James E Hartley

Trippin’ With Pollan

Wanna try some LSD? Or ‘shrooms? How about some toad venom?

According to Michael Pollan…yes, that Michael Pollan, the well-respected author of The Omnivores Dilemma, the guy whose advice you would never be embarrassed to admit you were following, according to That Michael Pollan…your answer should be an enthusiastic Yes.

How to Change Your Mind is a 400 page (New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year in 2018!) argument about the amazing benefits of psychedelic drugs. Here is the subtitle: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. You see: How to Change Your Mind is about how to quite literally change your mind through the use of psychedelic substances.

Right now, you fall into one of two camps. Either you are enthusiastically awaiting the explanation for why your psychedelic drug use is being defended in a bestselling book by a respected author or…well, you are wondering what is wrong with the world when Michael Pollan is writing and Your Humble Narrator is reading a defense of LSD. Believe me, until the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator gave me this book for Christmas, I would have been in the latter camp too.

Pollan explains his mission:

Other societies have had long and productive experience with psychedelics, and their examples might have saved us a lot of trouble had we only known and paid attention. The fact that we regard many of these societies as “backward” probably kept us from learning from them. But the biggest thing we might have learned is that these powerful medicines can be dangerous—both to the individual and to the society—when they don’t have a sturdy social container: a steadying set of rituals and rules—protocols—governing their use, and the crucial involvement of a guide, the figure that is usually called a shaman. Psychedelic therapy—the Hubbard method—was groping toward a Westernized version of this ideal, and it remains the closest thing we have to such a protocol. For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences.

The history of psychedelics is fascinating, far more so than I would have ever guessed. Once upon a time, way back in the 1950s, there was a growing scientific literature on the possible uses of psychedelics in treating psychological disorders. The research was still in its infancy, but it was starting to show some promise.

Then along came Timothy Leary, who is surprisingly the villain in this story. Leary single-handedly destroyed the scientific research into psychedelics with his flamboyant advocacy to an entire generation that they use LSD to “Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out.” The reputation of LSD and other psychedelic substances was transformed into the kind of thing John Lennon used in order to write trippy songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Tom Wolfe had a merry time describing the antics of these psychedelic adventurers in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip. By the early 1970s, everyone knew LSD was bad. Bad for you; bad for society.

That is not the end of the story. LSD is making a comeback! Pollan reports on a growing number of people who are picking up the scientific literature from the point where it was before Leary came along. It turns out there are quite a few clinical trials going on looking at how to use psychedelic drugs to treat things like PTSD. It’s science! If Pollan is right, you may be visiting your local hospital sometime in the next decade for your LSD treatment.

There is quite the cast of characters in this story. There is the woman who literally drilled a hole in her own head because (shockingly enough) no medical professional would do it for her. There is the guy who roams around State Parks finding psychedelic mushrooms. There are the people who really do ingest toad venom. And Pollan wants to convince you that while these people may be odd, the psychedelic treatment really works.

What is it about psychedelics that helps so much in treating psychological problems? This is where the book gets, well, trippy. Pollan interviews a bunch of people who have taken psychedelic substances and relates what they discovered while they were under the influence. The stories are…weird. So, he decides we will all be better off if he gives us some first-hand stories. Three times, he takes a psychedelic drug and then he gives us a lengthy report of what happened next. These stories are…weird. As Pollan notes:

It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force revealed truth.
Love is everything.
Okay, but what else did you learn?
No—you must not have heard me: it’s everything!

Yep, that is exactly what all the stories in this book sound like. Does it make you want to indulge?

But, Pollan keeps insisting, this is not just a tale of weird trips. Not at all. Pollan has discovered something in his research, both in the second-hand and first-hand research. Consciousness is bigger than you thought. Indeed, consciousness lies outside your skull. Consciousness is part of a vaster realm of being. When you use psychedelic drugs, you discover a deeper and larger and greater and lovelier world than the one in which you currently live. You take LSD and your mind wanders in this other word and you see a door and you go through the door (always go through the door!) and it is all…amazing.

And there again, it all sounds so meaningless. So, Pollan tries again. And again. And again. He is screaming at you, “Don’t you see?”

And what does he want you to see? You have a soul.

