The other day I bumped into a classic book at a local bookstore. Like me, you probably first heard the book praised by history teachers, and therefore you assumed it was too boring to read. I joked with the bookstore owner that I was tired of seeing brief quotes from this book trotted out whenever a contemporary author wants somebody old and famous to back him up. So I bought Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Although Tocqueville traveled extensively in the USA for about a year, the book is no travelogue.

I was unprepared for how exciting the book was. It sounds almost melodramatic to use the word 'exciting' when describing a book.

The first step in explaining the excitement was to see what it had in common with other books that affected me the same way. In fact I recently posted about Arthur Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers." In the latter book the most interesting character was Kepler, who had one foot in the Later Middle Ages--with genuine piety towards Christianity and the Greek intellectual tradition of Classical times--and the second foot in the experimental and mathematical Scientific Age.

Tocqueville also had a bifurcated point-of-view. His father had lived before the French Revolution and Tocqueville still knew what it meant to be an aristocrat. In contrasting that point of view with the modern, democratic outlook he took in a view-scape that had the maximum contrast and tension between opposites.

A thinker and writer who stands astride a cultural chasm is much more exciting than the normal writer, whose mind is circumscribed by his own milieu. The latter never questions anything fundamental. He is timid and conventional.

Many people enjoy natural scenery characterized by maximum contrast of some kind, such as a shoreline or the treeline of a forest. During my years of RV full-timing and boondocking, I usually hiked or mountain biked up to a saddle to experience the contrast. Sometimes I would approach the saddle from the east one day, and the west  on some other day. Whenever I joined the two, it seemed genuinely exciting--not just pretty!

Alas, a contemporary of Tocqueville scooped me by 170 years: “It is an important epoch when a man who has lived on the east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and seen it in the east.”  [Thoreau, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers".]

It is easier to make sense of current events when reading Tocqueville than when listening to the junk on regular news channels. He thought that the single-levelness of the Demos, and the destruction of intermediate powers of all kinds, would result in an all-powerful central government. Tocqueville would not be surprised to see the modern Leviathan running the schools, the banks, the automobile industry, housing, and soon, health care. But he might be surprised that it took 180 years.