The Oasis Within

Today I have a great official announcement, unofficially posted on Facebook and Twitter yesterday. A new era has come! And a new way of being a philosopher has arrived with it.

In February of 2011, after a breakfast of toast and coffee, I suddenly had the most vivid daydream of my life. An old man and a boy were sitting under a palm tree, at a beautiful desert oasis, talking. They were in Egypt. It was 1934. And their conversation was really great. I was intrigued. It was all so real, and so different from anything I had ever experienced. I have a robust imagination, but nothing like this. As the movie played in my head, I ran up the stairs to my study to start writing it down. The boy, age thirteen, was with his much older uncle, and it seemed that they were crossing the desert with friends from a small village in western Egypt, on their way to Cairo. I wrote until the vision passed, and I posted the few pages I had written out, as a transcription, on The Huffington Post. Right away, I got lots of enthusiastic emails. "What is this? This is great!" I didn't know what it was.

The next day, the movie started up again. And I wrote down everything I saw and heard. This went on for weeks, and then months. The characters talk about such things as inner peace, the challenge of change, the dynamic nature of balance, how things can help or harm us, the true power of the mind, the hidden structures of our world, the importance of wisdom, the elements of human nature, the necessity of love, the requirements of success, and the world’s strangest gift of all - uncertainty. I could be almost anywhere, doing almost anything, and I'd have to grab a pen and paper and start writing. Pretty soon, I realized that I had an entire book. It was called The Oasis Within. I knew that because I woke up with the title seared in my mind. Yeah, it's all strange. But interesting strange. And it was the most fun, by far, that I've ever had writing - or doing anything as a philosopher.

The story continued. A second book, much bigger, appeared, as if it were already fully formed in every detail and I just had to get it in that movie form so I could write it down, as well. I never had to make up anything. And I never did. It all just came to me, in a rush. It was like drinking out of an open fire hydrant. It was all I could do to type fast enough. Egyptian names, historical references, stuff I didn't know anything about at all - but at the end of each day, I began to research what I had seen in the movie, and all sorts of odd details turned out to be true of the time and the place. How was this happening? I had no idea. The first book, it turned out, was a fascinating conversational prologue to what was now obviously a much longer action, adventure, and mystery novel full of comedy, romance, politics, crime, and, most of all, philosophy. I was seeing a deep worldview developed by the characters in what they did and said.  It really blew me away.

The second book was more than twice the length of the first one. Then, the movie picked up again - there was a third, even bigger, book, and a fourth one, and on and on. Book eight came to a wild culmination, and the movie projectionist, whoever it is, then took a break. I was nearly a million words into the most unexpected adventure of my life, and what I now think of as the culmination of my work as a public philosopher interested in understanding as much as I can about what we're doing in this world, and how we can do it best. I learned more from the movie than I had at Yale, UNC, and Notre Dame combined. But they had all prepared me well for this wild and unexpected journey.

One friend, a former student, who is a highly acclaimed novelist, read the first two books in draft and said, "This is The Alchemist meets Harry Potter meets Indiana Jones." That was encouraging. And the first edition of the first book just came out in its first form - a really beautiful paperback. The hardcover version, and an ebook, are due out within a week or two. But the paperback is now there, waiting for you, at Amazon, hoping you're curious. The hardcover and the ebook will be available through any bookseller, and also very soon. But if you want to see the opening chapters in the new adventure right now, the journey that has changed my own life for the better, please go, click here, The Oasis Within, and read and tell me soon what you think!

To quote one of the characters, "Much is yet to be revealed."

