Bewilderment

Bewilderment 

-Richard Powers

“Nobody is perfect, but man, we all fall short so beautifully”

“Nobody is perfect, but man, we all fall short so beautifully”

Bewilderment is a word that I haven’t thought about in a while and it’s not for the lack of experiencing it but for the lack of giving my experience, meaning. The pandemic, the predictably mutating virus still generates our bewilderment. The gears that have shifted our planet and the bewilderment that humans are struggling to go back in time to a normalcy that cannot exist anymore. The bewilderment that we can have a hopeful future if only we could imagine it but we don’t. The bewilderment that difficult questions can have simple answers. The bewilderment that all life is just trying to survive. All this bewilderment and yet, I didn’t know that what I was feeling until now was BEWILDERMENT. 

There is a lot of sadness in the book, the kind that makes grief a flowing river that you drown in, on some days and swim in, on other days. The kind of sadness that gives your life meaning but also drains the life out of you. A sadness that doesn’t just arise out of personal experiences but out of the collective incompetence of our society. A sadness that you learn to live with and fight for. 

I always enjoy reading book that engage children in dialogue. Children have a way of looking at the world that adults cannot comprehend. Little Robin Byrne in this book looks at earth like one would, away from it. At times, it feels like some chapters could have been skipped and would have made no difference to the plot or the storytelling process but I’m here for the words and beautiful, they were. 

This book made me enjoy something I usually don’t, the cosmos and it made me revisit my love for something that guides my fascination for life, which is the biology of life itself. Traversing through curiosity, grief and neuro-divergence, bewilderment flows through you like an old memory, nostalgia and astonishment firing at you like synapses. Some parts of the book, I had trouble getting through. The words were convoluted, superficial, pious and pretentious. A book is however, a journey and I’m glad I didn’t abandon it. 

The beauty of life is in the relationships you form and sustain, with people around you, with nature and the earth. Who we contain in our bubbles varies from person to person; sometimes we include people, maybe our pets, sometimes a bit of nature but rarely does the entirety of life ever affects us as it should. And never do we seek to protect it as we must. There is foresight in this book about a future that we might live in and advice, but a little too much of it that it sounds righteous and smothers you with its virtuosity. But if you can get through it, you feel the urge that Powers felt, to tell a story through nature and children, about how we struggle in our selfish mindsets and willfully disengage from nature knowing that it could lead to our own extinction. 

Bewilderment is a slow read, but read this book like you would grow a plant, with patience till it blooms for you, and it just might.