The Gods May Be Crazy, But . . .

The gods may be crazy, but sometimes they confer an unexpected boon. Only if you weigh such a boon against the thousands of boners they pull, might you consider divinities benign. But that is a subject for another blog. (See "Biblo-O-Phile.")

But, to the immediate story.

At the Center for Creative Studies, where I was teaching English, I conceived a course that I called "The Essential Unity of Nearly Everything." The title was designed to allow me to include anything I wanted to read, from the Odyssey, to Gargantua and Pantagruel, to Twelfth Night, to Joseph Andrews, to The Tin Drum. I didn't know offhand what the "essential unity" would consist of, though I had faith that a creative imagination will find connections among seemingly unrelated works of literature from a variety of times and places.

Here is the boon. On my way to the first class meeting (I was on the plane, commuting at this time from Southern California), I picked up the in-flight magazine to browse through the pictures. I believe I randomly opened to a page with an article about string-theory. An article about string-theory? In an airline magazine? Along with the usual puff stuff about places to go, eat, and tourize? The advertisements for vacation packages? For Berlitz language schools? For the Rosetta Stone?

I read the article and discovered that string-theorists do, indeed, believe that there is an underlying unity to everything. Strings are those tiny, tiny theoretical things that connect all. As soon as I got to school the next day, I xeroxed the article for the class, and there was the theoretical foundation, provided by the unimpeachable world of science, for the next fifteen or sixteen weeks.

By the way, as the class progressed, we also discovered other kinds of unity, not the least of which is that these works were often about feasts, about over-indulgence, and about the mayhem that over-indulgence can lead to (think of Polyphemus in the Odyssey, or the eels in The Tin Drum). The class was delicious--the students and I both had a lot of fun. They learned, and as my former dean has said, no humans were injured--pedagogically or intellectually or nutritionally--in this small segment of the ever-unfolding course of human affairs.