I set out today for a walk through Hyde Park hoping to buy a cup of coffee and a book on camping in Wisconsin. On the first count I succeeded, unsurprisingly, although the clientele at the local bakery sometimes reminds me a little of Royal Grounds in Rockridge, and I watch nervously for strollers and pampered dogs out of the corners of my eye. On the second I failed, returning instead with four books: one on behavioral neuroscience, one on the politics and natural history of the Missouri River (written by someone who will undoubtedly disappoint me by not being John McPhee, but whom I hope to admire for at least trying to follow in his footsteps), Disputed Questions by Thomas Merton, and yet another Raymond Chandler novel, which I am pretty sure I have not read, but felt as though I had, leafing through its pages, the plot being somewhat beside the point with these things.

These books were all from Powell's---which, incidentally, precursors the one in Portland---and not from 57th St Books, which is where I stopped off first, figuring they were more likely to have travel guides. They do indeed have them: there's an entire wall dedicated to Lonely Planets, Let's Go's, Fodor's Guides, Eyewitness Travel Guides, Rough Guides, and Mobil Travel Guides for every city, county, country, and bioregion of the Earth and probably the Moon. There is absolutely nothing on the Midwest, except for dinosaur folio collections of photographs of rusted machinery, abandoned housing projects, desolate train tracks, and gleaming virile skyscrapers, which are all destined to languish on coffee tables in condo conversions all over the city, where they are expected to prove, without anyone actually reading them, that their owners, most of whom crowd onto trains into the Loop to go manipulate numbers in windowless cubbies for twelve hours a day, partake in Chicago's soul.

Bookstores drive me into alternating states of depression and amazement. On the one hand, there are the new Moleskine(tm) travel journals, which come pre-filled with travel guide material for a particular city, or a second book by Masaru Emoto, whose pseudoscientific bullshit claims that water responds to emotions sold enough books to get him on the New York Times Bestseller's List. On the other hand, I stumble across critical editions of Gerard de Nerval, a 19th century French eccentric who once walked a lobster through the gardens of the Palais Royal, and who may have faded into utter obscurity if T.S. Eliot hadn't quoted him in the Waste Land, or giant monographs on the Giant Auk; that is, books on topics of such vanishing importance that any attempt to study them in exhaustive and exacting detail has the same kind of transitory and futile beauty as a garden.

Some of these reflections undoubtedly come from having just finished Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. It is the first of Hesse's books that I have liked, and although I cannot exclude the possibility that growing a little older has shifted my perspective enough to make Hesse relevant, I also tend to accept the opinion of Theodore Ziolkowski, who writes the forward to my edition, that The Glass Bead Game is his only novel that manages to transcend the problem of the Bildungsroman genre, which is that voyages of self-discovery can seem insufferably self-centered. At any rate, I came to this book at a good time, because I have been struggling with similar questions about my own role in the world. It may be that everyone asks these sorts of questions when they are about to turn 30, and it may be that 30 is simply the age at which people become sufficiently aware of the structure of their environment, and the implicit and explicit hierarchies of power and influence, to ask where they belong. It is a different question from the sort that is proper to the twenties, which is more along the lines of if one belongs. At that age it is easier to make drastic changes, and easier to imagine that somewhere a better or at least different structure exists. And there is a sense in which the choices made then really are drastic, because they determine which choices will be possible from then on out.

I think I first became truly aware of how rarified an atmosphere I've managed to get myself into when I had dinner with my advisor, a visiting speaker who is an old friend and colleague of his, and another postdoc about six months ago. Of course it's been obvious for a long time, from the blank stares most people give me when I tell them I'm a neuroscientist, that I work on some pretty esoteric stuff, but I have always felt, no doubt as a consequence of a liberal arts college education, this as an obstacle rather than a true barrier to communication. Throughout most of graduate school, I rarely socialized with other people in my field. I thought shop-talk was isolating and self-destructive, and to be perfectly frank I thought most of the technical terms were substitutes for real knowledge, a sort of hocus-pocus used for self-deception and worse. Part of this attitude stemmed from my own lack of knowledge, of course. I simply didn't know enough, or have enough experience using the tools I was acquiring, to understand how much clarity and rigor is actually possible. I have no doubt that similar states of ignorance exist in every field: in history, for instance, the student surely has to progress from the point of complete ignorance, when everything is received knowledge, through a dark valley where every piece of substantive knowledge seems obscured by bias and uncertainty, to the point where he knows the lay of the land and can establish for himself the degree of some fact's reliability.

The reality is that this particular mountain peak is rather modest. No one who has actually reached it will claim that he or she can see everything from it. But it constitutes a space where it is possible to talk truthfully about reality, treating facts as facts and speculations as speculations. Although the communities built around this kind of dialogue are deeply flawed by egotism and all the usual problems of human social behavior, it is one of the most satisfying experiences in the world to be a part of one. It is not merely that they provide respite from the tawdry materialism and sensationalism of a culture that cares very little for truth. Nor are they just another kind of community, though it might be possible to see the complicated terminology and specialized knowledge neccessary in order to belong and contribute to them as a kind of isolating mechanism, which all communities use to establish and preserve an identity. What makes them special is that they are built specifically around one of the most important needs of human nature, and one which we do not, as far as I can tell, share with any other animal.

I realize that the need for truth, by which I mean the need to be able to search for it, has been hotly debated and frequently denied by many, including such luminaries as Plato, who thought most people were better off being lied to. Given the sort of crap that passes for books these days, one occasionally suspects that most people don't care whether they're hearing the truth or not, as long as it doesn't take much effort or disabuse them of any of their cherished preconceptions. In fact, it's a lot more than occasional for me. I would even go as far as to say it's one of my abiding concerns about the world and my place in it. It determines whether I can really accomplish anything through pure scientific research, or whether I'm working on an edifice that's in the process of crumbling. I was deeply disappointed by my experiences teaching undergraduates at Berkeley, and if those are the sorts of minds that are going to be my graduate students, it's not worth the effort of trying to get funding. Is my attitude about the purpose of research, that it's the process that matters, and that the role of research scientists is first and foremost to guard that process---is that inimical to the funding and publishing climate in my field? And could I work for a university system whose stated goal is the "production of knowledge" and whose real product is a legion of college graduates who are probably worse off for having a bunch of facts stuffed in their heads and no training in how to think? These questions are not purely unselfish, or selfish either. I want to live the life of the mind, and part of that life is sharing it with others. I want to see other people living that life, concerned with the search for truth, and the only way to help them do that is through real education, through seeing people as individuals, and helping them develop as persons. I just have to figure out where I can do that.