I sometimes like to ask ChatGPT what the current books on my nightstand have in common.
- Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
- Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
ChatGPT-5:
What they share in common is that all three explore how humans construct, perceive, and question reality through abstract systems:
- Flatland uses the metaphor of dimensions and geometry to question perception, social hierarchies, and the limits of understanding.
- Playing with Reality examines games as structured systems that both mirror and shape our social, cultural, and cognitive worlds.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach weaves together mathematics, art, and music to probe self-reference, recursion, and the foundations of thought and meaning.
So you could say they’re all about bridging the abstract and the concrete—using models (geometry, games, logic, art) to reflect on the nature of consciousness, systems, and reality itself.
Would you like me to sketch a short unifying theme sentence you could use if you were to group these on your blog or bookshelf?
What might I learn about myself by reflecting on these titles?
Looking at these three together and reflecting on why they might resonate with you could reveal some things about how your mind works and what you seek:
- You like to test boundaries of perception. Flatland is about literally stepping outside the plane of accepted dimensions, which suggests you may be drawn to perspectives that challenge conventions and reveal hidden layers of reality.
- You see life as a system of rules—and also as play. Playing with Reality frames existence in terms of games: constraints, strategies, and meaning within invented systems. That may echo how you approach projects and life—serious, but also experimental, aware of the rules while imagining how to bend or rewrite them.
- You’re fascinated by patterns that fold back on themselves. Gödel, Escher, Bach is all about recursion, self-reference, and strange loops. That could mean you tend to reflect on reflection itself, noticing how thought, art, and systems mirror each other—and maybe how you mirror the world in your work.
Put together, these titles suggest you may be someone who:
- thrives on abstract frameworks but grounds them in creative or playful ways,
- seeks depth behind appearances, and
- is comfortable living with paradox and complexity rather than quick answers.
What might I do with this exploration that adds something to the world?
These books aren’t just about understanding reality, they’re about teaching others to see differently. By reflecting on them through your own lens, you could:
- Translate abstraction into access. Many people never touch Hofstadter or Abbott because they feel intimidating. You could break down these big ideas—dimensions, loops, rules of play—into stories, art, or metaphors that make them approachable.
- Model curiosity as practice. Showing how you connect Flatland’s geometry to social structures, or games to human meaning, encourages others to take their own reading and turn it into self-reflection and dialogue.
- Create bridges. These titles all sit at the meeting point of art, science, and philosophy. You might create blog posts, art pieces, or conversations that show how logic speaks to creativity, or how games speak to society.
- Seed new ways of seeing. A single metaphor (like a shadow, a strange loop, or a 2D being glimpsing 3D space) can stick with someone and open them up to thinking differently about their own life.
So the “add to the world” piece could be: You become a translator of systems and metaphors—helping others see the hidden structures shaping their lives, while also showing that those structures can be played with, bent, or reimagined.
I remember reading Flatland when I must have been eleven or twelve. My brother was in the Running Start program then, going to college instead of high school. And oh, how I wanted to be like him. Anything he brought home for an assignment, I was determined to read. The two I really remember were The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott.
Now, holding my copy from the library, I can’t help but chuckle at the introduction being by Alan Lightman. Years later, when I left CHEFS (after they were acquired by Target and soon to be shut down), a dear coworker gave me three books: Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte, The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, and Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman.
Those three books profoundly altered my consciousness and stayed with me in ways that keep resurfacing. The Man Who Planted Trees was even the book I named in my final interview at WordPress.com—where, fittingly, this post is now being written.
Strange loops indeed.
What dimensions of our own realities do we miss? What more could we explore?
As Flatland rests atop the stack, I think about how I’m playing with my own reality. The book just below it, the subtitle, “How games have shaped our world,” dances in front of my mind. As books, ideas, people and places, come and go from our perception, what dimension are we experiencing? What more can we find?
ChatGPT-5 suggested that as I return to this early memory, and these books help shape my reality, the circle closes, but also expands, perhaps it is a spiral more than a loop.
I realize now there was a fourth book, though good things come in threes, or is it fours? (I can never remember.) This one didn’t make it into the stack because I only began and finished it this morning. Quiet Heart by Sleeping Crow. The lessons linger all the same.
I’m always seeking new (to me) versions of the Tao Te Ching, and this one came to me in a way that feels like part of the loop itself. A local in my hometown handed me the book, a gift in passing.
On the title page it reads: “A Circle Talk With The Old One (Lao-Tzu).”
And the passage that resonated with me this morning was as follows:
Infinity
Before the Great Spirit.
The Wise Elder walks in a place without form, in silence.
He is surrounded by the Great Spirit, but not with Him.
He is within the Circle of the Mother but not with Her alone.
He walks among men but does not consider this his path.
The Wise Elder knows that before the Great Spirit is the infinite.
And in that place his path will end and begin, and end.
This is the nature of the circle,
The life of the spiral,
The soul of his people.
He cannot explain it’s meaning.
He cannot plumb it’s depths.
He cannot measure it’s length or judge it’s breadth.
He cannot speak of it’s top or bottom.
Yet, he is forever within this place of spiritual peace.
And because I love a rhyming structure…
Infinity
before all names.
The Elder moves through silence,
not apart, yet not contained.
Encircled by the Mother,
embraced but not confined,
he walks the paths of others
yet carries his own mind.
He knows beyond all measure
the spiral has no end,
each turn becomes beginning,
each ending curves again.
He cannot weigh its vastness,
nor chart its hidden length,
he cannot name its bottom,
nor crown its boundless strength.
Yet still he stands within it,
at rest and yet in motion,
his voice becomes the silence,
his silence, the devotion.
Maybe you have books like these too, volumes that reappear across time, folding you back into your younger self while nudging you forward into something new.
If so, I’d love to know: what strange loops are you carrying, and how do they shape the spiral you’re walking?
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