I finished Rhythm of War last night. The surprises and reveals that made the first couple books in the series so remarkable are not really a big part of this book. It's the fourth book. We're transitioning into the conclusion of the series. Characters are being put into position. THey're building up experience points and figuring out the next quest in their journey. The pleasure is in spending time with familiar characters in a world that we know as well as the characters. We learn with them rather than learning from them. Rhythm is a step down from the first couple books, but it was a 1200 page book that never felt boring or dull. I enjoyed being in the world. I was kind of sad that it ended. I have been listening to a chapter or two on my way home. That was a nice way to wrap up my day. I would have liked to keep that flow going. I guess I get to wait until book 5 comes out in a few months to get back into that reassuring pattern.
These fat fantasy books always have these grand battles between good and evil. The characters are concerned with Big Problems. They're not worried about the little details of their life. They're worried about saving the world from Evil. They're working on saving lives by thwarting the schemes of Gods and Demons. Participating in that struggle is why we read these books. Sure the stories are suspenseful and we want to see what happens next, but we're participating in the struggle. We're not just passive observers. We're emotionally invested. We expand our life by witnessing the battle, recognizing the sacrifice and pain endured by our hero. Engaging with these themes makes our life bigger. These characters give their entire being to a movement. Their identity melds into their mission and purpose. The scope and grandeur of the struggle Sanderson's characters engage in are a big part of what makes his novels so compelling. It's hard to feel like you're wandering and aimless when you're engaging in an interplanetary conflict.
Doing science made (maybe makes, not really sure of the tense to use here) me feel like part of something bigger. I was participating in this effort to understand how our reality works. My piece of the effort may be small, but a contribution makes me part of the big effort to figure the world out. It sounds paradoxica, but the more I realized how little we really know the more meaning I found in doing science. You would expect that insight to make the entire effort feel meaningless, but getting a glimpse of what is under the surface of our daily physical reality made the effort worthwhile. This wasn't looking at the cold void and feeling alone and vulnerable. This was looking out and seeing the grandeur of what makes us who we are as both conscious individuals striving to live a life and physical beings bound and limited by how we're physically constructed. We're not isolated specks of dust floating in empiness. We're small parts of everything.
Jung looked at individuals and extrapolated from the few to the many to all of humanity stretching over time. There's a consistency to our experience that stretches across time and place. He's. reaching out to me from death and across seas through his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul. I've been reading a few pages here and there while working through Rhythm of War. I picked it up after reading about a paper where mice learned to avoid eating cherries from the experience of their grandparents. This learning through the generations (they posited that changes in gene expression was the origin of this generational learning, but it's very much part of that broad scope of what we don't know about the world) was suggested as proof of Jung's collective unconscious. I read about this in a different book by Jung, Man and His Symbols (this was the last book I read before I started college, I don't have it marked as read in Goodreads, I don't remember much of it, but I know I read the whole damn thing). I had this other Jung book on my shelf so that became the book that I picked up to start reading. I feel like I'm on the edge of understanding something pretty important and this book has been part of giving me a peek into something that feels important.
Maybe the point of all of this is to understand our place in the grand tapestry of existence (the wording could use some work). The meaning of life isn't that it has no meaning. Meaning emerges from living. The meaning is in appreciating our contribution, no matter how small, to the constantly unfolding processes of reality. Sounds a little woo woo but that captures things well enough for me to get back to it after I have had some time to realize just how banal the thought really is.
The spreadsheet says I'm at 179. Is the exact number really all that critical when I'm this far from zero?
