![]() ![]() “The delight of mystery,” he wrote, “which we sometimes fetch from the netherworld of a black hole or a parallel universe, can be enjoyed, here and now, in your very chair.”Īt the moment, my chair, as it were, resembled a cartoon of a log: a plastic bench that looked as if it had been lifted from an illustration in a children’s book. What I had seen only as a matter of personal struggle, Hoffman was effusively describing as an exciting opportunity to rethink the very nature of being alive. ![]() There was something different, too, about Hoffman’s approach to this whole question. This was a book of science, which I know nothing about, but I could already see that it was investigating a question I’d only ever thought to wrestle with in fiction: What is the relationship between the person you believe yourself to be and the reality you perceive? Here was Hoffman, my White Rabbit, asking, What happens when you open your eyes and feel you’re alive? Are you right to assume that your sensations correspond to an objective, external reality? That these sensations help you to navigate the objects that make up the world? That objects do, in fact, make up the world? What if, Hoffman wanted me to wonder, you don’t see what’s actually out there at all? So I suppose I saw the title running down the spine of Donald Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality as something like a lifeline, a comprehensive promise to escape what was bothering me, which happened to be absolutely everything.īut when I started thumbing through its pages on the periphery of the play area, I realized this was the opposite of what I’d assumed: it was not a lifeline but a rope ladder dropped into a rabbit hole, where, I found, I was happy to go. ![]() This should’ve been easy, but even books-one of the few things I had thought mattered to me-no longer held my attention, because whatever I picked up seemed to me like the playing out of some form or style that had been set long ago and exhausted soon after, like a superficially new way of essentially describing the same thing: life and its various discontents. I asked that they please just give me one minute to try and find something to read. I had taken them to the library to keep them entertained, and now they wanted to go to the play area. My kids, however, made different demands. Only that amid all this I was trying, of all the things I could’ve been doing, to do what I am always trying to do: redeem my reality by converting it into fiction. Only that the detritus of this chaotic survival-uncapped needles and disassembled pens, plastic spoons and spent condoms, half-drunk Mountain Dew bottles and empty Cup Noodles containers-kept accumulating in my backyard. Only that I lived with my family across a dirt alley from a liquor store and saw, almost every time I looked out our living room windows, someone shooting up or heating up aluminum foil and inhaling or hallucinating or peeing or fighting or starting a fire. ![]() Only that middle age was here and it was hard to believe I was still here: exhausted and uninspired in the long shadow of the pandemic, trying to keep my kids occupied on yet another scorching afternoon of yet another climate-change summer, in a midsize city where I knew almost no one. Only that I was unemployed and weeks away from turning forty. I was, let’s say, having a bad day when I came across Donald Hoffman in the stacks of the downtown Spokane Public Library last summer. ![]()
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