Benny was sincerely intrigued by the advertised subject matter of the day’s LuncheonLearn lecture, whether he agreed with it or not. It was a fascinating concept merely as a framework of thought and discussion. Unfortunately, having taken a seat in one of the first few rows of seats, Benny couldn’t help but focus solely on the speaker’s enormous cold sore. Benny had followed the lecture as far as one-half sentence before the cold sore seized his attention.
“The Thermodynamics of Ideas is…” But Benny was trapped in an intellectual puzzle of figuring out how such a preposterous, unattractive, and angry cold sore could correspond with the subject matter. It just didn’t add up. Benny couldn’t pull his attention away; he couldn’t look away or close his eyes. He’d never seen such a large cold sore before, and it was completely out of place with the discussion of the Thermodynamics of Ideas, whatever that was.
Benny was treading water in a sea of confusion. Every now and then from his haze, Benny would seem to stick his head above the surface of water just long enough to hear something intriguing such as, “… Peace on Earth is possible, and the proof is simply this: …” before again the movement of the lips and the ejection of the voice and the sight of the cold sore dunked him again beneath the surface of reasoned calm. As if drowning, he struggled (spastically) to break through the surface and take a breath. But his brain was flailing; he didn’t know which way was up. What is ‘up’? Benny had a vision of the two-dimensional protagonist in Abbott’s ‘Flatland’ upon that first view of the new dimension; impossible, perhaps, yet here it was.
As were the dimensions of space too much for ‘A. Square’ to comprehend, the impact of the speaker’s words left Benny without any foothold in familiar thought. As if possessed – he was possessed – by the sensation that something unseen, non-human, yet perfectly natural and ever-present had seized him in a moment of clarity, a clarity of an unseen perspective and view of his familial world, and at the same time he was lost in the (heart) of confusion.
At least the bottled water was free despite the rather hefty cost of attendance.
thermodynamics of ideas 