Pearls: Lessons learned from my nerd-ish pursuits
EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl
As I may have mentioned before in one of these weekly columns, I once had a former student of mine label me as ‘a man of nerd-ish pursuits.’ I presume he was calling me out for my love of fantasy, science fiction, jigsaw puzzling and other acts that ran contrary to the standard perception of being ‘cool.’
I accept that label. I enjoy my nerd-ish pursuits and offer no apology for them. And what’s more, I hold the belief that many of them contain insights and truths that are worth exploring. Ill give you a few examples.
My favorite novel is The Lord of the Rings, for example, and it’s a story that contains themes that are dear to my heart. The book emphasizes the love for peace that the good people of our world share, as contrast with the warmongering tendencies of those who desire power and domination.
It’s a story where characters who possess no great power or wisdom effect world-altering change, and where individuals seeking mastery are ultimately mastered by those same peace-loving folks. The lesson is powerful to me: enough people wanting and doing the right thing truly can defeat those who seem to be so great and menacing.
Over the past couple of years, one of my other favorite novels, Dune, has become a cultural phenomenon through its newest movie adaptations.
Now this is an entirely different story from The Lord of the Rings in some ways, but it’s also rich with lessons that are relevant to our world today. For example, Dune’s protagonist, the son of a duke, is also a genetic superhuman – a prophesied being who possesses extraordinary abilities surpassing those belonging to an order of genetic/religious power, an order to which his similarly gifted mother belongs.
It’s a messiah story, but that’s not necessarily the accessible lesson of the story that the rest of us can put to use. Rather, we see Paul, the main character, facing the downfall of his father’s dukedom perpetrated by others in authority, then rising to his mystical role and ultimately assuming political and spiritual power over his enemies. But he does so with the aid of a force of desert dwellers, Fremen soldiers who are scorned as ignorant fanatics by the rest of the universe.
In other words, Paul rises to power with an army of the misunderstood (and vastly underestimated) people of a crucial desert planet as his followers. The ‘weak’ again rise to rattle the thresholds of the strong.
It’s the classic sci-fi setup, as iconic as a farm boy from a desert planet destroying the Death Star with a pair of perfect torpedo shots in Star Wars, or a figurehead leader wielding a longbow defying tyranny in the Robin Hood legend, or a shy kid from the Bronx gaining power and battling evil in a Spider-Man comic book.
The notion that the weak can reveal their strength in a moment of need – well, it might be one of my favorite themes that so many storylines contained within my nerd-ish pursuits seem to share. I like it that 13 colonies could send the British packing, that a YouTube video could have more views that a popular movie, or that a dedicated group of voters can bring about meaningful change in our society.
Those stories aren’t real, though, are they? Luke Skywalker and Frodo Baggins and Paul Atreides and Peter Parker – they’re all just made-up heroes fighting fictional battles in worlds that never existed. Maybe…or –
They’re all born of the human imagination, an incredible reflection of the human spirit. Perhaps nerds like me have discovered something – maybe fictional stories of fantastic lands sometimes contain as much truth (perhaps more) about our world than, say, an evening newscast with anchorpeople who refuse to hide their bias, or an AI-altered picture or video being used to change your perceptions of this world.
Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.
