Okay, the header is a touch flashy but it's not far from the mark. Some books you read really dislodge you, permanently shift the way you think, about life, about yourself, about others, and you never get them out of your mind, for many reasons. But mostly because a good book makes you a wiser person, and a great book makes you a better person. These are the ones I've found.
"UNTIL THE END OF TIME" - Brian Greene (USA 2020)
I have just ended a journey through billions - trillions? - of years of Time and Space, and came out the other end different than when I set out 2 months ago, brain rewired, eyes opened, spirit refreshed.
It started with the Big Bang and the beginning of Time, then I travelled through the creation of (our?) Universe, the formation of galaxies and stars, then planets, and on (at least?) one of them - in an obscure corner of nowhere much - a certain arrangements of the stuff of the stars happened, the photons and electrons and quarks coalesced in a different way from how the stars and planets were formed, they came together and became - Life! Then Life became Consciousness, then Thought, and Free Will, and Speculation. And all that turned into wondering and wonderment and myth and theory and investigation and religion and art and creativity and engineering and passion and violence and - for so long now - an enduring and obsessive craving for Meaning. How? WHY? WHO??
But the journey didn't end there, it went on and on into the uncertain mists of the future, billions and trillions of years more, as all the matter of the universe gradually returned to .... to what? Ask ten cosmologists and you'll get ten answers. Does it actually end at all? And will we ever know the point of it. If there is one. The one telling bit near the end of this magnificent book is the question posed - "Which would make you feel worse - the knowledge that your life will end tomorrow afternoon, or that all life will end tomorrow afternoon?" Just about any of us would say the latter is infinitely worse, simply because we need to know that somehow, somewhere, this "Life" will go on, that our children and grandchildren and our loved ones will have their full shot at it after we're gone. Not only that, but our small part in it mattered.
If you aspire to any understanding of who you are, where you are, why you are, you need to acquire your own copy of this book and read it slowly. It will put you into the middle of whatever this existence business is all about.
If you'd like to know the brilliant guy who put this together, here's his Wiki page....
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
This is one of those books that, only half way through, you find page after page of those "Geez I didn't realise that!" moments. Did you know that we all carry the TB bacillus in our systems, and not only that but without it our brains would be about as effective as a jam sandwich, as the waste product of this bug's own little private life is niacin (vitamin B3), which we have to have?
Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology (sounds like a very specialised field!) at Oxford Uni, and an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College (I have no idea what that means), and a Fellow of the British Academy, which impresses the hell outa me on its own, but it's the clear and very organised way of his writing that impresses me even more.
It's in the form of 100 questions (that any of us might ask), grouped in 10 topics, ranging from the dawn of Life, through genetics, to the complexities of human behaviour. Sounds as though it'd be heavy on boffin-speak and technical jargon but so far I've managed to get my niacin-rich brain around it all, and I haven't skipped over one sentence, mainly because I'd be frightened I'd miss something I desperately need to know. Do yourself and your ever-enquiring human mind a huge favour and borrow a copy from your local library.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What can I say? - I'm sure that everything I read after this will seem ordinary for a while.
Scientists and thinkers like Hawking - to me - are the messiahs for modern times. He's bringing us the (but I won't say it's all "good") news. He has the message.
He wrote this during the last year of his life, and never saw the finished book, but there's a great "Afterword" at the end by his daughter, which includes a short description of her father's funeral cortege through Cambridge, with a police motorcycle escort, blue lights flashing, all the dons of his college lining the roadside in their finery, she reckons he would've absolutely loved it! - and added that he would probably have commented that he could've used this sort of an escort trying to get to work every day!
What I do so dearly love about this book (and others like it, but this one looks the best, as Hawking's science-y words are fairly much down at my level) is that it gets our piddly little lives into some perspective. Like this...
Apparently there are two schools of thought on the fate of the universe, depending on how much matter it actually contains, which can't be agreed on. If there is enough, gravity will eventually slow down its current expansion, then stop it altogether, and it'll fall back in on itself, to produce the Big Crunch (geez I love these scientific expressions!) and then maybe the Big Bang will even go off all over again. OR, if there isn't enough total matter in the universe, it will just go on expanding forever, the stars will burn out, and it'll get emptier and emptier and colder and colder. Take your pick! But don't panic, we're talking about events 20 billion years hence! Plenty of time to get your house in order.
