Prolepsis

Shadows cast by coming events. More to the point, intuitive awareness or those shadows before they are even noticed.

This is an early heads-up about a book that will change the world. New book? Of course. Actually it was first published in 1980, its eleventh version in 2002. It was written by a man who walked, and still walks the same earth as all the rest of us do. Just like Charles Darwin who saw nothing that anyone else had never seen before, but like Darwin, the writer of this book didn’t understand what everyone else understood. Darwin asked questions that no one else had ever asked before. And since these questions had never been asked before, there were no answers. He had to figure them out for himself.

So too this book which is called “The Nature of Order”, walks over familiar ground, sees all those things that we all know, but it asks the questions that we never thought of asking. We all have wondered about them - but we never asked them. And we never tried to answer them.

Christopher Alexander has actively lived in our commonly shared world of wonder for a long time. He was the driving force behind the great book which he co-authored called “The Pattern Language”, which has always seemed sufficient unto itself - until now. But that book was basically a statement of axioms which he had discovered and organized. This new book is a discussion of how those “axioms” came to be, how they work, how they are organized and how their fundamental composition can be used by us to shape a new world in which we might someday live and work.

I have read 88 pages of the first volume which is titled “The Phenomenon of Life”. Not always easy reading. Alexander is an architect, not a writer. He repeats a lot, but he has a lot to say. This first volume is some 475 pages, and is followed by volume two, “The Process of Creating LIfe”; volume three, “A Vision of a Living World”; and volume four, “The Luminous Ground”. And the books are expensive. What was he thinking?

Well, the book is not for everyone. I put the “Nature of Order” on my Blogspot page and found a grand total of nine people in the world who have also done that. I have corresponded with one or two. Strange people they are. Not like me. But interesting.

Prolepsis. Just so you will know.