I remember being a little kid at Audubon Elementary School in the suburbs of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, looking at the globe on a bookshelf. I don’t remember what grade I was in, but I well remember the idea that popped in to my head as I looked at the planet – – – specifically, the continents of Africa and South America – – and thought to myself, “those two pieces fit together.”
It seemed really obvious to me, and years later, when I started to learn about plate tectonics, I felt a little proud that, as an uneducated little boy, what seemed so obvious to me was, in fact, science. What was really surprising, however, was that this insight of a little kid didn’t really become a serious theory until only about a century ago. I would have assumed people would have largely agreed on this notion the moment even the crudest world maps were available hundreds of years prior.
This memory came back to me for a simple reason, which is that I’ve been listening to quite a lot of philosophy lately, and it became clear to me that the philosophy of Hegel aligned very closely to what I had described in my forthcoming novel. I had mixed feelings about this revelation. On the one hand, I was feeling pretty good about myself, since evidently I was able to develop a line of thinking that is very similar to one of the greatest philosophers in history, even though I’ve had no philosophical training. On the other hand, I started to worry that people would think I had basically lifted those thoughts and was regurgitating them in prose.
I’ve got to say, the whole thing is very “meta”. My novel hits the proverbial stands late next month, and trust me, I’ll be mentioning it repeatedly. I simply wanted to share this little memory with you, since it came to mind. Maybe there’s actually something in the novel worth learning, although in a more modern setting.