Anyway, my point is, while all that is fascinating, it doesn't change the fact that each of us are given one lifetime (well, at least at a time) that will last anywhere from not long at all, to say 100 years. That's 100 years, roughly in the middle of this at least 30 billion year event.
So, don't waste it my friend.
IF there is some great Master Plan (Hawking doesn't believe there is), and God did all of this just for us - and fairly over-engineered it some might say - then all you need to work out is... WHY? And then live your life accordingly.
Personally - I'm bloody impressed! That God did all this complicated universal physics to get my attention. Not that I fully understand Dark Energy or Quantum Mechanics or The Uncertainty Principle. And you'd have to add - not that I'm meant to. So why didn't God design a much simpler setting for us to go about earning our way into Heaven? Sadly, I don't think that's one of the Big Questions that Stephen Hawking answers in this book. But I can't wait to dive into the ones that he does.
Stephen Hawking is - fittingly - buried in Scientists Corner of Westminster Abbey, between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Doesn't get much better than that!
IF you were issued with the Curiosity Gene, and hanker after some answers to some Big Questions, do yourself a massive favour and read this book.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
For my money I would make this required study - along with Harris's close friend Eric Berne's "Transactional Analysis" - in all High Schools. These two men between them rewired my brain into the finely tuned piece of people-watching machinery it is today! AND it made be SUCH a better person. It was like switching on a light - PING! - ah, so THAT'S how our species works!! Give it a shot. You have nothing to lose but a few debilitating neuroses.
"THE INHERITORS"
By William Golding (born in Cornwall 1911, Nobel Prize winner). I've read this book three times (and I don't often read any book more than once) and each time it gets my creative juices flowing, it's such a thoroughly stimulating novel. It's about the arrival of Homo Sapiens and their impact on the poor old Neanderthals, not everyone's idea of a blockbuster, but to me a totally fascinating subject, and as a work of fiction - just brilliant.A lesson for all of us, Golding's Lord Of The Flies was knocked back by a string of publishers in the early-mid 1950s! So, don't be put off by a rejection or two, if your novel is the right stuff, and you persist, good chance you'll one day get there.
By E. Annie Proulx (American, won the Pulitzer with this one in 1994). Just about everyone has read this novel, but included here because I knew I was in the presence of sheer talent when I read this the first (and second and third) time, made me want to do better. And I was glad I read the book well before I saw the movie, as good as the movie is, like all movies of great books, too much has to be cut out to make it fit into two hours, and in this case, too much of what makes the novel great.
"THE NAKED APE".
By Desmond Morris, (an English zoologist I think). I read this back in about 1970, just after its release (quickly followed by his "The Human Zoo"), and my way of seeing this planet-full of people - and therefore myself - has never been the same since.It said (to me) that Homo Sapiens isn't special, it's simply a species that has evolved in its own way, and isn't basically different from all the other species it lives with on this scrap of cosmic dirt hurtling through space.
But what this book really did (for me) was to make me clearly see that this particular animal species is the only one (so far) that has developed the capacity to ask "What am I?" and "Where am I?" but more importantly "WHY am I?"
I've never been able to leave that alone since! But hey, that's what books are meant to do, enlighten, stimulate - yes, even rewire!
"THE BIBLE" (Old Testament) - by Moses, David, Solomon, et al. (A long time ago).
We always tend to tiptoe around the subject of Religion, so a-feared are we that sensitivities and passions will be inadvertently stepped on. But I'm content in this context, as this isn't about religion at all, but simply about BOOKS, books and the stories they contain that helped me see more clearly this existence that I find myself in. Puzzle-some as it is.
I read both halves a fair while ago, and at different times, but neither in one sitting, although I did manage to get through most of the Old Testament back in the 1970s when I was looking for answers. About Life. Not Afterlife, but Life.
The OT isn't an easy read - I was using the St James Version because it "felt" more like a set of ancient stories with the thees and thous - but it did open my eyes. Because at the same time I was reading the mythologies of the Danes and the Celts and the Greeks and the Australian Aboriginals, especially concerning the Creation Myth, and realised that in essence they were all saying the same thing. Thousands of years ago they were saying - I'm standing here looking up at the night sky and I'm fearful of being overwhelmed by what I think I'm seeing, and I have to make sense of it or I won't survive. It's too big. I have to capture it in a story that rationalises it all. And once I do that, I can live with it, and I can die with it. Something like that. Which helped me put together my own philosophy. As we all should.
