Dali, The Persistence of Memory
Last
year I wrote about archaeologist-historian-novelist Ronald
Wright's A Short History of Progress,
a briefer, darker, and more insightful assessment of our civilization
culture than the much more famous book that came out a few months
later, Jared Diamond's Collapse.
A Short History of
Progress summarizes and analyzes
six spectacular civilizational collapses from throughout our history,
and reads us the riot act about what we need to do now to avoid another
collapse, this time a global one. The book is one of the
15* essential works on my longer, 65-book* Save the World reading list.
Eight years ago, Wright wrote an award-winning (in four countries) novel called A Scientific Romance.
Complex, satirical and dystopian, it is at its heart a murder mystery,
unraveled piece by piece through its narrator, David Lambert. As
tempting as it is, I will not reveal any of the plot's secrets, or its
conclusion, for to do so would spoil it for readers.
Reading the
book was an eerie experience for me: The protagonist's name is David,
and his love-interest's name is Anita (my wife's name). My discovery of
this book was an instance of synchronicity: I was looking for two books
in a Toronto bookstore when I discovered instead Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers,
which I reviewed last week. Ronald Wright's praise for Flannery's book,
on its back cover, convinced me to buy it. The blurb described Wright
first of all as a 'novelist', a fact I had forgotten, and I made a
mental note to take a look for his novels. But as I climbed the
bookstore stairs to look for the books on my list, in my path was a
temporary display of 'notable Canadian fiction' in paperback, and on
the top row of the display was A Scientific Romance.
Some of the book's passages also spooked me: Just twelve days ago I wrote about The Precautionary Principle, and Treating Polluters as Murderers, and now I read this, a comment by David, the novel's protagonist:
One
thing I never understood about the law: If you dumped arsenic in
Granny's tea, you'd be put away for murder; if you poisoned a whole
country with some cavalier industrial process, the worst you could
expect was a paltry fine.
The book contains some prescient observations that also gave me a frisson -- you know that strange sense of precognition that has you flipping to the inside cover to see if the book was really
written eight long years ago, or searching your memory to recall what a
passage reminded you of so strongly, that you can't quite put your
finger on. And then just a few pages later, the protagonist, David, himself experiences a frisson,
as the words from his dream appear in a graffiti message, causing him
to say "You will know the vertigo induced by that last line, a "Dunne"
[a glimpse of the immediate future found in dreams, described in JW
Dunne's An Experiment with Time] foreshadowed in my dream."
Here
are a few delicious teaser paragraphs to give you an idea of the
astonishing scope of Wright's perceptiveness and imagination, and why I
couldn't put the book down:
The
rear-view mirror [our knowledge of history and archeology] breaks up
the parochial landscape of the present. And our costly reward is to
know that no culture is normal or inevitable; that none has a patent on
wisdom or a guarantee of immortality; that civilizations, like
individuals, are born, flourish and die; that the very qualities that
bring them into being -- their drive, their inventions, their beliefs,
their ruthlessness -- become the indulgences that in the end will
poison them... Civilization is always a pyramid scheme. Living beyond
your means. The rule of the many by the few. The trick is to keep
wringing new loans from nature and your fellow man.
What is the
critical mass of a world like ours? If the modern age began when the
sum of Western knowledge became too large for any individual to command
it -- with the birth of the specialist -- then the postmodern, strictly
speaking, begins with the death of specialists.
[Recalling
learning in childhood of the automobile death of his parents] For some
time I believed that it was I who had died, not they. That the rest of
the world had carried on without me; that the story I'd been told was
merely the stuff of hellfire. The adult mind employs more
sophistication but it tells the same fables to itself. The sensation of
having escaped and lived on becomes a solipsism, a trick of evaporating
consciousness, or, if you like, an anodyne from a loving God to spare
you the blow of your extinction. And it follows that one may never
know when one has died, may go on living an echo, like a player
performing to the darkness of an empty hall he thinks is a full house.
And the ever-running play you write and act is your eternity.
Why
is the echo richer than the source, and time remembered always grief?
People come and go, and you hardly notice how they feel, what you feel.
Then one day when you least expect it remembrance slips like a blade
into the heart: What you did and didn't do, said and didn't say; and
suddenly you fall down into a cold and sunken place with only your
regrets for company, there gutted by sorrow and remorse and left to die.
Yet, if a dinosaur can become a hummingbird, all things are possible.
The
book contains some brilliant anagrams (see if you can spot them) and
keeps you thinking and guessing, not only because of its plot twists
and revelations and its jumps back and forth in time, but because its
protagonist faces decisions that, in many ways, we all face today, and
draws you into thinking: What would I do in that situation?
Example: David needs to decide what period in history to try to explore
in a supposed 'time machine' that he has inherited from a mysterious
benefactor. He thinks out loud about all the possibilities, from past
and future, keeping in mind the scientific theory that you can never go backwards (a meme undercurrent throughout this remarkable novel, and also its larger ecological message to the reader):
We've
been living a long time on nature's savings, and there are signs her
bank account is overdrawn. It seems to me that if I go ahead a few
decades, or even generations, I run the risk of landing in a mess. So
I've made up my mind to follow [the machine's inventor] Tania's clue,
to the middle of the new millennium. Five hundred years -- long enough
for a new dispensation; and why be hanged for a lamb?
Suppose
you were David, and had the chance to travel to another time. Would you
choose to defy the laws of physics and nature and go back, to a simpler
time or to redress or preempt some past error? Or would you go forward,
and if so, just a few years, to see if today's optimists or pessimists
are right, or a longer way, either into the abyss of the uncertain
future our children's children's children will face, so that you can
struggle or luxuriate alongside them, accepting your responsibility for
their future, or far beyond that, into Gray's future, "a time when
humans have ceased to matter" or A Short History of Progress' future
where "nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the
laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea"?
I
would go far beyond the long tail of our civilization, roll the dice,
and pick a time further in the future than our civilization stretches
into the past -- thirty millennia forward. What would you choose?
* I will be updating these lists soon, to reflect these additions:
15 Essential Readings: #13 is John Gray's Straw Dogs; #14 is Diana Leafe Christian's Creating a Life Together; #15 is James Kunstler's The Long Emergency.
Full 65-Book Reading List: add the three books above plus: John Livingston's Rogue Primate, Bill McDonough's Cradle to Cradle and Hannover Principles, Janine Benyus' Biomimicry, Ran Prieur's The Slow Crash, David Ehrenfeld's Beginning Again, David Brower's Healing Time on Earth, Tom Robbins' In Defiance of Gravity, Malcolm Gladwell's The Cellular Church, Richard Douthwaite's Growth Illusion and Short Circuit, and Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers.
I
have reviewed all these works on this weblog; use the 'Search Site'
Google tool in the upper right sidebar to locate these reviews. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