As he notes, he is not the first person to discover a soul. Religious writings are full of discussions of a soul. Transcendentalists are full of discussion about a soul. But, Pollan never believed there was a soul, a part of you that is beyond this mortal coil. Now he knows better. Now, he says, he perfectly understands Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Who knew the key to thinking Emerson was deep was taking LSD?

This is a book that defies easy analysis. It is one part insane rants about weird mystical trips. It is one part a fascinating historical survey of scientific research into psychedelic drugs. It is one part bizarre tales of bizarre people. It is one part a glimpse into the possible future uses of psychedelic drugs to treat PTSD and addiction. It is one part an argument for a nontangible soul. It is a thoroughly bizarre book full of wonder and madness and tedium.

Should you read it? I honestly have no idea.

Mapping the Bible

Imagine you are a person who has one of those study Bibles with maps in the back and you love those maps in the back and really wish there were even more maps because those maps are so great. (Maybe you don’t have to pretend this is you.)

Imagine having looked at that map of Paul’s missionary journeys so many times and you wished there was even more maps of journeys with brightly colored arrows showing all the places someone stopped.

In other words, you are a map junkie who really needs more maps.

Enter John Beck. He’ll fix you up. The Basic Bible Atlas has maps. Lots of maps. And according to the blurb on the back cover, you really need these maps. “To begin to fully understand the Bible, we must understand the geographical setting of Scripture and how each place participates in the biblical story.” Perhaps you want to begin to understand the Bible; I know I would like to begin to do that. So you and I must look at these maps!

The subtitle makes reading this book even more imperative: A Fascinating Guide to the Land of the Bible. Note, it is not a guide, it is a fascinating guide. Alas, I missed the clue in that subtitle. Imagine a book entitled A History of the Civil War. Maybe you are interested in reading it. If someone else told you the book was fascinating, you probably would want to read it even more. But imagine the title of the book was A Fascinating History of the Civil War. Does that slight change in title make you want to read it more or less?

Now that you are done reading the cover, you, the map junkie, dive into the book to discover all the fascinating things about the Bible which you can only learn by looking at these maps. And what do you find?

Well, there are maps. Sixty-two of them—roughly one every other page! That’s a lot of maps. Moreover, since there are maps relating to Bible stories, that is a lot of maps of Palestine. Page after page, more and more maps of Palestine. Zoom in for a map of a small section. Zoom out for a map of the region. Zoom in again. Zoom out again. You’ll really know where the Mediterranean Ocean and the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee are by the end of this book.

If you are a map junkie and you want to look at lots of maps of Palestine, you’ll enjoy this book. But, what happens when you start reading the prose surrounding the maps? Sigh.

Chapter 2, “Introduction to the Biblical World” is about the area. We find out about the Fertile Crescent; that there was a major highway leading from Egypt to Damascus which ran through the region; that Palestine is not a very big area; that the area can be divided into a coastal region, a mountainous region, the Jordan Valley where the river connects the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, and the Transjordan region across the river; that there is not a lot of rain in the area; and that there are seasons and different crops planted at different times of year in different areas which have different soil types. If you didn’t know any of those things, you will like this chapter. Maps! And geographical features of the area!

But, then, we get to chapter 3. The rest of the book is simply Beck retelling the narrative portions of the Bible. Chapter by chapter, starting with Genesis and running through Revelation, Beck just retells the story. In telling the story, he mentions a lot of cities and you get a map! But, it is surprisingly rare when the story being told and the map on the page have any meaningful connection. You can look at the map and if you like maps, you’ll be happy. (Did I mention there are lots of maps?) You could instead read the text, and if you like hearing the narrative story of the Bible being retold, you’ll be happy. But if you want some meaningful connections between the maps and the story, you will be terribly disappointed. Over and over.

When reading the text, you will have to put up with a lot of odd speculation. For example, Beck repeats the description of Eden from the first two chapters of Eden. We then get this: “Given these qualities, we can creatively reassemble a day in the life of Adam and Eve.” If you are really interested in this creative reassembly, you’ll love this book! “They awakened in the morning to another beautiful day in paradise, a day brimming with joy and contentment…”

None of the above is to say that there are no interesting geographical notes in his book. They are just few and far between. In the story of Abraham, he first stops in Harran, before finally journeying on to the Promised Land. Beck notes that Harran is actually a really good place to settle; the Promised Land is not nearly so nice. That is another example of Abraham’s faith. However, oddly, Beck says absolutely nothing about the division of the land between Lot and Abram. In a book about the geography of the Bible, how did this division get omitted?

