Prologue
Once upon a time a young woman
walked into my office. Although young women walk into my office regularly, this
time something seemed different. She carried with her a mental electricity and
left some of it hanging in the air. Four years after that day, she sent me a
thank you note. “Thanks,” it read, in handwriting I recognized instantly,
although I’d seen very little of it, namely just a few words on post-it notes
stuck to Times New Roman 12-point, 1-inch margin, manuscripts. “Thanks.” That’s all it said. Plus her initials.
Thanks for what? you might wonder,
although you may not want to hear the answer. Thanks for disrupting her
mother’s plans? Thanks for opening doors I knew could be opened, although I had
no idea what might lie beyond them? Thanks for disconnecting her from the
culture that spawned her? Yes, to all those questions. In other words, thanks
for doing my job. What is my job? Let’s see, how best to describe this work. I
am an entomologist at heart; I study dragonflies, animals that have been on
Earth for hundreds of millions of years. I spend an inordinate amount of time
with dragonflies. You must know there is a refuge for people like me, a
tax-supported refuge, called a university. I exist in this refuge. I am also a
teacher. My job is to screen the human resources that will eventually be turned
into health care professionals; your pediatrician’s name is probably somewhere
in my files, and the kid probably got an A in General Biology. And I am a
student of humanity; I study your children, primarily, animals that have been
on Earth for such a short time they merge Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and
Abraham Lincoln into a category called “dead Presidents,” Vietnam and the Civil
War into a category called “history.”
But my real job is that of idealist.
It is exceedingly difficult work,
that of the idealist. Not everyone understands this work, certainly not in the
same way they understand accounting, medicine, law. The attorney gets up every
morning and reviews his cases, legal principles, conflicts and contracts. The
physician gets up and reviews her surgical procedures, her prescriptions, her
terminal cases that must be told the truth. But the idealist gets up every
morning and asks: what must I do today in order to make this world a better
place in which to live? On that day this young woman walked into my office,
charging my stale, chemical-infested, office air with her curiosity, I must
have answered the question correctly because four years afterwards I got a
simple one-word note: “Thanks.” Plus the initials. The idealist’s consummate
reward.
With thank-you note in hand, I sat
in this office, surrounded by the tools of my trade, staring at the chair where
she’d spent so much time, and thought: her story must be told. So I wrote this
book. My literary agent called the manuscript “an
evocative book about ideas, exactly the kind of thing the American book-buying
public is getting increasingly impatient with.”
Then she declined to handle it. I understood her feelings, although at
the time I thought: what happens to nations that get increasingly impatient
with evocative books about ideas? Is this a healthy evolutionary trend for
America? Probably not. So I persist in my own sense of what must be said in
print, regardless of what others believe. Yes, indeed; the story of this student writing papers about a tree needs to be told, and especially to a nation becoming increasingly
impatient with evocative books about ideas.
What kind of a conversation about her writing did we
have? A deep, serious, life-changing, mutually respectful, unique, fulfilling,
rich, fun, conversation, one that went on for the better part of a year, then
faded into an occasional hour at the local coffee house, then came to some kind
of closure with a one-word thank-you note. In other words, an interaction quite
unlike that imagined by a public increasingly impatient with evocative books
about ideas. Why can’t I get that phrase out of my mind? I walk downtown. The
sidewalks are filled with normal, everyday, people—lawyers, housewives,
businessmen and businesswomen, panhandlers, college kids, and non-descripts. Are
they all impatient with evocative
books about ideas? What are they not impatient with? Murder, narcotics, war? Or
are they not impatient with money, politics, agriculture, health, the military,
sex, sports, or religion, i.e. the very subjects she was prohibited from writing about all throughout
the year she went exploring a tree, a museum, a sculpture garden, a gallery? Is
it indeed possible that this society has degenerated into one so impatient with
ideas that it will neither read nor buy an evocative book about them? I don’t
believe this is the case. I believe my fellow citizens are vitally interested
in ideas. Why else would they flock, in droves, to churches? Why else would
they gravitate to certain politicians? Why else would they be so quick to
categorize, then dehumanize, their fellow humans? Believe me, we are very
interested in ideas; they are the hands that guide our acts, all of them, both
good and evil.
THE GINKGO is available as a trade paperback from createspace.com, and on smashwords.com, kindle, and nook.
THE GINKGO is available as a trade paperback from createspace.com, and on smashwords.com, kindle, and nook.
