Go look it up

Commonweal, Nov 6, 1992 by Chris Anderson

I've been engrossed in the World Books since they arrived UPS last week, though more out of nostalgia than a need for information. Even this new seventy-fifth anniversary edition reads like a wonderful old scrapbook, something I've come across in an attic somewhere.

Twice already they've answered the kind of dinner table questions we got them for: How and when did house cats come to America? (With the Pilgrims.) And how big was the Spirit of St. Louis? (Only 23 feet, 8 inches long.) For the next ten years we want to be able to say "go look it up" and have the kids racing to the shelves, grabbing a volume, and falling on the living room carpet, maps and transparencies cracked open.

The facts come in handy for grown-ups like me, too, since I tend to be a little fuzzy and intuitive. Knowing the length of the Spirit of St. Louis makes me feel solider.

But so far I've been reading for memories, and the past I'm recalling is my own. Or not so much my past as my past image of the world, of knowledge, and of things. The print today is smaller than in the 1963 edition we had when I was growing up--a white and blue set, in the hallway by the bathroom, the only books in the house. There's more information now, more scientific advances and wars to include. More women are mentioned, more blacks. Most of the astronauts in the pictures are captioned without name. They're just "astronauts," not the five-star heroes I remember from the '63 set.

But it's all more or less still there: the glossy pages and the color drawings, the calm, detached, sixth-grade, social-studies-teacher voice patiently describing the hierarchy of dogs, or the evolution of engines, and the structure of bicameral legislatures. An odor of dusty libraries and chemistry labs and science fairs and high-school health assemblies comes off the books, and even of the green cut lawns and neat curbs of suburban America. Even now, all the photographs of people and places and processes look as if they were taken in the fifties somewhere in Ohio. A man drives a car. A woman turns on a stove. A student lifts up a petrie dish--everyone has just had a haircut, everyone is wearing new clothes. Even the platypuses and sweet peas look posed and stiff.

Just taking a volume down and paging through it, as I used to as a kid, reading what interests me, has that soothing effect of walking through a museum or gallery. It's silent. You're wandering along quietly, stopping to look at this and at that, light reflecting off the glass cases, voices murmuring in the distance, the echo of footsteps. Hours pass before you look up and notice it's lunch time. There's an exquisite tenuousness, a thinness, about the quality of your attention. Your interest in any one thing is never passionate--nothing registers fully or loudly--and yet your concentration holds over long stretches of time, and dozens of subjects. It's as if your heart has slowed, your temperature dropped.

On one level what I appreciate about the World Book is its dullness. My life is chaotic and exciting and troubling enough already, and so I'm grateful for the books' monotonous clarity, their flatness. No one cries, bleeds, frets, struggles, despairs in the World Book. The helter skelter of life has been nominalized, made into an abstract subject ("Crying," "The Circulatory System," "Emotional Disorder"), and there is comfort in that. In the article on "War," for example, all the major blood baths of history are simply tics on a shaded time line, progressive examples of political theory. "Most countries fear the possibility of attack and maintain armed forces to defend themselves. Sometimes this fear may be directed toward a particular country. In that case a nation may decide to choose its own time and strike the first blow." Or "When a nation makes war, its government always states the reasons for the war. This is necessary if the people are to be united in the war effort. But the reasons given for a war need not be the same as its causes." It's the boldface that calms me, the stating of the obvious, and the general absence of subordination.

A graph titled "Wars Involving the United States" has three columns, "Wars, .... U.S. Military Deaths," and "U.S. War Costs," from which I learn that the Vietnam War cost 58,000 lives and $150,000,000,000 while World War II cost 405,399 lives and $263,259,000,000. I don't mean to imply that the author of this article is without horror at the thought of the lost lives represented by the zeroes. Real people write the Worm Book, their names in tiny print at the end of each piece, and I believe that taken individually they spend just as many sleepless nights and rejoice at just as many sunrises as I do. It's the conventions of encyclopedia article-writing that factor out those human elements. Deliberately. And I'm glad. I take the voice as artificial. I don't consider it in any important sense true (only factual). But I'm soothed by it anyway--soothed because it's unreal, because it's finally fantasy, in much the way I'm soothed by the conventions of children's stories, fairy tales, and myths. In the World Book life is made to look like history, and often that's a therapeutic, distancing illusion.