Similarly, the book does a nice job in showing that by beginning in Jericho, Israel’s assault on the Promised Land under Joshua began by splitting Canaan in half and capturing the connection point between the three main highways of the region. (In another interesting note—Jericho is not just the entry point to the Promised Land in Joshua, it is the exit point for the last king of Judah when the Babylonians roll into town.) By the end of Joshua’s campaign, the whole Promised Land had not been captured, but all the major transportation arteries had been. The importance of the cities of Shechem and Jerusalem gets discussed. (Oddly Bethlehem does not.)

The most curious absence from the book is maps of battle grounds. If you want one place where geography has a huge impact on history, it is certainly battlegrounds. What was the terrain like? Which battlegrounds favored chariots and which did not? How large are the battlegrounds relative to the size of the armies? Where is the high ground? Who is picking where the battles are fought? How are the cities situated and defended? Other than noting that Jerusalem was an odd location for a capital because it is actually not the high ground, there is virtually no discussion of these sorts of geographical details.

In the end, this is just an odd book. It promises lots of geographical insights, but fails to deliver. It does have those maps! And Beck’s prose easily rolls along. If you want a summary of the narrative part of the Bible, the book may not be a bad read at all. But, if you want an exploration of how the geography of the region affects the stories, look elsewhere.

You Like Comic Books?

Nothing arouses greater bewilderment in my students than when I mention that I enjoy reading comic books.

It’s as if there is a thought bubble over their heads containing the words, “Uh, you are a college professor and you like comic books?!?!”

Thought bubbles are part of the language of comic books, by the way.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is an attempt to explain the medium. If McCloud is right, then not only should you stop despising the form, you really ought to embrace the form and be excited for what is coming. It’s a fun book, full of historical tidbits and philosophical ruminations. It is also a comic book.

Why the disdain for comic books? I was talking with a student not too long ago about this. I noted that she thought it was perfectly fine to like Novels and other written texts and it is perfectly fine to like Paintings and other forms of visual art. So, why, I asked, is it impossible to imagine combining words and pictures and creating something amazing? Her answer, completely unbeknownst to her, was straight out of McCloud’s book:

Traditional thinking has long held that truly Great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm’s length. Words and Pictures Together are considered at best a diversion for the Masses, at worst a product of crass commercialism.

This is true about how people think. Think of a Great Book, any Great Book; the book you thought about almost certainly was all words. Now think of a Great Work of Art; that art almost certainly has no words. McCloud:

By the early 1800s, Western Art and Writing had drifted about as far apart as was possible. One was obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible…the other rich in invisible treasures, sense, emotions, spirituality, philosophy.

But, are these things logically separated? Obviously not. Indeed, figuring out how to effectively combine these two disparate worlds into one could surely produce something amazing. That thing which would be produced would be…a comic book.

The bulk of McCloud’s book is devoted to analyzing the form and structure of the comic book. What is the difference between a panel in which the words are influenced by the art and a panel in which the art is influenced by the words? What is the taxonomy of ways that the words and the art can influence each other? How does the shape of a panel affect the way we read it? What is the effect of changing the space between the panels, removing the border from a panel, or having the art reach to the end of the page? What is the effect of color?

In other words this is a technical book about Comics. Chances are, unless you already appreciate the form, you find the idea of reading a technical discussion about the structure of a comic book to be just about as silly as reading comic book. Why do you think like that? Because of your upbringing.

As children, our first books had pictures galore and very few words because that was easier. Then, as we grew, we were expected to graduate to books with much More text and only occasional pictures—and Finally to arrive at “Real” books—those with no pictures at all. Or perhaps, as is sadly the case these days, to no Books at all.

Because this is the way we were all raised, the comic book market has long been associated with people who have not yet learned to read “real” books. For a long time, that was the only large scale market for comic books, and so they achieved their status as things adults didn’t read. I remember as a kid wondering why my local library had no comic books. They were expensive to buy, so I would have liked to have been able to get them from the library. Now I realize why they didn’t have them. The arbiters of taste knew that I was better off reading books with no pictures. Perhaps my intellectual development would have been stunted if I had been able to read more about Batman when I was a kid. (Watching him on a TV show was apparently OK as long as I didn’t ever read a Batman story.)

