Book Review: Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl

If you’ve never ridden on one, a tilt-a-whirl is an old carnival ride where you have these wild turns and spins that sometimes make you smile, sometimes take your breath away, and sometimes make you nauseated. On the whole, it’s an enjoyable jaunt, but after a while it seems like you keep going around in the same circle, and you may end up growing a little tired of it.

Strangely enough, that describes my experience of reading Nate Wilson’s new book Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl. Although his analogy is supposed to refer to our life on this world (and it does), it also describes his writing. His prose sometimes made me smile, sometimes made me think, but other times just made me tired.

In a dozen chapters, essays really, he explores the strange and wonderful nature of life, in all its simplicity and complexity, and the nature of how it helps us to relate to God and to ourselves. He wants us to revel in the “wide-eyed wonder of God’s spoken world,” and to an extent he succeeds, while musing on philosophers and kittens, Socrates and snowflakes.

There are sparks of true beauty scattered in the book, such as:

If I were infinite, I could read and love each (snowflake as a haiku). I could remember the dance of each flake since the world was born.

Faith is hard… but faith brings with it the only possibility of peace and joy in this world— the only possibility of laughter on this mad, mad ride.

Logic cannot give you goodness, just validity.

Why do we so often ignore the beautiful in exchange for the cute?

–and–

Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shekinah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag.

There is treasure to be found in this book, but you have to also wade through pages that are far less inspired as well. Overall an interesting read.

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