Red Lights

This is Amorella. The photo scene is real enough, or rather, it was. Public service in action caught in a digital format.

You just finished Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol.

I did.

What do you think?

I thought I would glean something from the book, a sideways glance, if you will, but what I remember most from the book is a quotation from William Blake: “We both read the Bible, day and night; but you read the black while I read the white.”

Can you relate the quote to the photograph of emergency equipment?

No. This sounds like one of my impossible assignments that out of desperation students had no choice but to conjure up conclusions. The assignment was: Explain light to someone of high school age who has been totally blind all herorhis life. No physics, explain only the phenomenon of sight.

I told them to use analogies relating to the other four senses, touch, audio, taste and smell. They had a week to work on it. An expository essay of one to two pages typed, a regular sized twelve point font, single spaced, a space between paragraphs. Preferably with no grammatical errors, or if there were, they should be corrected with a black ink pen.

I thought and still think of it as a spiritual assignment because it takes a higher degree of thinking to tackle the problem. Explaining the seemingly ordinary to someone is not as easy as it looks. It is a refinement of the simpler assignment of describing in words how to tie a shoe lace. Or, another favorite, Explain the form and function of a paper clip.

I see no emergency in William Blake’s quotation. The only red flags, as it were, are that we read words, biblical or not, and do not understand the more holistic meaning of the word, phrase or sentence. The white of the page is between the lines as well as margins. Thought leaps beyond the margins and fills between the lines. What is gleaned from a reading is more than the words read.

Human beings, like words, are more than the sum of their parts. Human beings have no bottom line, though I humbly submit they have a top. Our minds are not built to grasp certain specific things. No one can picture a total of a million separate one dollar bills in herorhis mind, at least I don’t believe so.

I see no emergency in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. It was a good read and I highly recommend it to those who like Dan Brown’s style. It was a page turner and entertaining, but it does not provoke the imagination as The Da Vinci Code does. Why do you ask, Amorella?

The Lost Symbol suggests spiritual elements, isn’t that the reason you read Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code?

Yes, but the books are fictions surrounded by facts. The spiritual, however, is within the reader not the book. It is within the reader and the writer. The words are only a go-between, a stop-gap conditional contract between minds. I did not wonder so much with Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol. I still, at times, wonder about The Da Vinci Code. Is it possible that Jesus married and had children? Certainly. Is it a reality? There’s the rub. That makes for a better story in my mind, you see.

Non fiction is stronger than fiction in your mind.

Of course. I question what is reality and what is not. It is important to me to understand the difference when it is not always so easy to see the difference in this world we find ourselves subjected to. Our minds are built to imagine and to tell stories. Sometimes human beings don’t care whether the stories are the truth or not as long as we are comforted or better satisfied with the story no matter what it is. When something is not to be questioned I am far less than satisfied. I would hope most people are. It is in our nature to question what we observe in nature and in the nature of ourselves.