New Author Reflects on his Ouevre

My book has been out for two years now. It didn’t exactly set the world on fire.

I say this not in disappointment, not in surprise, but merely as disinterested observation. And in that spirit, before dismissing the prospect altogether, perhaps a little analysis is in order.

I mean, what would constitute setting the world on fire, anyway?

Enormous sales, a check in the mail—that’s a common measure. In this case, though, I’m not sure how you’d arrive at the appropriate amount. You could multiply hours spent working on the book by some arbitrary wage, I suppose. The World Bank may have an instrument capable of calculations at this scale. I doubt I could manage such figures. The point is, with respect to return on investment, it would be hard enough to determine fair compensation, much more so that of a windfall.

No, book-writing and money-making are activities that exist in wholly separate dimensions. But how otherwise to calculate worth?

I used to tell myself, during the darkest, most uncertain moments of work on this project, that if I could somehow bring it off, actually publish, and touch the mind and heart of a single reader—just one!—then it would have all been worthwhile. Many others have used this trick, I’m sure, to stave off abandonment, and I’m not sure I ever completely believed it. But a few months after the book came out, when I received a reader’s appreciative email, darn it if it didn’t turn out to be true. Then a second came. One was enough, and more than one was nice (in the way a blast of dopamine is nice). In fact, emails from readers seemed to come regularly for a while there. I won’t disclose the exact number because that would be crass and because whatever you’re imagining the number to be is almost certainly larger than it is.

Still, a few gratifying emails are a far cry from setting the world on fire.

“Why do people write books?” a professor of mine once asked the class. It was one of his typical “display questions.” Educators may be familiar with the term. In contrast to “genuine questions,” for which the questioner doesn’t know and genuinely wants to know the answer, display questions are questions asked a lot by teachers, who already know the answer but want to know if their students know. This professor was fond of display questions pulled from out of the blue. As students do and have always done, we waited a few seconds in silence for the professor to supply the answer he was looking for. But this time I listened extra carefully. This professor had authored several books, and I wanted to write books, too. I figured if I found out why this was so, I might be able to stop.

“People write books because they want to change the world!” he said.

I did a lot of thinking about that afterward, wondering if it was really true, wondering if the world was more absurd than I’d imagined. Now that I’ve written a book of my own, I see the claim as exaggerated.

I mean, I think I see what he was getting at. Writing a book is a gigantic undertaking—why would anyone do it if their ambition for it wasn’t equally grand? We tend to fear overreach, we tend to condemn it, but it isn’t the world’s worst sin. It’s pretty much inevitable even when the bar isn’t set quite so high.

But change the world? Set it on fire? Those aren’t the words I would use to describe my motivation. The task I set out for myself was a good deal more practical and realistic: to write a sober, calmly reasoned, carefully hedged, and rip-roaring history of ideas. Yes! A book full of human story, of dramatic people in vexing situations, set in exotic locales. Bali, Verdun, Golden Gate Park. Early dolphin work in Hawaii, sun sparkling on the water. Researcher-therapists with military haircuts, taking notes in a mental ward.  R. D. Laing and his all night-dinners at Kingsley Hall, Stokely Carmichael taunting hippies at the Roundhouse in London, asylum inmates acting out the Revolution off-Broadway. The pendulum of Western thought was swinging from rational control, from mechanism back toward dependency and holism. Somewhere along that trajectory it would arrive again at the tragic. That was Gregory Bateson’s double bind to me.

Let me put this another way: My book would make a damn fine documentary series. There are photographs, there are films, locked away in archives, never before seen. The axioms of systems theory could be explained with amusing animations or by celebrity cameos in the manner of The Big Short. Clips could be shown from “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Catch-22,” while a psychedelic rock soundtrack plays. Owen Wilson could narrate. Netflix, are you listening?

That’s a genuine question, by the way. Though I do suspect I know the answer already.