A Land More Kind Than Home

There's a novelist named Wiley Cash who lives in my town. I've never met him but we have at least one friend in common. I recently picked up his first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, and once I started reading it, it was hard to put down. The story is told from multiple points of view in a way that actually works, and helps, rather than confusing the reader. It's a winding tale about some people in the mountains of North Carolina, and crucially involves religion, big snakes in church, crime, murder, heavy drinking, a family broken apart, and a long road to redemption for one man you'd never have suspected as capable of it. My favorite sentiment in the book, one that the story has richly earned the right to announce, is uttered by an older lady near the end. As she sums things up, she says:

It's a good thing to see that people can heal after they've been broken, that they can change and become something different from what they were before. (305)

This is a hope that we all have, and a truth that many of us can attest. Something is going to break us, if we live long enough, and we can change and heal, given enough time yet to come. And the healing doesn't have to look likely, in order to happen. Redemption is the result of a multitude of forces at work over time. If we give people the chance to turn around, sometimes they will. It's a prime example of the true alchemy in our world.

Wiley's story is rich with a resonance of North Carolina's mountain people. But you might see and hear something similar in any poor, remote area of the country. The words and cadences of the characters reflect even what I heard in the piedmont portion of the state, growing up on the edge of a town in an eight hundred square foot rental house. Its setting strips away a lot of the complexities of modern life, to allow some of the elemental things to shine through. The story of the book will fascinate you, disturb you in good ways, and then lift you up.

I'd recommend it as a great summer read. And now, Wiley Cash already has another book out. So I've got more reading to do.

Best Book of the Year

The best book I’ve read this year was a total surprise. I hadn’t seen the author’s two previous books, although the first one got a lot of attention. And it was only noticing the “Pulitzer Prize” sticker on the front cover of this one at my local Barnes and Noble that got my attention. I was intrigued. There was a picture of a bird. And it was a big book, nearly 800 pages. The thought ran through my head, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”

But some strong instinct, some irresistible intuitive urge, made me buy it. It was almost like I had no choice. And it may actually be the best, most completely involving novel I’ve read in at least five or ten years.

The Goldfinch, by Mississippi-born Donna Tartt, is named for a famous painting, done in 1654, but the book takes place in something like present-day New York, mainly, but also in Las Vegas and Amsterdam. It follows the adventures of a precocious but academically uninterested thirteen-year-old boy through a suddenly traumatic period and then into the subsequent years of his life, up to his late twenties.

The book is, first of all, a real page-turner. And, at its core, it’s an extended reflection on the power of our actions and inactions in a sometimes-crazy world. The main character, Theo Decker, does something, early on, you could say, instinctively, that has implications he doesn’t at the time fully grasp, and as he begins to understand the potentially damaging consequences, he hesitates making the choices that alone could undo, or at least mitigate, those very big problems. In the initial instance, it was almost like he had no choice but to do what he did. And yet, when opportunities later develop to possibly reverse the course of things, his failure to take the obvious action and do what we wish he would do, seems on one level mysterious, and yet on another level understandable, in context, at each juncture.

Further circumstances beyond his control intervene, and we see him hide from the realities he faces by indulging in various forms of self-soothing and self-medicating behaviors, mostly involving more drugs than you would ever imagine, all throughout his teens, and then into his twenties, rather than grappling as he should with the things that confront him.

But this sketchy, high-level abstract of the tale can’t possibly convey the nature of the richly realized story, the fully imagined settings in which Theo’s problems grow, or the fascinating characters who come into his life along the way. I don’t think I’ve ever been so involved with the characters in a story, since my very different experience of Harry Potter and his friends.

Then, within the last hundred pages or so of the book, we get major philosophical payoffs from the story. And some of these reflections are almost worthy of Blaise Pascal in their vividness. Beauty, truth, meaning, chance, depth, choice, consequences, and surprise: It’s all there. And the ultimate results of Theo’s actions are so strikingly different from what we have come to expect that musing on them will keep you philosophizing for quite a time to come.

I just finished writing a series of novels – eight, as a matter of fact – totally well over two thousand pages. Entering that fictional world has involved the most intellectual excitement and fun I’ve ever had. And, if you might still be looking for some great summer reading, I’d love to be able to recommend these to you. But they exist only inside my computer. I haven’t even shown them to a publisher yet. So, shhhhh.

That, however, leaves me free to urge you to get your hands on The Goldfinch as soon as possible. I think you’ll be amazed.

But don't read any reviews. They give away far too much. Experience it all as you should!