Sunday Salon: Creativity in reading

I’ve recently been invited to be a part of SundaySalon by Hsien.  As part of my usual reading routine, SundaySalon looks to be a great avenue by which I can elaborate and tell you a little about what I am reading at the moment.

But before I get to that, let me say a few words about reading.  I am an avid reader.  There are whole series of books that I reread up to five times a year.  Stuff like Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, Song of Albion, Byzantium… and that’s just from two of my favorite authors.  Stephen Lawhead and C.S. Lewis.

Granted, I am a fictionally inclined when it comes to reading, but for the would be creative, it doesn’t necessarily have to be fiction.  I think it was Michael Crichton who said that "Some of the greatest minds in the world are and have been writers, if you want to be like them, read."  That’s my own paraphrase from an interview I once saw of him. 

So getting to the point.  The book I am reading right now is one of those Once or Twice a year repeat books by Stephen Lawhead, called Empyrion (which is actually two books, The Search for Fierra and The Siege of Dome).

It’s a science fiction fantasy story about a man who travels to a far flung galaxy to figure out what went wrong there in a corporation colony.  Turns out, because of time distortion in space he arrives several thousand years into the future of the colony.  Immediately treated as prisoners, eventually he is given the privilege of being escorted through the now thoroughly changed civilization that has developed. 

What he finds instead is a fearful, segregated race of people who have lost all touch with who they are or where they have come from. 

I see a lot of similarities in our culture today.  The divisions between people of different social status are getting ever more pronounced.  Our culture is imploding upon itself and even language has been affected by certain words becoming obscured from their original meanings.

In short, we are at a decline.  The good news is that it’s still not too late to live in oblivion of it for the next 200 or so years… or make a change for the better.  The old saying goes that "Rome didn’t fall in a day" and we can still make a difference in the direction we are heading. 

But it will take some creativity to get there.  Answers to questions like global warming, hunger, green energy are going to take a lot of thought and well… energy over the course of our lifetime if we want to make any difference at all.  We are running out of time.