DANIEL QUINN
If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways
"There is always a brave new world," said Poirot, "but only, you know, for very special people. The lucky ones. The ones who carry the making of that world within themselves."
- AGATHA CHRISTIE
Preface
In October 2005 I received a letter from a reader who was going to be in Houston - my home - over the Thanksgiving weekend; she wondered if she might spend some time with me to nail down the ideas she had explored in my books. I agreed, with the understanding that I had a purpose of my own: I wanted to use our conversation, taped and edited, as the basis for a new book I had in mind.
At her request I have replaced her name with another, of her choosing. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our dialogue.
Although references are made herein to the fact that I've written other books, the reading of these other books is not in any way a prerequisite to reading this one. To put the matter a different way, in writing this book, I have not assumed that the reader will be familiar with any of the ideas put forward in earlier works.
Thursday: Morning
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Elaine [after an exchange of the usual civilities]. As you can imagine, I'm very curious to know about the book you're working on.
Daniel. It would be nearer the truth to describe it as a book I've been struggling with on and off for the past five years - at least. I'll try to explain... When I finished Ishmael, I imagined that I'd done what I set out to do a dozen years before. I thought that this was it and that my work was done. A very naive notion.
Elaine. Why naive?
Daniel. Because no one with anything important to say has ever managed to encompass the whole of it in one book. What I learned from writing Ishmael was how far short I'd fallen. This is what the thousands of letters I received told me. Readers loved the book but came away from it with serious misunderstandings of what I was saying. I thought I could correct those misunderstandings with a second book, The Story of B. From the reaction to that book, I saw that a third was needed. That was My Ishmael: A Sequel. What I then saw was that a fourth was needed in order to knit all my ideas together in a very simple, straightforward way, and this was Beyond Civilization.
Elaine. Uh-huh.
Daniel. When Beyond Civilization was still in manuscript form, I agreed to meet with a small group of readers who, like you, asked for an opportunity to get together with me to nail down their understanding of what I was saying. I agreed to give them a long weekend, but they had to arrive having read Beyond Civilization. When they arrived, however, it was soon clear that Beyond Civilization had answered very nearly all the questions they'd wanted to ask me. The "seminar" was over after about two hours, and we had to spend the rest of the weekend just socializing... The point I'm making here is that, with this book, I largely answered the multitude of questions that readers had been asking me ever since Ishmael appeared.
Elaine. Yes, I can see that. Though I think your essay "The New Renaissance" was what really did it for me (see Appendix I).
Daniel. Yes. For anyone seeking a concise expression of my basic message, "The New Renaissance" was it. I felt I'd said everything I had to say. But one question remained. This was a question that had been there from the beginning, but for many years I tended to dismiss it.
Elaine. What question was that?
Daniel. "How do you do what you do?"
Elaine. You say you tended to dismiss it... ?
