Finding Order in This World

When reading a novel this morning a tedious paragraph made me stop.  Some authors make me think. They have some wisdom or picture I can make in my mind.  Some authors just have a beauty and flow to the words they choose. I feel l like I'm eating Culver's chocolate custard slowly, a fourth of a spoonful at a time.  I let the spoon retreat out of my mouth and feel the luxury of the cold taste with each swallow.  Paolo Giordano grabbed something in me in his writing.  It took my breath away.  I felt like he handed me a new tool for understanding my inner self.  The self I've never analyzed before when I'm having trouble with the world and what it's handing me.

Giordano captivated me from the beginning of the story by his unique characters and events. But when the story got to the character Mattia thinking through numbers, I wasn't expecting to be interested at all.  I almost skipped it.

2760889966649. He put the lid back on the pen and set it down next to the paper. "Twothousandsevenhundredsixtybillioneighthundredeightyninemillionninehundredsixtysixthousandsixhundredfortynine," he read out loud. Then he repeated it under his breath, as if to take possession of that tongue twister.  He decided that this number would be his.  He was sure that no one else in the world, no one else in the whole history of the world, had ever stopped to consider that number.  Probably until then, no one had ever written it down on a piece of paper, let alone spoken it out loud.

After Giordano continues to write about the character, Mattia and how he spends a long time dividing the number to check if it's a prime number, the author continues with,

During his four years of university, mathematics had led him into the most remote and fascinating corners of human thought.  With meticulous ritualism Mattia copied out the proofs of all the theorems he encountered in his studies.  Even on summer afternoons he kept the blinds lowered and worked in artificial light.  He removed from his desk everything that might distract his gaze, so as to feel truly alone with the page.  He wrote without stopping.  If he found himself hesitating too long over a passage or made a mistake when aligning an expression after the equals sign, he shoved the paper to the floor and started all over.  When he got to the end of those pages stuffed with symbols, letters and numbers, he wrote, "QED," and for a moment he felt he had put a piece of the world in order.  Then he leaned against the back of the chair and wove his hands together, without letting them rub.

Rituals. Games. Calculating and pretending.  I find those behaviors comforting.  But, I never realized "why" I do those things.  When Giordano wrote "…he felt he had put a piece of the world in order."  I understood a facet of my subconscious that I never have before.

Many things I do are a bit quirky.  I've always felt a little weird.  A little bizarre.  I just took it to be the "creative" side of me, the "7th child of 10 Cronans" part of me, and the "first grade teacher" part of me.  When my daughters were growing up, I chocked it up to "parenting".  Sometimes I thought it was my "discoverer-inventor" part of me.  I like things to be interesting and keep moving.  I pride myself on never being bored.  So, when I play little games in my mind I've always figured it was my way of keeping connected to the real world when I felt the need to check out and become a dreamer.

Now, after reading these passages, I have a bit of understanding how I would want to give the world some order, some sense and meaning.  I guess the religious teachings I learned were suppose to fill that void, but they never really met the mark.  The seasons in the church with their rituals and order, the memorized prayers, the music, all helped to stabalize and order the world around me.  But, when times were tough and stressful, I would retreat into my games and fantasy and begin to stack up some building blocks of my own to feel secure.

Maybe my marriages and career were suppose to help me see the order of things.  Boundaries, rules, images to maintain, standards and obligations.  They definitely were all-encompassing at times.  But, when marriage felt chaotic, I imagined myself getting in my car and becoming a Canadian citizen.  When teaching felt more like a job than a career, I pictured myself walking out of the classroom at lunch and never returning.  Instead, I have found myself gravitating toward things I could do that would lead me "…into the most remote and fascinating corners of human thought, " as Giordano writes about his character Mattia.  When I go to the corners of thought my body can be present in the "norm" of things and my mind slips away.  

There's a child part of me that will never give up.  It's freeing.  It fits like a warm scarf wound three times around my neck on a cold, windy, Michigan October.  The world does not make enough sense to me.  The only way I can stay out of the cocoon of depression is to try to make sense of it by my rituals, my play, my fantasies.  There's no manual, no musical score, no missalette, no guidelines, just my imagination and the order it gives to me with its gifts.