(Howell Creek Radio address for April 14, 2012 -- ) The Room You Are In Now ========================== Allow me to read to you from my Red Book. There are a thousand entries: we will hear the first two, and the rest some other time. 0,001 -- Existence --------------------- > "The last man, whoever he is -- and he may be a cobbler or some low vulgar dog for aught we know -- will have a longer pedigree than the greatest nobleman now alive; and I contend that this is not fair." > -- Charles Dickens, _Nicholas Nickleby_ Wherever you are reading this, look around you. You are in a room. Notice the light, the noises, the air. If you had just yesterday fallen into a lake and felt yourself going down much deeper and much colder and darker than before, and felt the water entering your lungs and been pulled out at the last moment, you can bet you would be noticing this room more carefully. The child and the one who has escaped death see things in nearly the same way. Try to notice your room now in the same way. Now, reader, I charge you to remain where you are now for six hours -- then look around you again. Even though you have stayed seated in the exact place, you have moved from the previous room into a new room. The room of six hours ago and the room of now are two different rooms. If you think it is the same room, I think it only seems that way because some of the characters from the old room have walked quietly with you into the new one: the walls and the curtains, the deacon bench in the corner, the tree by the curb. Other characters have not followed you. The light has changed, the air. Your own feelings have changed, perhaps several times. People come and go from the room. You yourself are different now than you were six hours ago. Every combination of time, light, weather, locations, things, emotions and people is in fact its own unique room. Even if you try to remain still, you are always moving in between rooms. If you could remain still for a hundred years, you would see that even though your feet have not moved, the room you find yourself in at the end of that time is utterly different than the one you started in. In a day you will move through a thousand rooms, and you will pass by the doors of thousands more without even considering whether to enter them. In a lifetime you will enter and leave perhaps a million such rooms, many of them only accessible by the mind's eye. There are billions of other rooms in time and space of which you will have heard only rumours, and countless trillions of other rooms. A single spring afternoon in the strip of grass behind your office building is a room that perhaps only you will ever visit. Many people think the universe is one big room and that they are sitting in the middle of it. But when they understand the universe is irrecoverably fractured into trillions of tiny, fleeting rooms through which we are always moving, the world begins to seem big again, as it does to a child. Existence can be felt and smelt. It is something to be held on to. If you want to think about Existence, always think about the room you are in Now. 0,002 -- Inexistence ----------------------- We only talk about something's existence when we have nothing else to say about it. * * * Trixie and I have just finished our first go at publishing a short book. It is titled "The Annual Yarn: 2011" and (as its name implies) it promises to be the first of many such annual books that will only get better. There are a few dozen remaining for sale if you would like a copy -- go to for more information, and follow @HowellCreek on twitter for updates. Synopsis ---------- Radio address for April 14, 2012: A reading from the first two headings of my Red Book, about Existence and Inexistence ,the first two stops on a journey of exactly one thousand steps. The music is the cue _Eat Meat and the Kill_ (The Blue Danube by Strauss) from the [original soundtrack recording][1] of _2001: A Space Odyssey_. [Download the transcript][2] [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00002611E/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00002611E "2001: A Space Odyssey original soundtrack (affiliate link)" [2]: http://jdueck.net/files/hcr-2012/hcr-2012-04-14.txt "Transcript for Apr 14, 2012 in plain-text (Markdown) format"