Big Ole Brain Crush: Daniel J. Boorstin's The Creators

If you ever get a chance to cruise downtown Oberlin, OH, check out the used book store (that is, if you don't blow your money at the bead shop...advice: start at the coffee shop and walk to the right). I got twinkly little stars in my eyes from cool book overload. Yellowing and yet in pristine condition on the crowded shelves were out of print copies of fairy tales, drama anthologies and classics. I nearly went home with an E.M. Forster biography and an illustrated Shakespeare, but my cash didn't stretch that far (we still have to eat this week, darn it). So, practicing the same restraint I apply to shoe stores, I browsed, bovine-like in my constant chewing over of titles and authors. What I love about Oberlin's liberal atmosphere is that the clerks are friendly, but not pushy. They're used to students and artists with limited budgets, so the "buy! buy! buy!" schmooze doesn't exist. (I would, however, still steer bead lovers to my neighborhood's City Buddha versus the crazy expensive stuff at the bead shop...still, those Peruvian bags were way cool...sigh...)

Anyways, when I finally made my choice, there was no question what my home library missed: Daniel J. Boorstin's Knowledge trilogy.

There are three key things that saved me from completely chucking myself out my 13th floor window (lucky, yeah?) while writing upper level European history essays: coffee, the love of my late (great) Pomeranian, and a copy of Boorstin's The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. This book needs to be in your library if you adore art and history, and want to maintain that love affair despite the rocky essay deadlines and those interminable recitals of dates and religious upheavals. Boorstin's take on history's greatest artists isn't written like classroom text. This was what was so great about reading this book in my early high school years - history became a flesh and blood story, not a distant, dusty timeline. Critics of Boorstin's work tend to skewer him for presenting a Western-slanted account of the past 3,000 years. I was glad I didn't see it that way - I discovered this book as a story of how individuals left lasting imprints on society - how the efforts of one man or woman could be remembered from the works and words they left behind. It's as close to immortality we humans can achieve in THIS life.

I first read this book between trips to Europe, sandwiched between my childhood exploration of the Louvre, and when I dragged my Dad and little sister through it as an adult. My professors spanning high school and college were then treated to massive chunks of quotes from Mr. Boorstin's series of biographies in last-minute essays.Then I read it one really bad night while I cried about my own "art" alone in my college apartment. I don't care what the critics say. Boorstin's short biographies don't have to be read in order - for one day, Michaelangelo provides healing and guidance, for another, it could be Mohammed providing inspiration - it's good to have this option from a heavy history tome. The book is divided organically, according to themes - of God, structures, images, words, music, time/space, and the intangibles of the human soul. Appealing to my journalistic spirit is the prevailing question of WHY - the search for the answer to this question over the ages, versus the more utilitarian (and therefore more cold) question of today, HOW to get it done. The answers are in the architecture, the poetry, the philosophies, the religions, the paintings...it lifts the heart to think this can be a neverending exploration. You'll want to read Dante and Dickens, view Picasso, listen to Bach - you will want to experience it for YOURSELF.

I didn't find The Creators at the bookstore, but I did scoop up Seekers and Discoverers. Both deserve a re-read, after nearly three years of missing Boorstin from my library. I have had a huge brain crush on this man's writing for over a decade. "The nation's collective IQ took a nosedive on February 28, 2004, when Daniel Joseph Boorstin - historian, professor, writer, curator, librarian, and great American Booster - died of pneumonia at age 89." (The New Atlantis obituary) His career reads like an account of ten lives, all mashed together into this big, beautiful intellect. More importantly, he lived and wrote generously. The Creators points to the beginning of a path -wherever your mind is inclined. He is criticized for lack of elaboration - but he was not motivated to impress us with a huge tsunami of research (which he undoubtedly had to swim in, to produce these marvelous books). He gives us a compass to discover our own roads to expression. This is the survey class of your dreams - that first brain crush on art, history, religion and cultures, culminating in a lifelong love affair.

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story — a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

-- Daniel J. Boorstin