A Rainy Evening

It was raining hard last evening as I stood waiting for a bus to take me home from work.  At last one approached, and I struggled to close my umbrella, and drag my rolling backpack onto what turned out to be a very crowded bus.  We all stood wet and bedraggled, cheek to jowl.  I determined internally not to “go negative about it,” even in my thoughts. 

The man next to me, 20 years younger, and an inch shorter, made eye contact with me and said, “What was the most profound book you ever read, and how did it affect your life?” 

I paused, even while hearing the bus driver guffaw in the background, plundering my memory. I was about to mention “Interview with a Vampire,” (for reasons I’ll explain in a later blog), but then, after a couple seconds said, The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell.  He confessed he’d never heard of it.

I gave him a quick synopsis.  The Quartet is comprised of four books Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, each named after a different character.  The first one, Justine, I read and loved.  I saw the colorful story, set in Egypt, unfurl with sensual and exotic imagery.  I loved the story, though I felt sometimes impatient with the narrator (who was not Justine).  The second book, however, had somewhat the same story, but was retold by another character.  I discovered that everything I had thought true in the first book was only true in THAT narrator’s eyes – that the new character had seen everything differently.

This was a startling concept to me, and had a profound impact because I was young, all of 19 or 20.  I had not really seen, before then, the point of view of the other.  I guess I’d assumed, in the egocentric manner of a teenager, that everyone more or less saw ‘reality’ the same as I did.

I asked the young man what book he had read.  He said he’d been reading quantum physics (I do not recall the title), and that he was amazed that everything we see is just a tiny bit of what actually exists. 

I mentioned that not only did what we see change when viewed through the quantum physics lens, but also when we ourselves had changed.  I told him about Robert Kegan’s stages of development that I had read a bit about, with the lowest being a completely self-involved, selfish person, and the highest being someone like Gandhi, peace loving and compassionate.  Kegan believes we are evolving towards higher mind, irregardless of how much bad behavior we read about daily. 

We marveled that we were sort of talking about the same things.  Then I noticed through the bus window that our delightful conversation had sped the bus to my destination.  I was sorry to have it end!  He asked me for my card, and I didn’t have one.  He started to write down his particulars, and then I think we both felt a little awkward.  It was a conversation for that moment in time, but probably wouldn’t happen again outside our unique set of circumstances.  I was content with that.  I don’t know if he was…

My question to my friends would be the same that man asked me – “What book (or books) have had a profound influence on your life, and how?”