Erdos Had The Number First

So many times people come up with a good idea and reject old ideas. Sometimes people reinvent the wheel
and sometimes they reinvent the semi-mythical square wheel.

But what I sometimes wonder about is the fact that the square wheel is better than a round one when you are stuck in
mud.

A guy I work with gave me Langewiesche’s
Inside The Sky . It’s a really good book. I have to admit I have a problem with the concept of literary places. Place is something I struggle with, partly because I spend most of my time in my own head.

But that’s not all. I often feel it lessens what we are to give credit to those people and places that have stood in our way.
One does not give credit to the ghetto for creating a writer who grew up there. You may site the influence, but that I often feel gets too close to the worship of suffereing and hardship. Pain is NOT the precursor to transformation.

But Langewieshe has caused me to revisit one of my thoughts about place and that it is a two dimensional one. Langewieshe says that flying over/through a place is “being” there. When I first read this I thought “What bullshit”. But now I agree with it. Often we feel we have experienced a (part of a) place by passing through it. and flying over a city is passing through it as much as kayaking down the Chicago river would qualify as having passed through chicago. I don’t know that we must experiece the world within the normal plane to have experienced the world. I would note that he defines “flying over” to be low, much like driving through. YOu could drive through Chicago on the drive and drive “through” chicago on Interstate 80. Distance counts.