Go look it up

Commonweal, Nov 6, 1992 by Chris Anderson

My solar energy project took first prize at the Madison Elementary Science Fair, despite the fact that it didn't actually work. It won because I was immersed in the world of the World Book and could speak in its confident rhythms. Dad and I had built a little triangular box, a half square, with a window on the flat open side and two thermometers, one inside and one out, the idea being to capture the sun, make it bounce around inside the house--the Greenhouse effect harnessed. Why it didn't work I'm still not sure, though I remember frantically painting the inside black and doing some research on the capacity of rocks and of water to retain heat. Mostly I just wanted to sound as if I knew something, play that part, and my charts and reports were first-class, lots of flat arrows branching out in stages from one paragraph to another, appropriate phrases in boldface.

But orderliness is only the first level, and it's finally illusory. What's even more pleasing and profound about the World Book, I think, is that it's organized alphabetically. Individual articles make claims of synthesis, and the set as a whole aspires to the presentation of general knowledge, a pretty big ambition. But on a level deeper than that, and finally at odds with it, in the juxtapositions the alphabet requires, is a very different vision of the world, undiscriminating, democratic, and delighting. The truest world of the World Book is the one you glimpse reading a volume front to back.

Eleanor of Aquitaine ( 1122-1204) was the wife of King Louis VII of France and later of King Henry II of England. The elecampane is a coarse perennial plant closely related to asters, growing as a roadside weed in parts of the United States and Canada. Elephants have no sweat glands, ridding their bodies of excess heat by flapping their ears or spraying water on themselves. Elevator--Elf--Sir Edward Elgar--T.S. Eliot--Elk-- Ellipse. The American Elm, spreading out like an umbrella against a blue sky. Elohim, the Hebrew word that means gods, a god, or God.

Fact follows fact, object follows object, each entry unashamed and unapologetic, without irony, everything safe and available, equally interesting, worthy of attention, and you keep turning the pages, absorbed, humming to yourself. The Who (one of the most popular British rock groups in history) is followed by Wichita (the largest city in Kansas) is followed by Wild Carrot, Wilson Cloud Chamber, Winch, Wind Surfing, Women's Movements, Stevie Wonder, Wood, the names and labels like accidental poetry. You can pull out any entry and subordinate it to any argument, use any fact for any larger purpose, political or personal; but when you read a volume as a book, assume the sequence as a structure, a deeper, more innocent wholeness emerges. This is the world undifferentiated, prior to specialization and use. This is things the way they are, a jumble of shapes and forms and sensations, nothing more important than anything else, an array of objects all ends in themselves. This is the world as a child first knows it, despite the Latin names and the assigning of species, just rocks and trees and birds and things, seen with a child's detached and thoughtless pleasure.