While the reputation of comic books remains static, the world of comic books has changed. Since 1986, it is hard to justify the argument that there is not a realm where comic books are exploring the possibility of becoming Great Books. That year saw a remarkable trio of books. Spiegelman’s Maus, Moore’s Watchmen, Miller’s, The Dark Knight Returns. All three are extraordinary, doing things that could not be done in any other medium. And all three are written for adults. Maus has made the furthest inroads into educational culture; it is, after all, a very compelling account of the Holocaust. Moore’s book made Time magazine’s list of the 100 best books (not comic books, books!) of the 20^th century. Miller’s was the genesis of the most successful of all superhero movie trilogies.

Since then, there has been a steady stream of comic books which move far beyond the antics of Superman and Spider-Man. Most of them are not very good. But, recall: most books without pictures and most pictures without books are also not very good. That isn’t the question. The question is whether a decent comic book is inherently worse than a decent novel with no pictures. The question is why so many people can’t imagine that a future Great Books list will include some books with pictures.

Learning to read is truly one of the most amazing things we learn to do. But, it is a tragedy that we associate learning to read as meaning learning to read when there is no art on the page.

Choose Again

Charles Krauthammer was a reasonably well-known political essayist who died in 2018.

His son, Daniel, subsequently edited a collection of his father’s essays, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors.

The book as a whole is a nice trip down memory lane over the last few decades, recalling the political and cultural flashpoints which once seemed like the most important things in the world. Krauthammer was politically conservative but of a genial disposition, so for the most part there was nothing abrasive about his columns. Remember when people just disagreed instead of violently disagreed?

The most striking part of the book was not the political commentary. The final section of the anthology has a few bits reflecting on how to lead a life worth living. The remarks in this section bear repeating.

First some biographical background. Krauthammer had an unusual career path, to put it mildly. He started out post-collegiate life as a psychiatrist. He went to medical school, got his degree, and went into practice. But, then one fine day when he was 30, he quit his job and began life anew writing political commentary. As Krauthammer quipped about the change in careers:

There is not very much difference: In both lines of work I spend my days studying people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur—except that in Washington they have access to nuclear weapons. Which makes the stakes higher, and the work a little more interesting.

That change in career is most noteworthy. It relates to a conversation I have with students all the time. More times than I could possibly count, I have had a conversation with a student who is tortured by indecision and angst about her future. Looking for a summer job (make that a summer internship…nobody has a mere summer job anymore), looking for a job after graduation, deciding on graduate school, planning a whole life—it is always a similar conversation. The student has no idea what to do, feels bad about not knowing what to do, agonizes about what to do. The pain of the unknown is visible.

My advice: relax. One of the little known secrets of college is that nobody knows what they want to do with their life when they are still in college. Some people think they know, but they are wrong—they don’t actually know. They may get lucky and their guess about what they wanted to do was right, but even in those cases, they didn’t really know. Until you graduate from college, you simply have no idea what life is like when you are working or living on your own.

Up through graduation, the next step in life was always known. Sophomores become juniors whether in high school or college. But at whatever point you leave school, high school or college, you suddenly embark on the great unknown. You’ve sailed off the edge of the map. There be dragons.

How do you do this? You get a job which will pay the bills, get a place to live and start plugging away at life. And then sometime between 6 and 18 months after you leave school, you start to figure out what it is you like about life, what it is you want to do. It is only after you have left school and realized there are no more summer vacations and Christmas vacations and all the free time during the week that you begin to realize what you do and do not like to spend your days doing.

And so, I tell my students, stop being so worried about this summer or your first job out of school. Just find something you think you would like to do that will pay the bills. And then go do that. You can always change your mind in a year and try something else.

Enter Krauthammer:

I never wrote a word, I never published a word before I was 30. And the reason I bring this up is because I want to speak to the young students here tonight about choice, about choosing a life.
When you are at this stage you are at right now all life is open to you. But soon you are going to suffer the agony of excellence. With so many talents and so much excellence, at one point in your life soon you’re going to have to choose. And every choice means an exclusion; every time you open a door, you’re closing a door.

