Before signing off, I’d like to revisit the travelogue one last time and transport us back to Colorado, and, more specifically, Mesa Verde National Park for an object lesson in how not to go around over-reading the world, but also to demonstrate how we are creatures of meaning to the point where we seem to be almost addicted to it. The Anasazi tribe left Colorado, travelling in the direction of the Rio Grande and Mexico, sometime around 1300AD, gradually assimilating themselves into other Pueblan communities as their journey progressed. What they left behind are hundreds of surface dwellings, dating from 1100AD onwards, and even whole towns built on wide mountain ledges beneath rocky overhangs many hundreds of feet above canyon floors. But what the Anasazi did not leave behind was a written language, and the disappearance of the cliff-dwellers into other cultures has also made the oral transmission of their history problematic. There are so many important aspects of their lives and history we know nothing about, and on which we can only speculate. In addition to the buildings and artefacts in them, there are dozens of sites throughout Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico where you can see Anasazi petrographs and petroglyphs - images painted onto or carved into rock faces. To some degree, they’re similar in appearance to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs - only no-one understands their meaning with any certainty. Cue further speculation. In fact, a significant percentage of our understanding of Anasazi culture is based on nothing more than guesswork. Educated guesswork sometimes, but by and large shots in the dark. If you visit Newspaper Rock in Canyonlands National Park as Chris and I did on our trip, you can see hundreds of petroglyphs scraped in a seemingly random fashion onto a single slab of stone. There are human stick figures, sheep, horses, spirals and dozens of representations of human feet. The most obvious interpretation of these symbols is that they were recurrent aspects of everyday life. Simple as that. Yet the anthropologists who are studying both these and other aspects of the Anasazis’ existence aren’t content with this way of looking at things. You get the distinct impression, chatting to the park rangers who give excellent guided tours of the sites, that the academics want more; looking at the petroglyphs as graffiti is just too easy. Of course, to a psychologist even random doodlings have significance and can be interpreted as windows on the soul. But what we’re faced with here, according to the eggheads, are physical expressions of a collective cultural vision, a jumped-to conclusion that isn’t necessarily borne out by the available evidence. Oddly, the need to interpret the symbols, coupled with the frustration of not being able to, has lent them a significance over and above their physical reality. Doodles become totemic symbols. Fun becomes folkways. Nobody is prepared to say “we don’t know”, and so the desire to decipher them is further intensified by professional pride. It’s like scratching an intellectual spot - the more you seek to get rid of the itch the worse it gets. And here’s what can happen. Both on the tours, and in the available interpretive material, it seemed to both of us that a combination of wishful thinking and the need to be thought expert was the motivating factor behind some of the analysis. Take, for example, the curious shape of some of the apertures in the vertical faces of Anasazi buildings. Some are “T” shaped as opposed to oblong or square. So, we ask ourselves, why are they like that? And why aren’t all the doorways like that? According to the rangers, they were “special” doorways that had a “ceremonial” significance. We were then invited to use one. Now a lot of Anasazi buildings are sunk into the ground, so, on the way out, you’re exiting onto a higher level than you started from. The lower edges of the “T” shape make very useful hand holds for hauling yourself up or lowering yourself down. And judging by the wear and tear at these points in the surround, that’s precisely how the Anasazi used them. Performing the same action with a vertical frame is much more difficult, and involves some rather awkward wrist manoeuvres in more than one plane. And the same when you’re going in; placing both hands flat on the horizontal surfaces on either side of the doorway and supporting your weight while you swing the rest of your body through the aperture means you can lower yourself down gently until your feet reach the floor. Simple. Now I’m not quite saying that the doorways didn’t have ceremonial status; simply that this is not the most obvious conclusion to have reached. Wood for the trees and all that. Another example: liberally distibuted round the later Anasazi sites are sunken circular pits which at one time would have been roofed over. Each could comfortably seat 15 or more people, and was equipped with a central fireplace, a shallow hole behind the fireplace, a back chimney to draw air in, and a wall separating the fireplace from the flue