Shelf life

Over the last few days, I re-read a couple of books, both after at least a dozen years. The first of these was Changing Places by David Lodge. It's about two professors of English, one at a hotshot West Coast university and the other at a drab English university, who go on exchange for a semester to each other's departments. I remember liking it a lot when I'd read it first - oh - when I was in the eleventh or twelfth grade, I think. I'd got it from the British Council library, and that was the time I used to go there frequently (and try to figure out what was funny about Punch).

I thought I should read this book again partly because I remember enjoying it the first time round, and partly because I'm now in the profession, so to speak. I thought I might enjoy it even more. Funnily, I didn't. I found myself putting the book down every few minutes, every five or ten pages. It was still very good, I think, and very clever and everything, but it just seemed forced. I wonder why -- it's not as if I have anything against cleverness (more on this below) and I'm not even a huge fan of linearity as I realised while walking away from watching Das Leben der Anderen. (Yes, I finally got to watch it. It was very good, but a little too linear, don't you think? And what was with all those "two years later" bits?) I thought it might be due to my (not so) newfound underwhelmedness by what I was recently castigated for calling "storybooks". Makes me wonder: there's so much wild stuff that's gone down in the world, there's so much to know about -- that seems to be my rationale for preferring to not read storybooks given the opportunity to read. (Also explains my suckerishness for bookstores -- I ended up buying five new ones over the weekend :-| So much for travelling light.) I guess films work as entertainment because in general they're so much lighter than books. You sit back, you absorb for a couple of hours, and then you're done. "Heavy" films are either the deep-meaningful types, usually with telling profound stories with lots of dark and negative feelings, or they're the meaningless-on-the-surface ones, which critics can spend fifty years delving into constructing "meaning". (I'm thinking about Bunuel here.) These are generalities, I know. And I sort of lost the point that I was trying to make, but it's something to do with fiction versus non-fiction in books, versus fiction versus non-fiction in films. If someone can find that point, let me know.

The second book I got back in touch with was one that was very close to my heart for years and years. There were three books that I read as a kid that made me want to become a physicist. The most critical one was The Structure of the Universe by Jayant Narlikar. I got it for my birthday, and a few days later an elder cousin visited and saw the book and dismissively remarked that I'd never understand it. So of course I had to. I spent seven years chasing it. The second was The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. Where Narlikar's book communicated the macho-ness of physics, in spades, I might add, this book reinforced its coolness. A coolness that died many years later, when I learned about all the mysticism crap that this stream of thought had led towards.

The third book was Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman. I'm definite that there's a generation - if not more - of young Indian geeklets who've grown up idolising Richard Feynman. I mean, who wouldn't, after reading this book? Well, I learned quickly enough when I lent it to a neighbor who was a dozen years older and a sociology student to boot (and we all know what Jim Hacker has to say about that). This person returned the book saying she was put off by Feynman -- he just seemed too full of himself. I was aghast at the blasphemy and discontinued the conversation post haste.

Which is why it was interesting to me that, so many years after having interacted with all parties concerned, one of my first reactions to the book was indeed that Feynman was making too big a deal out of himself.

Hmmm.

Reading through, though, I began to change my mind. The guy really was a genius and he was just telling it like he saw it. Self-effacingness isn't the greatest of American virtues anyway, and this was an American who really was an exceptional person who had so much to tell the world. One image that had stuck with me all these years was that of a comment by one of his students in the introduction to either this or one his Lectures. That student had said something about how it felt great to just walk into a class with Feynman. He'd be standing there, smiling to himself, playing with a piece of chalk. In his book he talks about the delight of communicating the joy of physics, and I'd held on to that thought. A good teacher doesn't just communicate the content, s/he also communicates the joy of knowing the material. A lot of human knowledge is just really cool. And anyone who can communicate some of that coolness is doing the world a favor.

Which sort of brings me back to what I was trying to say about fiction versus non-fiction in books.

Much as I did when I was fourteen, revisiting Dick Feynman made me revisit my ambition to be the best I can as a communicator.