I have a day off between travels today. My next stop is Santa Barbara for a conference on creation care. Living by a (very) small market airport, it didn’t make sense for me to fly home yesterday. I would have gotten in late, and couldn’t get to Santa Barbara in time for the opening dinner on Sunday evening unless I left on Saturday. So instead, I’ve holed up in a basement Airbnb near the airport in Boston and have a 6:00am flight tomorrow morning. I’ll cross the great “flyover country” (I forget who called it that) with just a wave to my family below who are celebrating Father’s Day without me.
Instead of passing the day in my windowless basement watching the Euros all day (Come on, England!), I asked ChatGPT where I might go to sit and drink coffee and work on my computer. It helpfully suggested this place in a cute neighborhood that brews the family beans and ought to be conducive to some philosophizing.
The topic of the morning’s thinking is the next book. If you haven’t read The Sacred Chain yet (or if you have read it but haven’t left a review yet on Amazon!), there is still time. It has only been out for a couple of months. But like the coffee at Thinking Cup, I’ve had these ideas brewing for a while.
I explained in this newsletter before that the original project that turned into The Sacred Chain was severely pared down by agents and editors from the capacious (I think they used the word “sprawling”) idea I brought. That means there is a lot of material that didn’t get used and is still percolating. So today’s task is to start more seriously sifting through that and seeing what I can come up with.
I’m sitting at a table near the front window, where the locals seem to be a mix of young urban professionals who are gentrifying the neighborhood (people walking past with their designer bags and yoga mats), and the actual locals who appear to have been here a long time. No offense to the former, but I’m not that interested in what they’re doing and prefer eavesdropping on the latter.
When working in public places, I often listen to Sigur Rós on the earbuds because 1) I don’t understand any of the words of this group that sings in Icelandic, which helps to eliminate distractions when you’re trying to think; and 2) the music pretty well fills the spectrum of audio frequencies and drowns out all other noise. At least usually. There are a couple of older women sitting near me talking to a man they obviously know at an adjacent table, and my noise cancelling earbuds must not be tuned to block out their stereotypical thick Boston accents. A few excerpts of their conversation that made it through the filters and have kept my attention from what I came here to do:
“I saw you at the library the other day reading the paper.” “Yes, I use to be on the daily delivery route, but when it hit three bucks a day I gave up and started going with everyone else to the library to read for free.”
“The Celtics were so bad last night, but I’m glad they’re showing the games on channel 5 now so you don’t have use the cable.”
“That lasagna she brought to the church thing was divine. Am I right, or am I right? You know I’m right!”
There’s got to be a book in there somewhere… but it is not the book I’m trying to write now. Perhaps trying to explain my new book here in a paragraph or two will get me back on track thinking about it instead of the local conversation (though I can’t help adding that one of the ladies just said, “When our generation is gone, there aren’t going to be any people left in the neighborhood.” Evidently the millennials pushing their comfort animals in strollers don’t count as people in this neighborhood!)
This new book is going to tell a story of how we humans came to be the way we are today. The “way we are today” could go lots of different directions, and learning my lesson from the last book proposal, I need to guard against sprawl. So I want to tell a story about the capacity we have for spiritual experience and responding to the call of the divine. I can’t say definitively, but it sure doesn’t seem like other creatures have this. My experience with Sedna and Murphy the other day was incredible and I don’t think you could convince me that these octopuses are just mindless machines. But it would also be tough to convince me that they are fully self-aware of their actions and thoughts. They might be living up to their calling better than we humans are living up to ours, but that’s because we have developed the capacity to not live up to our calling. Can an octopus or a tree not live up to its calling? I think they can be prevented from doing so (primarily by us), but I don’t think they can reject their calling. The fact that we can is a fascinating development in our evolution.
Also, I say tell “a” story, rather than “the” story. That’s because there are lots of stories to tell, and not enough facts to close down all but one of them. There are enough facts to close down a lot of the possible stories (we humans evolved from other creatures, for example, and didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus), but there are still different ways of telling the story of how we came to be what we are today. Harari, for example, in his wildly popular book Sapiens tells a really engaging story. But it is ultimately pretty grim. And he plays pretty loose with a lot of the facts and doesn’t really admit he’s telling just one of the possible stories. I think there is a better, more hopeful story that doesn’t sacrifice fidelity to the facts and that can be told about who we are and what we’re capable of today.
My story is going to progress through different developments in our past. At the moment, these are: seeing, walking, thinking, talking, feeling, choosing, and loving. I recognize that sounds sprawling. But I’m not trying to give a comprehensive history of each of these developments, but just showing where they came from and how they have become something distinctive in human life. That captures the important insight that there is both continuity and discontinuity between us and other animals. Lots of things walk, but we take pilgrimages; everything communicates, but we write poetry. I’m not claiming that makes us better than everything else; in fact in many ways these developments have made us worse (we’re the only creatures on Earth that sin, right?). And perhaps if octopuses would write books, they’d talk about the similar sort of continuity and discontinuity their lives have with other animals — including us; but (somewhat tellingly for my project) they don’t write books!
Anyway, I think there’s a book in there somewhere trying to get out. But now I’m going to take the T to another part of town where ChatGPT told me I can watch the Spain match in the company of others who care about such things.
Thanks for reading.