Reviews for The Man Who Walked Through Time
Review - Man Who Walked Through Time, The
This book was ridiculous and annoying and, somehow, more interesting for it. He begins by stating factually, that the Colorado River took seven million years to dig the Grand Canyon. Then, a few pages later, he claims that he was not doing this "to learn intellectual facts." So, whatever the evidence, he had already made up his mind.
There are a lot of paragraphs that don't actually mean anything. For example, after some insect bit him, he wrote, "I found myself seeing us all not merely as animals that happened to be there on the Platform, but as passing performers in a long, long dance. And I found that I understood this dance not merely with the thin comprehension of intellect, but so radically and so clearly that after a little while its surge and rhythm were as sure as the meetings themselves, if not surer."
About halfway through, after hiking naked for a day, he comes to "feel" that evolution is true.
Finally, "I had freed myself from our dogmas. Only in my faintest moments could i revert to the vision of man as a being whose valid aim in life is to snuffle around fretting over the future of his individual soul or some similar artifact ... I was an organism that fitted into the pattern of the man-world and the man-world fitted into the life-world and the life-world fitted into the rock-world and the rock-world fitted into broader domains. That was all. I fitted in. We all fitted in. My journey had left me with this sure grid of meaning to build on."
He concludes that man is the spearhead of evolution. "The steady knowledge that you are part of a spearhead is an exhilarating thing; and now the thrust and the excitement and the danger and the potential seemed to me to be more important and more satisfying and certainly more practical than a problematical 'purpose.'"
He decides, somehow, that our concept of time is all messed up and then, bizarrely, backs this up with a passage from "the closing chapter of a beautiful and widely read book" — Revelation 10:5-7 — where it says "there should be time no longer." Odd that he should find confirmation for his views from a random passage in a book he otherwise disregards, although even this is wrong because "time" in that passage means "delay."
The portions where he describes what it was like to hike alone through the canyon and tells what he saw there, were pretty good. But there was too much communing with rocks for my taste.
There are a lot of paragraphs that don't actually mean anything. For example, after some insect bit him, he wrote, "I found myself seeing us all not merely as animals that happened to be there on the Platform, but as passing performers in a long, long dance. And I found that I understood this dance not merely with the thin comprehension of intellect, but so radically and so clearly that after a little while its surge and rhythm were as sure as the meetings themselves, if not surer."
About halfway through, after hiking naked for a day, he comes to "feel" that evolution is true.
Finally, "I had freed myself from our dogmas. Only in my faintest moments could i revert to the vision of man as a being whose valid aim in life is to snuffle around fretting over the future of his individual soul or some similar artifact ... I was an organism that fitted into the pattern of the man-world and the man-world fitted into the life-world and the life-world fitted into the rock-world and the rock-world fitted into broader domains. That was all. I fitted in. We all fitted in. My journey had left me with this sure grid of meaning to build on."
He concludes that man is the spearhead of evolution. "The steady knowledge that you are part of a spearhead is an exhilarating thing; and now the thrust and the excitement and the danger and the potential seemed to me to be more important and more satisfying and certainly more practical than a problematical 'purpose.'"
He decides, somehow, that our concept of time is all messed up and then, bizarrely, backs this up with a passage from "the closing chapter of a beautiful and widely read book" — Revelation 10:5-7 — where it says "there should be time no longer." Odd that he should find confirmation for his views from a random passage in a book he otherwise disregards, although even this is wrong because "time" in that passage means "delay."
The portions where he describes what it was like to hike alone through the canyon and tells what he saw there, were pretty good. But there was too much communing with rocks for my taste.
Reviewed by Roger on 2014-05-22 14:53:54