Always Strive to Be a Better You

Plato’s asymptote and greyhounds

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The summer before my eleventh birthday, our family visited my grandparents’ home in Pennsylvania on our annual East Coast trip. I always looked forward to those delightful vacations, partly because they allowed my brother and me to stay connected with family, and partly because Pennsylvania seemed like an exotic, otherworldly place, somewhere we’d experience things we really didn’t get in Oregon: clay tennis courts, expansive cornfields, dripping humidity, sparkling fireflies—and late evening thunderstorms.

It was during one of the latter—a particularly aggressive series of electrical discharges with unusually violent acoustics—that I found myself huddled under a blanket in my grandfather’s office, hoping the storm would pass and I could fall asleep peacefully. The rest of the family had evidently built up some kind of auditory immunity to the thunder, so I was the only person awake in the house. In between flashes and booms, I’d allow my gaze to drift up from the carpet and around the room. And that’s when I found it: an encyclopedia.

What wonders this hefty compendium contained! I don’t recall which volume of that anthology I stumbled upon first (my grandfather had the entire set), though I remember the joy of mining the slick pages for nuggets about aardvarks, zygotes, and everything in between throughout the rest of our way-too-short vacation. It was divine, unearthing the facts, people, places, and dates that might have otherwise bypassed me. Information was quite literally at my fingertips, long before the Internet, in this bulky, beautiful book of all knowledge.