Book Review: Notes From A Tilt-A-Whirl by N.D. Wilson
Right now I have tea simmering. One sextillion, seven hundred quintillion tiny molecules of water are in every drop, being brought to such a furious heat they can’t contain themselves. Explosion upon explosion, bursting through the surface friction in a liquid rollick. All I hear is a simmer, and the tiny whisper of water upon bubble – a millisecond’s worth of victory and defeat – before it evaporates upward into the thin air to be sucked into our nostrils, or seeped into our skin, or escape through the screens of our windows into the great world where it will become a cloud, or a flower, or a snowflake, or an apple, or part of the ocean, or roll off a wet dog’s back, or a drop of dew.
The water in the pot – the unimaginable sextillions of liquid molecules that still remain there – I’ll pour over leaves. A little sweetener. A ceramic mug. All begun with water that was begun with something else that was made from something else that eventually, rolled and rained and snowed and melted and coughed and sputtered and dripped and drained and fell and rose through the history of the world, where it once began, breathed ex nihilo from God Himself.
The magic is too big for me to comprehend. This vast infinitude in my tea cup in my hands. I’ll take a sip, without thinking even. The history of the world is in that water drop. If I think about it I’ll start to hurt. I’ll cry. Or laugh. Or do both at once.
What kind of world is this anyway?
“The rough kind,” author N.D. Wilson says. “The spinning kind. The moist kind. The inhabited kind. The kind with flamingos (real and artificial). The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity). The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off…The kind with people who kill and people who love and people who do both.”
To say that this Tilt-A-Whirl of a world is a ride at the carnival, spinning and sickening in a way that makes you laugh through the nausea, and that it merits a few notes seems childish at best, vulgar at worst. But that’s all we have. Words. Field notes from the canvas called life. A few lines of the play. Our own role to fill, as we become awakened to an infinite God, who entered His own story. N.D. Wilson in Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl gives it his best shot.
“I have a clumsy brush, and my tongue sticks out the corner of my mouth. I’ve even put a shirt on backward like a priest. I hope they’re not offended.”
And he does a good job. As well as could be hoped for in the grapple with the subject of Shakespeare and theologians and little children.
There’s no easy pattern to the way the book is set up. It really is like notes on a Tilt-A-Whirl…written on a Tilt-A-Whirl.
“This book is…spinning small and spinning big – and follows the earth through the seasons of one orbit. Like the earth and the Tilt-A-Whirl, you will end at the beginning.”
And the ride is amazing.
Why Should I Read It?
Because we forget that we’re “living on a near perfect sphere hurtling through space at around 67,000 miles per hour…And it’s all tucked into this giant hurricane of stars.”
We have grown calloused to a miraculous world, more crazy and nonsensical than any fantasy dreamt up in a human’s chemical brain. We’ve “grown up” into disillusioned, disenchanted, stoic, practical atheists, bending inward around ourselves until “living life” is nothing more than general deformity. Shame on us for taking this breath for granted. 8 billion people on a ball careening through space in a hurricane of exploding fire bombs – and we forget that we’re alive at all.
“This world is beautiful but badly broken. I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story, a world of surprises and questions to explore. And there’s someone behind it; there are uncomfortable answers to the hows and whys and whats. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him were all things made…Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. Let the pages flick your thumbs.”
Read this book so you can read His better. And so you can learn to laugh at the world. And yourself. Your story began before you, but it won’t end after you. You and I go on forever, joining hands and chorus and choir before the throne of God, with the eternal cast of man and beast and bird and insect and angel and mountain and stone and galaxies and atoms and bananas.
This world on the broken spiral is headed for eternity, redemption and salvation. This is just the Shadowlands. Real life hasn’t begun yet. Enjoy the adventure and don’t waste it.