It is exactly that fear of closing doors that paralyzes the modern student. Their lives have been conditioned to constantly worry about missing out. FOMO is a real disease among students. It is one of the reasons they are glued to their screens. Is there something better going on right now? Am I missing something?

Krauthammer’s advice:

The moral of the story is: Don’t be afraid to choose, and don’t be afraid to start all over if you have to. T. E. Lawrence once said, at least in the version of his life by David Lean, “Nothing is written.”
And by that he meant: Life is open, everything is choice, nothing is inevitable. So the message I have to you young people is: Don’t be afraid to choose. Choose what you love. And if you don’t love what you’ve chosen, choose again.

That is truly excellent advice. And not just for college students. For everyone. Lots of people get stuck because they think they have no choices. But you do. Nothing is written. If you don’t love what you’ve chosen, choose again.

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Childhood Wonders

“Growing up spoiled a lot of things.”

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an examination of that thesis.

A novel (presumably semi-autobiographical) of a young girl growing up in Brooklyn in the mid-20^th century, it is a very pleasant read about a bygone era.

Historical bildungsromans are a genre unto themselves. Most of them are told as something akin to “How the caterpillar became a butterfly.” Set it in a romantic era with some charming historical details and a few funny relatives, and you have an instant novel. Not necessarily a good novel, though.

One of the things that sets A Tree Grows in Brooklyn apart is that it is never really clear what the moral of the story is. Our heroine, Francie Nolan, grows up, but the novel ends slightly before we find out what exactly she becomes. We are watching Francie change, but it is not clear into what. You can guess at the end about what happens next, but it is purely a guess. You just don’t really know what the butterfly will look like.

Think about your own childhood for a second. Does it have an overarching narrative plot? You might be able to impose one on it with the benefit of hindsight and the desire to have your story be a single plotline. But, when you were growing up, what was your life? It was a whole bunch of unrelated short stories. There was that thing that happened in school in third grade. There was that time you and your best friend got into a fight in 5^th grade. There was that discussion you overheard between your parents that made no real sense. There was that time you got in trouble for that thing you didn’t do. You can add to that list at your leisure.

Did all those events belong in the same novel, though? Of course not. They were just your life as a kid. None of it really made sense. None of it connected to anything else. It was just life in a strange world full of strange events that happened and then stopped happening.

The same was true of all the people in your life. Think of your peers. How many of them do you actually remember? Why do you remember the ones you do remember? Adults are even an odder set. There were your teachers; you probably remember most of them. You remember your relatives too. But what about the neighbors? Your friends’ parents and your parents’ friends? The doctor and the dentist and the mailman and the bus driver and the lunch lady and the guy who worked at the local 7-11? They are all just so many hazy memories of strange adults wandering through life. You never gave most of them any thought at all.

Remembering what it was actually like to be a child is hard. Looking back, we impose order on the whole experience. Knowing what came after, we trace back what were the important things and what were the irrelevant details. But, that storyline you have created is just that: a storyline you created after the fact. Your memories of your childhood are completely disrupted by your knowledge of what came later.

What is it like to think like a child? That is what A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is trying to craft. There are lots of episodes in the novel, but it is not at all clear that they all form a coherent whole. There are lots of people in the novel, but it is not really clear who were the important people and who were not. As you are reading the novel, there are no clues saying “This episode is important.” All the episodes are important to Francie; she is the kid living through them. But, which ones will have a lasting effect and which ones are just the normal experiences of a kid who never quite understands what is going on? You the reader, in other words, know more than Francie, because you, the adult reading the book, understand more about the world than the kid in the story does. There is a crossword puzzle feel to much of the book: can you figure out what really just happened from this kid’s view of what just happened?

There is thus a magic to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and it is no wonder it has proven to be such a beloved novel. The world seen through the eyes of Francie is an amazing place. Wonder is everywhere. There is pain too, but the pain fades and is dulled; kids can be remarkably resilient to pain. There is tragedy and comedy, but neither one dominates the scene. Mostly, there is just another day and another month and another set of things to do. Adults never make much sense. Things just happen. And Francie just keeps moving along.

Growing up spoils a lot of things. There is a magic in the world that simply does not exist when we start imposing order on it. There is a blessed ignorance of the world that no longer exists when we understand the world of adults. Kids just take things as they are. Adults, well, we don’t. And that is most certainly a loss.

