Too bad. Now that I look back on that evening, I wish I would’ve asked her about her childhood and her young adult years. I’m not sure she would’ve been able to recall much, but it would’ve been fascinating to learn anything I could. Maybe one thing I should have said was, “Thank you for that book you gave me 5 years ago.”

Well, now it’s been 20 years.

Though I read big chunks of the book, I’ve never read it. There’s a lot of text. It’s a huge book. But maybe it’s time to get started. I read the introduction this evening.