The books all smelled the same, but I knew they each had something different to offer. The main branch of the public library was a half mile from my house. When I was young, this half-mile was considered the farthest I could travel on my own, without a car, without my parents. This freedom, typical for a child in the 1970’s, was a ticket for me; a ticket to anywhere and everywhere outside of this half-mile radius.
I will never know what drew me to this particular musty corner of the third floor of the library. Math was not my forte in school and I was struggling to manage algebra. This row of shelves was tucked between the sheet music section with its giant books filled with music notations and the social science section with its books about aborigines and anthropology. But I do know that I was DRAWN to this section. I was too young to understand most of what I looked at, but I knew that I was in a world entirely different than anything I had ever experienced.
I pulled a random calculus book off the shelf; one that clearly hadn’t been opened in years or ever. I did not even know what calculus was at the time. The jacketless cover cracked as I opened it. Inside was the magic world of numbers and symbols that instantly swept me away from my world of comfort and familiarity into a universe of possibilities. Inside these pages, I was swimming within a pool of reason and logic. I saw illustrations that showed ladders resting against walls and water flowing out of a basin. I saw graphs of beautiful symmetry that extended forever but finitely.
I read, without understanding, concepts such as limits and rates of change. I devoured words such as integration and derivatives and chewed on on summations.
I became lost in a world of Greek letters and squiggles. These symbols were more beautiful to me than the world’s greatest art. Though this sentence is not necessarily true, I saw art as something that showed us the world and these symbols were art that explained the world.
I felt alive in this corner of the library. I returned often and immersed myself in the ancient texts like some archaeologist staring at hieroglyphics; knowing that he is looking at something important even if not entirely understanding it.
At this point, I dreamed of being a mathematician, even though I struggled with trigonometry. But as is often the case with education, that dream was squelched by rote memorizations and struggling for grades. It was not about nurturing a passion but about passing a class and moving on, robotically to the next.
I have since lost that battle, now 43 and not a mathematician. I have lost many of those battles in my life. Mathematics was replaced by biology which was replaced by physics and cosmology. At each turn, I was faced with self-doubt fostered by continuous force-feeding of facts without contexts and judgment without consideration.
I have always been interested in these fields; my bookshelf filled with more Aczel and Hawking than Grisham and Patterson. Just last week, I uncovered an old calculus book in the attic. I remember throwing this book out of the window at the library into the bushes three stories below. I NEVER actually borrowed any books. I stole them until I was done with them. But I had this one in the attic. I brought it down to show my 10 year old. He is a little younger than I was when I first came across it, but I took a chance. I opened it and just showed him the myriad graphs and symbols. I spoke romantically and with melancholy. He did his due diligence and listened. After about 15 minutes of talking about numbers as if they were made of gold, he looked me in the eyes and asked, “Are you done Dad?”
No, son, I am not.