REFLECTIONS ON A BOOK I NEVER READ: A few weeks ago, I finally discovered Douglas Hofstadter. His new book “I Am A Strange Loop” just came out. That sounds like my kind of book! I’m hoping to pick up a copy in the near future. It’s about human consciousness, kind-of; but it’s also about advanced math and computers and the death of Hofstadter’s ex-wife . . . . Hofstadter is hard to put into any one box. He’s one of those expansive thinkers who have developed a cult following of sorts.
Hofstadter came out of nowhere in 1979 with a book called “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”. GEB is about math and physics and consciousness and paradoxes and various quasi-scientific ways of looking at reality. I just picked up a copy of GEB from a used-book web site. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I plan to put a few chapters of it away before I get to “I Am A Strange Loop”. Reviewers say that GEB is a prerequisite for Strange Loop. On the Amazon web site, one of the customer reviews of GEB says “this is the book that made me weird”. Dang! Must be good. Then why didn’t I hear about GEB back in the 80’s?
At the time it came out, I was finishing up law school. I didn’t get a job with a high-powered law firm, and thus had some time to kill. So, with my increased spare time, I started reading non-legal books, and hanging out with a guy who was kicking around in my brother’s crowd. This guy, Mr. Shortman, was around my age. He also had an undergrad degree in engineering (although he didn’t go to law school). He was a heavy-drinking kind of guy (thus his affiliation with my brother’s friends), but his mind wasn’t totally gone yet either. He still took seriously all the stuff about critical thinking and openness to new ideas, which college profs try to cram you with even in engineering school. Good old Rick still hadn’t lost the habit of reading books.
And at the time, there were a lot of new, off-beat books for guys like Rick and me to read. Robert Pirsig had hit the scene with “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, and then there was Samuel Florman with “Existential Pleasures of Engineering”. Lewis Thomas also presented some “outside the box” reflections in “The Medusa and the Snail” and “Lives of a Cell”. Me and Rick discussed these books over many a glass of beer. Hofstadter’s book would have been right up our alley. But for whatever reason, it never made our list. I can’t figure that out.
On the dedication page of my used copy of GEB, there’s some writing under the author’s tribute to “M. and D.” The writing says “Much love to Dad from Alice, ’82”. Wow — so Alice heard about Hofstadter back then, and obviously so did Dad. It can’t help but make me wonder what happened to Alice and Dad – and who were they? And what ever happened to Rick S? I lost track of him about 10 or 12 years ago. We just both kind of lost interest, I guess. Rick moved to Ohio around ’88. Although for a number of years I made the long drive on Interstate 80 to stay in touch, I guess that I got tired of it, especially since Rick seemed to be losing interest in books and off-beat techno-metaphysical viewpoints. We’d still hit the restaurants and taverns, and wind up late at night in a go-go dancer bar (one of Rick’s key non-technical interests). But without the rambling discussions about weird and potentially brilliant new ways of looking at reality, the girls and the beers just seemed kind of low-life (instead of presenting a charmingly odd setting to discuss recursive feedback systems and quantum decoherence and spacetime topology). The fire in Rick’s mind had gone out. And that was really a shame.
Well, hopefully the fire in Dr. Hofstadter’s mind is still burning. I hope that Alice’s dad is still around, and that he gets to read “Strange Loops”. And I’m glad that I finally caught up with Hofstadter. It makes me sad thinking back to Mr. Shortman, though. Someone told me not long ago that he’s still alive, selling RV’s (it’s probably hard to hold a job in quality control engineering in Ohio now, with all the factories being shut; but I’m not doing anything all that earth-shaking with my life either). I can’t help but wonder if Mr. S somehow came across GEB and Strange Loops, would he perhaps pick them up, and maybe get the sense that these were once his kind of book? And maybe read them? Ah, but life buries most of us under so much rubble. To anyone young who might come across my words here (if anyone at all comes across them), I would admonish you to take seriously that line in Pink Floyd’s “Hey You”. The one that goes: “hey you, don’t let them bury the light; don’t give in without a fight”.
