ANATHEM

Things at the office - while not necessarily 'improved' - have settled down a bit, to the point where I'm willing to go on doing what I'm doing. Which is not really a surprise. The fact of the matter is that, for all my bitching and for all my well-known aversion to anything remotely resembling work, I kind of like what I do, and I know for absolute certain that I would be TOTALLY fucking bored doing anything else with my life. So, while I wouldn't do what I do for free, I probably would do what I do for less money than I currently get paid. Which, I suppose, is about as close as someone of my generation in my position will get to saying that work ain't so bad.

Thus, I am once again relegating to the back-burner my dream of moving to Costa Rica and opening a gift shop and/or legal practice and/or cannabis plantation. We'll just tuck those away for the next time that I need a happy thought to remind me that... Well, just to remind me. And I'll actually be keeping an eye on that back-burner: see infra.

In other news, interesting political developments over the weekend, which I'm not actually going to talk about much, particularly as HT has recently published its first guest post, on that very topic. So, I will remain silent except for noting that my interest was decidedly peaked by Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama. This development will sway the opinions of many borderline Republicans. With a golden-boy from the Republican party breaking rank, many of the semi-conservatives who were already considering Barack based on their support of stem-cell research, Roe v. Wade, and so forth will follow, and vote Blue. This practically guarantees that Barack will be elected President, which in turn suggests that America will be moving considerably towards a socialist/communist nation in the next few years. Thus, we'll keep the Costa Rica contingency plan dusted off and ready for short-order implementation.

But today, I want to focus on literature. Specifically, I am about 600 pages into Neal Stephenson's new novel ANATHEM. It is, without a doubt, the most interesting book that I have ever read in my entire life. Seriously, when I run away to Costa Rica it will be one of the few books that I take along with me, since just about every page has some interesting idea or concept that I could spend several hours thinking about or writing about or considering the implications of. It's Ulysses, but instead of being thick with imagery and unwieldy prose, it's thick with ideas and applications of theories. Not with real in-depth study of those ideas, but with discussing the application and interconnectivity of those ideas. Again: even having not finished it yet, it is the most interesting book I have ever read, and no matter how well or how badly the actualy plot-line might end (the plot is actually not all that interesting, to be honest), the ideas that get kicked around earn the book a place among my all-time greats, among and in some ways surpassing my library of halcyon works. (Illusions, Armor, Small Gods, Atlas Shrugged, Reaper Man, Mimesis, Stranger in a Strange Land, Shibumi, Vampire Lestat, Jonathon Livingston Seagull, and so forth.)

There's only one problem: I don't know anyone who I'm sure is smart enough for me to recommend ANATHEM to them, or who would really be able to have a detailed discussion about the content. Actually, that's a bad choice of words. I know plenty of people who have the raw brain-power to grasp the ideas expressed in the book, but I don't know anyone with a broad enough base of knowledge to read the book without having wikipedia right at their fingertips to look up explanations and derivations of various ideas. There is simply too much in the way of little-known ideas and theoretical science and physics! I don't know anyone who knows enough about that stuff to be able to keep up! The next problem is that Google and/or Wikipedia probably won't help a reader all that much, since the world made up by Stephenson in the book uses different names and terms even for fairly simple things like the Pythagorean Theorem and Occam's Razor, much less more esoteric topics like alternate universe theory, Plato's Cave, Q-bit processors, and so forth. Most readers wouldn't know enough about the subject to know how to craft a wiki search! Just as Dante's Inferno, sans annotations, is little more than interesting imagery (with boring plot-line and lots of jubberish and meaningless names) to people who are not historians and theologians, ANATHEM is simply over the heads of people who don't take at least a passing interest and knowledge in each of practical models of human consciousness, quantum theory and theoretical physics, philosophy, plane geometry, and a bunch of other subjects. (I wonder if Stephenson is planning on publishing an annotated version? Or if he would let me publish one?)


Thus, my library of all-time greats now includes TWO books that I consider to be transcendentially insightful, but which I don't recommend for most people to read. Armor was already on that list. The underlying theme of that book is not a story about interstellar conflict, but of desperation born of hopelessness, and the amazing feats that the desparately hopeless can drive themselves to, consuming themselves in the process. That emptional content is frankly beyond most people's ability (and/or interest) to grasp. (An easy way to test is to ask a reader if they just skimmed over the Jack Crow chapters to get to the next Felix chapter.) But just as the emotional content of Armor is not for the common man, the intellectual content of ANATHEM means that I don't know anyone who I recommend the book to.


There will be further posts relating to and/or inspired by ANATHEM, particularly relating to futher discussion of models of human consciouness, but those will have to wait for another time. Partially because I don't want to write about it right now, but also because the idea hasn't yet fully taken shape in my head. (It really is that big - so to speak - since it potentially touches every crystaline point of knowledge and reality.) I just hope that I'll be able to explain it in a way that will make sense...