Pardon my whining, but my brain is full. See Far Side Cartoon, Gary Larsen, 143 Far Side Gallery 16 (1998). I have been studying for days, methodically stuffing legal theory into every crack and crevice in my caffeine-buzzing cerebellum for hours on end, often feeling more confused as I learn and relearn, classify and nomenclate. (word? I don’t care.) My cup, in the view of this court, runneth over. As I was reading Farnsworth’s analysis of Posner’s analysis of the Restatement’s (Second) analysis of force majeure clauses, my brain seized up like a Volkswagen bus on the Autobahn with a cracked oilpan. I pushed back from the desk and had to take several deep breaths. Let the information flow…
All of which is to say, that I look forward hourly to this summer. I miss my family. I miss my old friends. I miss wearing shorts and actually perspiring (people in Ohio sweat on only two days—June 21, the summer solstice, and April 15, tax day). I miss hearing ‘y’all’ and fixin’ and I miss the desire to find out what a new book has to say.
You see, I love books. Everything about ‘em. There is nothing in this world that a good book, well-written and strategically placed, can’t solve, placate or expand. But this abstract definition of what constitutes a book has been shaken to the core. Now my books, at least the ones I must read, incite minor pangs of fear and loathing. To continue on the cartoon metaphor, I refer to Calvin and Hobbes: “If nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun.” The Indispensible Calvin and Hobbes, 123 Something 09, (199?).
This ain’t fun. This ain’t curiosity. Alain de Botton summed up the notion of curiosity for me in his book The Art of Travel a couple of years ago:
''Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood, we ask, 'Why is there good and evil?' 'How does nature work?' 'Why am I me?' If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at some point we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing.''
No, this goes beyond curiosity. This involves focus and desire, resistance to boredom and frequent preemptive strikes on the impulsive demons of our nature. One has to simply become a machine through which a large amount of information is streamed, organized, and rejuvenated by imagination. All that said, with all due respect to Mr. Botton, there is precious little on this spinning blue globe that I would cherish more than a prolonged period of nothing right now. Well, perhaps a hammock. And a fishing pole. And.. as crazy as it sounds … a good book. One nobody, and I mean nobody, is making me read. Luckily, I saved some room in my brain for dessert.