Oddly enough, this great book is closely allied to the one above. Well, for me anyway. It concerns one William Smith, an English canal builder in the early-ish 1800s, and Winchester's opening paragraph to Chapt 2 "A Land Awakening From Sleep" says it all -
"William Smith was born into a world of dogma, faith and certainty, into a deeply conservative English society that his own discoveries and theories would one day help shake to its very foundations."
This was the time just before Darwin, but well after the Revd James Ussher's long accepted theory that the moment of Creation was 9am Monday 23rd October 4004 BC. Okay, we humans once believed that the Earth was flat. We believed that the Universe rotated around the Earth. We truly believed all sorts of stuff. Because we couldn't conceive of a better theory. Such wild notions (to us today) made sense at the time.
So, William Smith. He's cutting great chunks out of hillsides for his canals, and he's looking at the strata of the rocks and the fossil creatures they contain and he's thinking - Hmmm, NO way this all went together in six days back in 4004 BC!! Poor old Will made the mistake of waving his radical heretical ideas around - and we're talking only a century-and-a-half ago here, just back in the time of our great-grandparents - and of course he was in for a bumpy time. But the genie was out of the bottle and Darwin did the rest.
Do yourself a favour and read this book. AND Winchester's "The Surgeon Of Crowthorne", a "Tale of Murder and Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary".
"THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE" - Arthur Koestler (USA/UK 1967)This is a fairly heavy philosophical-psychological read, but the back-blurb says - "Could the human species be a gigantic mistake?" - and that's what sucks you in, IF you're looking for other ways of seeing the complex gizmo that evolution came up with as homo sapiens.
BUT, I had to skim-read the entire front half because it's pretty esoteric for the mug-in-the-street to absorb word by word. It's as if he wants to take you for a drive in his car but first insists that you have to know how the entire thing was built part by part and why the crankshaft goes around and around and also how the steel and aluminium was mined and made in the first place. All very interesting but I only had the book for two weeks. You need your own copy if you want to absorb it properly.
Having said all that, it still provided a whole other aspect to what we are and how we tick.
Bearing in mind that he wrote this in the mid-1960s (he was born in 1905, died 1983), a time when nuclear overkill seemed to be the national strategic policy of all the Big Powers, so he can be forgiven for being a touch pessimistic about the future of Life on Earth. But what he chooses to explore in this is the WHY of it - WHY is humanity, of all the species, capable of so much destruction under so many circumstances? Other than having the hardware to make it possible of course.
He goes through the whole business of selective evolution in detail, especially of the "higher" mammals in the easier-to-absorb second half, suggesting in the close that Humankind could eventually wipe itself out as it has a sort of "insanity gene" built in! In short, Nature has made a mistake - the only evolutionary instance of it that he can see - in giving the ultimate controlling species a "tool" it doesn't actually know how to properly use - the human brain.
He suggests that we have a fatal flaw - the ghost in the machine - in the form of our primitive brain.
His key point (best as I could manage) is that we really have THREE brains - Reptilian, Mammalian, and Human - which we acquired as we evolved, but they were laid on top of each other, without adequate interconnection. Something like that. The light bulb moment for me was when, demonstrating this, he likened it to a psychiatrist having to deal with a crocodile, a horse, and a human, all on the couch together! And each one acting naturally.
He contends that our first level old reptile brain is still trundling along, acting like a crocodile if not kept in check! I mean, what's a crocodile designed to do? - eat, fight, and propagate! Not much else. That's its survival code. And it's worked damn well for millions of years.
The thing is, I didn't really absorb this until the day after I read it. I was walking down our High Street, three young bucks ahead taking up half-and-bit of the footpath, and another three young bucks coming the other way, taking up the other half-and-a-bit. And yep, the two guys in the middle accidentally bump into each other.
He spends some time elaborating on the whole mind/brain interaction, but also how little we use the potential of our unique Human mind/brain, still being driven way too often by the outmoded superstitious ways of our more primitive ancestors. Too often the news headlines demonstrate just how right he is.
Koestler closes this book with the statement - "Nature has let us down, God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out." Not exactly laced with optimism, but I've only scratched the surface for you here, as it goes through much much more, and in depth, leaves you with the feeling that you've spent a lot of your life only seeing part of the picture.
Personally, I'm a little more optimistic than Koestler about we Humans. There's just enough instances of logic and compassion and empathy going on out there to have me feel that we will prevail long term, that we will learn to keep the Crocodile in its place a little more often. In the meantime millions will go on dying from the Four Horsemen side-effects of over-population, but...