For good or bad, I do a lot of reading, and it does have duel consequences. Of course, reading is a journey, one that can only be taken in the mind.

I very seldom read science fiction any more but at twelve years old I read a lot and many times it was Robert A. Heinlein. To say that he was a great influence would be an understatement. I had no idea at the time that I was absorbing his suggestions of freedom and responsibility and travel, mostly space travel.

This month is the centennial of Heinlein's birth. Many people that were similarly influenced by his writings have been marking the occasion with their own writings. In today's Wall Street Journal, Taylor Dinerman celebrates Heinlein's contributions to science fiction and the modern age. Heinlein was a visionary. He wrote about future technologies as easily as some of his characters visited other time periods, as though they were bringing back inventions for him to use in stories.

When my father died, the comments others made in his praise made me realize that many of the characteristics that I took for granted, and too seldom adapted, were great influences on my thinking, values, and life. Similarly with Heinlein, his guidance went unnoticed at that young age but I did become aware of it more as I re-read some of his novels with a more mature mind. Now with the numerous recognitions of this anniversary, I am again learning after someone's passing the filaments that link me to them.

I was too young to be a hippie. Too far removed and protected to want to be one. Yet I read a story on the Kent State shootings and how some of the students lived in a communal house. On a table was a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein. It was a paradox for me—why would these college kids be reading Heinlein? I bought a paperback copy and soon realized why. The freedom and sexual openness and questioning of authority dripped from the pages. Yet those were not the parts of the book that had stuck with me.

Dinerman mentions that paradox in his article, how hippies could hold Heinlein's book in reverence at the same time the man was campaigning for Goldwater, the presidential candidate and conservative that greatly influenced Ronald Reagan, all years before Kent State.

Professor Bernardo de la Paz, in Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

 

"The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government—sometimes I think that it is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive—and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby."

 

I often refer to books for reminders of principles that I've learned but may have gotten a bit soft on the particulars. I mix that with my experiences to sanity check one against the other. Remembering Heinlein today, it would seem I sometimes sanity check the textbook to the novel, too.

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