Re-reading Is Fundamental: A Short History Of Nearly Everything
Image credit: Joe Daly
I’m not a huge fan of re-reading. There are, of course, a select range of books that demand multiple voyages — typically volumes devoted to the spiritual or to the practical — two dimensions that require constant and evolving cultivation as life and circumstances change. On the fiction side of things, my list is a bit more limited. We’re talking the works of Tom Robbins, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, H.P. Lovecraft and of course, that one Universe-rattling tour-de-force from the meteoric John Kennedy Toole.
I’ve currently got two hardcopy reads in progress but I needed a new audiobook for the drives and dog walks that account for an hour or two of each of my days. So this evening, I pulled up my Audible app and opened the library to scan the unread titles (like my bookcase at home, there are a load of untouched volumes in my audiobook library which I’ve saved for the right moment). I didn’t need to dig too deeply because there it sat — A Short History Of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. I get that not all books are appropriate for all people but this is one that comes pretty close. Talk about ambitious — after a brief prologue that pile drives home the point that each human being has defied odds beyond what the human mind can adequately register and somehow became an animated pile of cosmic dust. The fourteen billion year-old Universe is full of cosmic particles but somehow in each of us, a staggering number of them gathered together and decided that for a few decades, they would serve the brief mission of giving us life. The odds we’re talking about are greater than winning Powerball ever week for the next hundred years. So, having issued such an awe-inspiring and rather humbling baseline, he dives right into the Big Bang.
One needn’t be a cosmologist, a scientist or a philosopher to drink deeply of the sprawling information of this book. In fact, as Bryson himself points out, scientific texts have long stood as a barrier to curiosity for so many due to their monumental dryness. In Bryson’s hands, the story of creation takes on degrees of wonderment and awe, told in accessible terms that are easy to process, although I often re=wind sentences just to fully digest the heft of what has been said. And you don’t have to remember anything. Ultimately this book offers a new context for viewing the micro and the macro and what you retain is completely up to you — there are no to
That the author eventually gets to mankind in the 21st century is nothing short of a towering literary achievement. In hardcopy, he manages to tell the story in just under 600 pages and the audiobook plays out in eighteen hours. Either way, it’s an investment but I’d argue one that every rational and curious human being should undertake at some point in their lives. This is the only planet we’ll ever call home. To understand how it, along with the millions of life forms that have called it home over the years is an eye-opening journey that cannot help but change the way you see yourself and therefore the world around you (and within you).
And so tonight, on a drive up to Orange County, I dove back in and man, it feels great to be back.