An old dog

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm too old to learn new stuff. Maybe there are degrees of new stuff that I can learn, (simple, moderately difficult, difficult, freakin' hard) and I shouldn't be too worried, but I've been trying to tackle a book that I found when cleaning out a closet and I'm just not getting it.

I have no idea where this book came from or why it ever made it into my house and eventually my guest closet. My son said it was originally mine, a textbook from some class I took, and I know for a fact that is not true. I have never seen it before. Even my 50-year-old addled brain knows that.

At any rate, I found it and decided that there might be nuggets of knowledge that I could pull from it and I figured I should be able to read it because it won a Pulitzer. Surely they don't give Pulitzers to unreadable books? It would be like reading a Theory for Dummies book that would have better prose.

The book is "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter. It is (as it says on the cover) "A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" which really doesn't explain anything to me even though I know what most of those words mean. Oh, and Godel is spelled with a sideways colon over the "o" but I don't know how to put it there (or know it's actual name or how to pronounce the word with it there).

So I start out reading it and I'm getting most of what he's saying and then he gets into number theory and I get lost. Immediately. I am an accountant and basically we add, subtract, multiply and divide. I slog through several pages of that and then get to the prose parts where he explains what he's saying with little vignettes involving the Tortoise and Achilles. Those are very readable and explain what I should have picked up from the preceding chapter somewhat but not entirely. Lots of times he gives little puzzles to solve and tells us to ponder them. One of them I even took to work with me to ponder when I had slow time -- before I figured out that it's unsolvable. At least I think it is. Which would have made his point in the chapter if I remotely understood what he was saying.

But the fascinating part of it is when he talks about Johann S. Bach and M. C. Escher. Bach wrote some amazing fugues that wove musical patterns (braids if you will) into music of great complexity and stunning simplicity. Escher is the artist whose work includes flights of stairs that continue to go up while at the same time circling back to the point of origination, along with animals or insects in a pattern where the negative space gradually become some other animal or insect and then yet another.

So basically I'm enjoying the drawings and the explanations of Bach's amazing abilities (which must be explained very well because I have no musical ability or education). I'm struggling with this Godel guy, but two out of three ain't bad. Mostly.

Oh well, I'm going to keep plugging. I've decided it's okay to skip the theorems and logic when they get too awful and make my eyes glaze and just focus on the more comprehensible parts. Or maybe I'll give up entirely, but not yet. I'll let you know.