In the corner of my family room sits a Poang armchair, really a wooden frame of an almost reclining chair one would expect to find at IKEA, but, like many of their products, it’s oddly comfortable for under $100. It is what might be called functional, and its major function has become my spot for reading nonfiction, my current addiction. Nonfiction may seem like an odd thing to be obsessed with, but sitting in that Poang drinking a cup of coffee and reading nonfiction brings me endless gratification. I think it’s part of my compulsion to understand the full history of humanity starting from Mesopotamia (or even earlier) and leading to today, and that’s a completely sincere statement. At some point I realized that every book I read was influenced by the books that came before it, and I wanted to follow that line all the way back to the beginning. That story, leading back to Gilgamesh and even the cave paintings before it, became a large part of my beautiful illusion.
Underneath the front open frame of the chair my stack of nonfiction books makes its home. My wife probably looks at that pile and sees disorder–things that need to be put away–but the collection has a method. The books are ordered into three different categories, the first of which is the big history or big idea book. These tend to be tomes looking at the question about how we got where we are, including titles like 1491, Gun Germs and Steel, and the book I’m currently reading, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, which is actually only about 200 pages. Still, those 200 pages are pretty dense and filled with history and footnotes, like the other books in this category, but for the past few years I’ve been reading through them like they were beach reads (sometimes I even leave my Poang and read them on the beach). Each of them adds a new, complex layer to the story, which only makes me want to read more and more–realizing I cannot learn everything, but trying to embrace the complexity.
The second category becomes just a slightly more specific version of the first: books on American history. I just recently read autobiographies on most of the major founding fathers, including the one made famous by a musical, and while the topic may be out of vogue outside of Broadway and the books sometimes denser than the previous category, the intricacies and ambiguities of history make them page turners for me. The perfect example comes from two different books discussing the same event, when Sally Hemmings went to Europe to care for Thomas Jefferson’s children. In one telling, Hemmings is extraordinarily attractive and is almost abducted by the captain of the boat she is brought over on because of her beauty. In another telling she is judged too young (14-years-old) and inadequate for her post by Abigail Adams, who almost sends her packing back to America before she even gets to Jefferson. I don’t know why, but the incompleteness of two perfectly different interpretations actually makes my hair stand on end.
Last, only on this list, is the neuroscience book, a category I’ve been playing around with for at least a decade. As complex as our history is, our brains, the things that make, write, and examine that history, seem to be endlessly more complex. When I first started looking into the subject, there were a handful of books, and now there seem to be a handful released every week. My current focus is consciousness. The list I want to read is six books deep and keeps growing. Our history can be reinterpreted, even rewritten, but our consciousness isn’t even fully understood yet. I hope I’m around for the day when I can read a big history nonfiction book looking at the investigations into consciousness and where they ended up, but it’s also pretty exhilarating reading books describing it happen.
Full disclosure: I’m actually sitting in that Poang as I write this wondering whether a chair can multitask and aching to stop writing–I almost gave up several times–and reach for Scientific Culture… It makes me think back to Socrates’ “Apology” (which Darron and I read for one of our early episodes), and the idea of professing wisdom one does not have. Maybe part of the reason I read nonfiction is to avoid writing, which long ago was the beginning of my beautiful illusion, and escape in an unbroken quest for knowledge. My fear is, perhaps always has been, that the act of writing is inherently an act of professing wisdom. The big question then becomes whether I actually have any. The one thing I certainly know is that I read a nice amount of nonfiction. The other thing that I somewhat know is that I would like to write again; I would like my two young sons to see me writing. In a nonfiction book I once read, How We Learn, Stanilas Dehaene talks about the four pillars of education, the first two of which are attention and engagement. Paying attention is no problem, but (outside conversations with Darron) I don’t always reach the engagement level. While my reading has taught me that it is impossible to know everything, so there will always be gaps in my wisdom, maybe writing about the nonfiction I’m reading will actually help me gain just a little bit more. At the very least it will help me track my thoughts on the growing complexity of our past, present, and future.