The beauty of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that it captures that element of childhood. This is the power of books. As the novel itself put is, when Francie learns to read:

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

Here is the book to read when you start feeling cynical and jaded and think that there is no magic left in the world. This is a book that reminds you that life is wonderful even when it seems like it isn’t.

Alice in…Sunderland

History has many cunning passages.

Bryan Talbot, author and illustrator of comic books, moves to Sunderland (England, not Massachusetts) for reasons unrevealed. He then commences on a multi-year examination of his adopted town.

The result: Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment.

The book is like a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Charles Dodgson, better known by his penname Lewis Carroll, spent some time in Sunderland. That is the primary connection which gives the book its name and which, truth be told, allowed the book to have a title which kept it from being so incredibly obscure that nobody would have ever read it.

The book itself is a meandering journey through history. It relates the history of Sunderland and everything even remotely connected to Sunderland and everything even remotely connected to anything even remotely connected to Sunderland and everything…well, you get the point. Since Lewis Carroll was in Sunderland, Talbot then has an excuse to relate everything related to the author and everything related to the book and everything related to the real Alice and everything related to Alice’s family, the Lidells, and then the entire history of the Lidells, which is apparently a rather large and ancient family.

After a little over 300 pages, it is reasonable to ask if there is anything that is not less than six degrees departed from Sunderland. This is not, to put to mildly, a tightly constructed book. It is more akin to a wandering conversation with a person whose attention span lasts on average a quarter of a page and at most four pages. Not surprisingly, the quality of the narrative is all over the place, from intensely interesting to trivia that only someone entering high stakes trivia contests would find worth knowing.

What saves the book from being a chore to read is the art. This is a comic book. The art is extraordinary. There is a larger variety of style than in any other single book I have ever seen. Maybe the complete Sandman series has this much variety, but that is a massively longer work. The artistic style changes from page to page, and remarkably it works. As the narrative jumps all over the place in the type of thing being discussed, the art just follows along.

The reason to read this book then has absolutely nothing to do with Sunderland. Truth be told, it is hard to tell how interesting Sunderland itself is, because unless you are paying very close attention, it is nearly impossible to tell which historical bits take place in Sunderland and which are just stories connected to something that is connected to Sunderland. By the end, I am not even sure if Alice Lidell was ever in Sunderland; I know Lewis Carroll was there, but if I cared enough to do so, I’d have to Google to see if Alice was ever there or if all the stories about the Lidells are in this book simply because they knew Carroll who spent at least a day in Sunderland. (At one point, one of Talbot’s avatars in the book asks the avatar of a local historian why none of the Carroll biographies mention the time he spent in Sunderland. One might think that implies the connection is weak.)

Besides watching Talbot at work, weaving history and art into some interesting visual treats, is there anything worth pondering in this book? Two things.

First, everything you know about Lewis Carroll is wrong, well unless you have read Talbot or maybe some biography that gets it right. All the popular ideas about Carroll are simply not true. Carroll was not obsessed with little girls, he was quite sociable in the company of adults, the idea that Carroll was a pedophile is totally unsubstantiated and without merit, and the story that Alice in Wonderland was composed in one afternoon when Carroll was on a boating expedition with Alice and her sisters is not true. So, feel free to read the Alice books for what they are—remarkably clever little puzzles and wordplay.

Second, a book like this is a wonderful reminder that everything is connected to everything else. Take the town where you live. Imagine delving into all the quirky history of your town. You’ll discover a wealth of stories. Those stories and the people in those stories are connected to other quirky stories and people who are them connected to get more stories and people. Next thing you know, you’ll find a connection to an entire world out there. All starting from your neighborhood. No man is an island. Similarly, no town is an island.

Why does this interconnectedness matter? It should remind us of the joy of learning things. There is a serendipitous joy when you just start noticing what you are reading and seeing and visiting and watching. Think of the last two books you read, and then find the connection between them. Maybe the connection is obvious, but maybe it isn’t. But, there is most certainly something interesting in the connection between those two books that would not be apparent from either book in isolation. Start noticing those connections and a whole new world will open up.

Your whole life is like that. At one level, it is one thing after another, but at another level, there is a world of wonder, a world of interconnected wonder, all around you just waiting to be noticed.