to distribute the warm air equitably around the room. These pits are called “kivas”, and, once again, it’s assumed they had a ceremonial purpose. I don’t doubt it, but judging by the huge number of kivas on the Mesa Verde site, there must have been a disproportionate emphasis on ritual within the culture. Far more likely is that they were simply family dwellings: after all, they’re round, brilliantly insulated by being underground, and they have their own central heating system which might just have been used for keeping warm rather than appeasing the Gods. Having reached this conclusion, I began asking myself why there was this desire to explain almost everything in terms of ceremony rather than practical need. And then I began to indulge in a bit of speculation of my own. And, as it’s the end of the book and I’m in holiday mood, I’m going to share it with you, and damn the torpedoes. What the anthropologists are doing is what bad literary critics do; they’re over-complicating the issue because the quotidien just isn’t sexy or even interesting enough. Of course. But the less obvious question that needs answering is why are they doing that, beyond, say, considerations like career advancement or to stave off boredom. I reckon they’re being nostalgic, pure and simple. They’re looking back to a time when, they imagine, meaning did not exist to be explained but lived. Meaning didn’t need to be justified, it just was, an inescapable fact of life. This is not, of course a mindset unique to those who study primitive cultures; those of us who consider our corners of civilization to be sophisticated often hearken back to a past era when every thought and deed had an intrinsic value connected to the rhythms and patterns of nature - so everything, in effect is ritualistic. Never mind that life was nasty, short and brutish, it was so simple and so, well, meaningful. Meaning was experienced, not thought about, because man was in tune with every aspect of his life. Or so the story goes. It’s Wordsworth leech gatherer or the noble savage all over again in modern dress. I’m not sure some bedraggled nineteenth-century Lakeland beggar considered himself uniquely privileged by being uncontaminated by civilization. He’d most probably have moved into Dove Cottage at the drop of a hat if Wordsworth had invited him. And, conversely, you didn’t see Wordsworth, in an imitation of King Lear, throwing off his borrowed finery and moving to a hovel to get closer to “real” life. It just seemed aesthetically attractive to do so. And we all suffer from this delusion occasionally: we often imagine that the more noise and clutter we can remove from our own lives, the easier it will be to tune in to their meaning and purpose. Working our way “back” to meaning has spawned an entire industry of self-help books and audio; discovering what “matters” and separating it out from what’s superfluous is an act we’re engaged in every day of our existence, and reading can provide us with significant input to help us out. Whether it’s ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’ or ‘The Color Purple’, we’re trying to track meaning down in whatever it is we’re reading at the time. Some of us need a quick fix; others are prepared to work at it. Some require the help of other people; others have the energy, nous and time to do it themselves. But whichever way we arrive at meaning, it seems a primal requirement for those of use who regularly read books. And there’s plenty of of meaning readily available in literature without any of us having to invent spurious meanings of our own, or indulge in the kind of wildly inappropriate speculations we’ve witnessed at various points along the way in this particular publication. And as in books, so in life. As I hope I’ve demonstrated on repeated occasions, interpreting literature isn’t that dissimilar from other analytical processes we use to make sense of many other aspects of our world. “Reading a situation” isn’t much different from reading a text. And outside literature, we’re more likely to be drawn in the direction of meaning than meaninglessness. Which is why, having reached the critical reductio ad absurdum of meaning (Deconstruction), Lit Crit peered over the precipice, quickly withdrew, and marched straight back in the opposite direction. As I’ve already noted, twenty or so years on from this about-turn it’s no longer impossible to mention “value” in the same sentence as meaning, so there’s strong evidence we’re heading back leftwards on our Meaning Line. And hopefully, having faced down the prospect of meaninglessness, we’ll return to a more balanced view of what determines value, without marching full tilt in the direction of unitary explanations. In short, I hope we’ll prove more tolerant in embracing aspects and types of meaning we don’t feel immediate sympathy with. And looking at this purely selfishly, that can only improve our experience of reading. We should be more alert and responsive to a broader set of influences. And yet this too can have its drawbacks, which we can see if we look at some recent novels.