Today a Flying Bear Will Kill Me: Quests, Inquiries, and Misadventures

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? Meno asks Socrates in one of Plato’s dialogues. Taking Meno’s Paradox as a narrative Pole Star, essayist E. J. Myers recounts a sequence of experiences by which he searches for unknown places and asks unanswerable questions.

9/14 first recalls, then speculates about, the author’s duty shift as an EMT at the World Trade Center three days after the 9/11 attacks. In Mi Gringo, Myers examines a long-past incident in which he helped rescue an injured four-year-old girl while living in a small Mexican town. Art of Memory, Art of Forgetting delves into inward-looking rather than outward-searching experiences: the complex, often fraught issues that interweave memory with forgetfulness. Brief and frisky, ROTAS SATOR? SATOR ROTAS! considers how the human species persists in imposing significance on words that are often just … words. These and eight other essays–often unsettling, sometimes disturbing–range across a wide variety of topics, landscapes, mindscapes, quandaries, and speculations. In each one, Myers tries to find that thing the nature of which is unknown.