"In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny-or as she later learned to call them, "mystical"-experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search. Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, LIVING WITH A WILD GOD brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich's most personal book ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the "meaning of life." Certain to be a classic, LIVING WITH A WILD GOD combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce …
"In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny-or as she later learned to call them, "mystical"-experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search. Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, LIVING WITH A WILD GOD brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich's most personal book ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the "meaning of life." Certain to be a classic, LIVING WITH A WILD GOD combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement"--
Review of 'Living with a wild god' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
I don't know what I think about this one. I think I would have been better off reading it, rather than listening to it. I drifted off way too many times, so either I was bored or not in the right mood. The basic premise of the book seemed to be her lifelong goal/quest to figure out the meaning of life. I'm pretty sure I missed the end point of her decades-long search. Sometimes I am a terrible audio-book audience...
I'd been on the same quest as Barbara, but I see it differently. I think she'd be OK with that. She, for a former solipsist, looks outward more while I look inward. Also, I took those drugs she avoided.
I started out similarly to her in some ways. We're close in age, and scientifically minded. I stayed closer to mathematics (less to do with the outside world) though I haven't totally avoided physics. I don't call myself a non-believer, though. Barbara, scientist to the end, sees belief as a cop out. I see it as unavoidable (and believe she didn't really avoid it, though she thinks she did.) She takes the categories in which she sees the world as more reliable than I do. To me, they're more organizing principles. I see them as incapable of holding truth in any permanent way--not because science is always improving its models, but …
I'd been on the same quest as Barbara, but I see it differently. I think she'd be OK with that. She, for a former solipsist, looks outward more while I look inward. Also, I took those drugs she avoided.
I started out similarly to her in some ways. We're close in age, and scientifically minded. I stayed closer to mathematics (less to do with the outside world) though I haven't totally avoided physics. I don't call myself a non-believer, though. Barbara, scientist to the end, sees belief as a cop out. I see it as unavoidable (and believe she didn't really avoid it, though she thinks she did.) She takes the categories in which she sees the world as more reliable than I do. To me, they're more organizing principles. I see them as incapable of holding truth in any permanent way--not because science is always improving its models, but because knowledge requiring models has a built in limitation. I didn't start out with this point of view but acquired it over time. Like her, I started out fighting the fuzzy-headed religionists but in the end, I realized they were closer to the truth than I had been by insisting on the rational. Rationality still has a place, but for me, a much smaller one. It's more for communication--a way in which we gesture to each other. I understand why mathematicians like Cantor and Godel ended up in trouble (from the mental health perspective). I would like to rationally gesture to Barbara to communicate my point of view but doubt I'm fully capable of it. For one, she writes a lot better than I do.
But there is one thing I might be able to say, and it's about faith. Or maybe "faith." When Ms. Ehrenreich looks over her teenage journals she regrets not having recorded more. She still thinks in terms of data. I've lost most of my "trip reports" though I remember the experience of looking them over later and having no idea what my writing meant. I knew I'd meant something serious and important that I just had to get down in writing but what I actually "got down" seemed either trivial or enigmatic--like Wiliam James's Higamus Hogamus rhyme. It was partially my lack of literary skill, but it was also that what I had to say couldn't be contained in words in the way I had thought should be possible, and that, it turns out, is the real message. Both, in the sense that so little can ultimately be said as well as in us all lacking the ability to recapture an experience other than an imperfect memory of it.
Here's how I would like to apply this knowledge to Barbara's "vision." She says that at the time she stopped seeking--that she found her answer. But then she quotes her mother, saying that knowledge that can't be put into words isn't knowledge. But while she was having her experience, she knew otherwise. She knew better. I would ask her to have faith in that knowledge. Yes, it's now somewhat lost to her, but the lostness isn't as important as she thinks. If I face East, I no longer am seeing what is to the West, but it hasn't gone away. I'm lucky in that I need only turn around and see it again, but if I could not, for some reason, I insist that it is still there. Her knowledge, which she is no longer experiencing and can not put into words (other than those she wrote in the book) still exists. That, combined with the inability to capture it verbally means she can now give up searching for it--the best outcome merely being a replay of something that she won't, due to the limits of the medium, be able to retain beyond the memory of it having happened. I've been in that repeating loop to the point of realizing that I need no longer repeat it. (Though, I admit I still at times feel the pull to do so.)
I also understand the sense behind the monotheistic point of view and many of its accompanying seemingly odd pronouncements about God being good and such that Barbara would like to jetison. It's not some sort of comforting illusion but a way of understanding the nature of consciousness. It's just a bunch of organizing principles, as useful in its domain as quantum mechanics is for describing the physics of the "outer" world. I am aware that most people use the concept of God in as sloppy a way as people use the term "quantum leap" to describe something having little to do with quanta (which are tiny, not enormous.)
