Just before diving into East of Eden, Lily absorbed a novel of almost the opposite kind — short, contemporary, overstated — unclassic in every way. She really liked it and wanted me to read it.

Unlike most people, I put down most books I start. There are a million books to read, and I don’t know why people force themselves to finish books they are no longer enjoying. Lily knows I do this with a hair trigger, and she wanted to make sure I gave this novel a fair effort, giving it time to grow on me before I passed judgment on its jokey tone.

“You have to wear a certain hat when you read it,” she said. “Your board-game-playing geek hat.”

I did, and when I began I could see why she said that. It’s called Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Every character is a caricature. The prose was a little too up-to-date for my normal tastes: repeated references to tweeting and industrious ex-Googlers — one character is reading the Steve Jobs biography that was released shortly after his death. Copyright 2012.

I made sure I was wearing a somewhat silly hat for the first thirty pages or so, and I’m too hooked on the story to put it down now. But I did need to make a conscious effort to get into a not-so-serious headspace when I began, or I might have jumped to something else.

The metaphor of putting on a particular hat to approach a particular endeavor is as old as any. They typically correspond to archetypes or professions — you can put on your stoic laborer’s hat before tackling some yardwork, your monk’s hat as you sit down to meditate, or your scholar’s hat before sitting down to study for an exam. But there’s no definite category of qualities that can be represented in a “hat.”

While eating salad on Lily’s balcony one evening last week, we talked about how she’d used different hats — the proverbial type — as a way of deciding what tone of thought to bring to a particular situation, with the idea of becoming more conscious of where her head is right now. When she’s feeling down, for example, she deliberately puts on her mopey, self-pity hat, and suddenly the whole episode seems more ridiculous than serious. Hats help us see where we’re coming from, or where we ought to be coming from.  Read More

During the summer I try to steer my day so that when the sun sets, I’m outside, in a place where there’s nothing blocking the view. Sunsets are always worthwhile.

They’re also always fleeting. During any given rapt sunset experience, there’s always a moment when you realize that its brilliance has peaked and it’s beginning to disappear. Sometimes I arrive at the bridge or at the end of a Westbound street only to realize right away that I’ve missed that peak.

When that happens, at least I can be vicariously happy for the sunset-watchers some distance west of me, whose sunset is just beginning to get brilliant. That fact is a wonderful gift to human beings — the sun is always setting.

Thousands of miles past them, at the same moment, early risers on certain Pacific islands are about to see it rise. The sun is always setting and always rising, always high overhead and always nowhere to be seen. Objectively, this is as true as anything else we know. It is always setting, right now.

We have to acknowledge that truth is relative to the observer. If there were nobody observing the sunset there would be no sunset.

I daydream often about the wild sunsets that must be happening in a gazillion different skies out there in space, from the surfaces of foreign planets. There are trillions of stars, with differening colors and intensities, and each can be seen from different surfaces at different distances, through different atmospheres, over unthinkably exotic landscapes.

But there’s probably nobody there to see most of them, and so they are only really happening in my imagination. A sunset, after all, is an experience. So you need an experiencer, in the right place, for it to exist. You could still say that there are billions of potentially experienceable sunsets out there, but they’re not real until someone is standing there on that strange world, watching a blazing blue and green double sunset slowly dissolving over some mountains.

Science is by far the most helpful institution we have for making sense of our experiences, and for predicting what we might experience next. The way they do it is this: a bunch of different people observe the same phenomena from different angles at different times, and they talk about it and come up with a concept about what those phenomena are when no particular person is looking at them at all. They add all these conclusions together and put it in books, which purport to describe how things really are, regardless of what you may experience them to be personally.  Read More