Books |
Travels
Michael Crichton
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Travel
Michael Crichton
I knew him oh-so-slightly. We shared a dinner or two with the art crowd. And I wrote a piece about him, which revealed an amusing fact — he had a very good sense of how much the books in his library weighed, more or less to the ton.
His own books? I only read a couple. Why bother if you could stand to wait for the movies?
But one Crichton book — rarely mentioned, not suitable for filming — really impressed me. That’s because it was all about Michael Crichton, the man behind the books. And if you can get beyond mutant DNA or crazed dinosaurs and want to explore real mysteries in real life, Travels is the Crichton book for you.
You’ve probably never heard of it. There are reasons. It’s autobiographical, but not in a conventional sense — one of the world’s most popular authors makes no attempt to show himself as a hero. And although the title couldn’t be more explicit, it’s not really a travel book — it starts with about eighty pages of Crichton at Harvard Medical School, becomes an account of trips to exotic destination, and ends with chapters that explore inner space.
Soon-bending, talking to a cactus, energy medicine — he tries it all, and not for the purpose of debunking it. Crichton’s quest is for direct experience, knowledge you gain the old-fashioned way. Appropriately, therefore, the book begins here: ”It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw.” Two hundred pages, he’s here: ”Everything was glowing and alive and vivid… I didn’t want to talk. My sensations were too immediate… I was demonstrating all the characteristics of a psychedelic experience, but I hadn’t taken any drug.”
In retrospect, the quest for self-knowledge makes sense. Crichton was the son of a writer. He believed his father did not wish him well. And he was tall and smart — he sold his first travel piece to the New York Times when he was just 14. After graduating summa cum laude at Harvard, Harvard Medical School wasn’t much more challenging; to make money, he wrote thrillers. More and more, medicine looked like car repair.
But then, once he switched completely to writing, he didn’t exactly make fiction look difficult. In 1994, he scored a never-before, never-again hat trick: the #1 movie (“Jurassic Park”), the #1 TV show (“ER”), and the #1 book (Disclosure).
Michael Crichton was married five times, which suggests that all his difficulties were in his life. He resisted easy answers — at a Los Angeles dinner party, he wondered aloud why the other guests kept complaining about distant villains known only as “they”. He suggested we do better in curing ourselves of illness if we take responsibility for causing it — even when we know that’s not exactly so.
Judith Orloff knew Crichton during the years of inner study in Los Angeles and wrote about him in Second Sight. Knowing they were “spiritual buddies”, I wrote to her soon after hearing of his death and asked what she recalled of those adventures. “We explored all kinds of wild people,” she wrote. “Michael and I learned to sense and outline energy fields practicing on each other. He had a brilliant mind and was just cynical/skeptical enough to make me feel in good hands when we explored all this spiritual and psychic phenomena.”
And then she went on to share some tidbits about Crichton the writer: “I remember when he was writing ‘Jurassic Park’, and he was bemoaning to me how he was afraid he was losing touch with his creativity. He loved doing the same things every day when he wrote — going to the same Japanese restaurant, keeping a routine.”
He had, she concluded, “a big heart and a wide-open imagination.”
Both are on display in “Travels”, which ends with a quotation from Rilke that couldn’t be more explicit:
Whoever you are: some evening take a step
out of your house, which you know so well.
Enormous space is near…
And now he’s on the other side of that space. How I wish I could read a dispatch from him. Judith Orloff wonders if she has: “Ever since I wrote to you about Michael, my microwave keeps going on and off on its own.”
To buy “Travels” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “The Andromeda Strain” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Jurassic Park” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Rising Sun” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Disclosure” from Amazon.com, click here.
