In my life, there are many books which have shaped and changed me dramatically. Sometimes those books make small incremental changes in perception, a turn of phrase that you start to incorporate or a new way to look at people which hadn’t even crossed your mind before.
When I was a young child, I was extremely shy, battered around by everyone and being a victim to the cruel whims of everyone around me. I felt lost and out of control. I remember the day I read Illusions by Richard Bach, I was sitting on the breakwater at Dana Point Harbor overlooking the ocean. There was a quote that changed me, wove into who I was and became a mantra for my life. “I gave my life to become the person I am today, was it worth it?” From that moment forward, every morning I would wake up and if I didn’t like who I was, then I would figure out why I didn’t and I would change my life. From being someone who was ‘destined’ to fail to someone who goes through life living their dream and just ‘living’ life and enjoying it in all its glory.
A couple weeks ago, I picked up another book that I read which changed my perception of reality. The person who first read this book was around 20 years old and believed the ‘dogma’ of the world. I was in a class called Gods, Clocks and Religion which focused on world religion, physics and philosophy, the only class that I actually ever attended in college and felt that I learned something from, and remember thinking how little I knew in such a vast sea of knowledge. Logic Tables (thank you for helping me learn to program), the amazing depth of ways that people work to justify who they are and why they live, and physics and how it all ties together. I so did love that class. But most important of all, it gave me a book called A Canticle for Liebowitz.
Imagine for a moment, what the word would be like if the nuclear bomb hit, the loss of knowledge, the destruction of neurons, 90% of the population wiped out and the rest reduced to just trying to survive. The great cities reduced to rubble. Now slowly move through time a thousand years. Scavengers for the last thousand had cannibalized whatever rubble was left in the big cities and time had buried what was left. The need to communicate in a written form is just starting to come back to the masses and as people are picking through the rubble they come across artifacts, written documents, blue prints. The only thing that survived in the last thousand years was religion who had been trying to preserve knowledge, documents, but over time had lost meaning and had slowly filled in the blanks… Now time progresses another thousand years and new dogma, new beliefs, old legends and people try to piece together the past. As you piece together the past you come across blueprints of technology and you start to try to build it. But, people haven’t changed. They are still greedy and power hungry, suspicious and judgmental. Time has progressed, but the growth of the human soul is the same as it was before.
So three thousand years later, where would we be? Who would we be? What have we learned? In the book, we have learned nothing. More bombs were built and wars occurred and power hungry people destroyed. Till once again, we are lost in the arms of another nuclear war and they cycle continues from scratch.
So, how did this book change my perceptions? It made me stop and think about dogma, rituals, the books being absolute truth. Humans did the copying, they created their own formulas, they made mistakes and they filled in the blanks. There is no ‘absolute truth’. It made me stop and re-evaluate us as a society, we look back at the pyramids and the Greeks and we either venerate them or sneer at ‘what did they know’ since they were obviously lacking in ‘sophisticated knowledge’. Finally, it made me stop and look at the world that we create, our society, and question the ignorance and the judgments and the power hungry struggles and shake my head at what we as human beings do in the name of our ego and our gods.
I thought that when I re-read A Canticle for Liebowitz that I would find it ‘less’ than what I remembered, instead as I re-read it I find it more.
