Revelation.

Revelation. 

Personal revelation. I’ve been thinking about where that word actually starts to mean something and where it begins to fall apart, because technically somebody could tell you, “The Waffle House on 37th Street is closed,” and you could say, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” New information has entered the building. Something has been revealed. But is that a revelation? Well, if you’re halfway across town at two in the morning specifically trying to get to that Waffle House, maybe it damn well is. Suddenly your entire little midnight universe has changed. But if you’re sitting three states away eating cereal and have never heard of 37th Street, then who cares? It’s just information floating past your head like a balloon.

So I think revelation starts getting interesting right around there, because apparently the information itself isn’t enough. Something else has to happen. The information has to hit you at the right angle, and when it does, it isn’t arriving in some clean laboratory inside your skull. It’s landing in this ridiculous biological stew that includes your childhood, your memories, your education, what you ate for breakfast, whether you slept worth a damn, what the weather is doing outside, what somebody said to you fifteen years ago, whatever you’ve been obsessing about lately, and probably six hundred other things you’re not even consciously aware of. Then the new information comes crashing into all of that, and somehow, occasionally, the lights come on. Revelation.

And this is where people get themselves into trouble, because somebody has one of these experiences and naturally thinks they’ve discovered the Great Universal Thing. They come rushing over to tell you about it with wild eyes and tremendous enthusiasm because, to them, this is incredible. This changes everything. They’ve been studying it, thinking about it, turning it around in their head for months or years, and then suddenly the whole machine clicked into place. Fantastic. I love it. But that revelation happened inside their particular nervous system, using their memories, their biology, their experiences, their weird Tuesday afternoon, their weather, their breakfast, their entire accumulated history of being that specific person. Then they hand you the conclusion and expect the heavens to open.

Maybe they do. That’s possible. Somebody else’s revelation can absolutely trigger one in you. But it also might not. You might just sit there politely drinking your coffee thinking, “Yeah, I think I understand what you’re saying,” while absolutely nothing cosmic happens. And that doesn’t mean you’re stupid or stubborn or spiritually defective or whatever other nonsense somebody wants to hang around your neck. It may simply mean you don’t have the same trail leading up to that particular mountain.

Writing is a good example. You can spend years screwing around with sentences, moving paragraphs, wondering whether the joke goes here or three lines later, cutting something out, putting it back, staring at one stupid comma like it personally insulted your family, and then one day you suddenly understand something about language that seems enormous. You see why the sentence works. You see rhythm. You see where the paragraph wants to breathe. You’ve had a revelation. Then you explain it to somebody who doesn’t write, doesn’t want to write, and has never spent twenty minutes arguing with themselves over where to put a paragraph break. They can understand what you’re saying perfectly well, but there’s nothing behind it waiting to explode into recognition. You got the lightning strike. They got the weather report.

Same thing with mathematics. Somebody could spend thirty years buried in math, thinking about patterns and relationships until numbers are probably following them into the shower, and then suddenly they see some magnificent structure nobody has quite seen that way before. This could be an extraordinary mathematical revelation. Then they explain it to me, and I’m nodding along like, “Yes, yes, fascinating, absolutely,” while internally I’m hanging onto the number seven for dear life. It isn’t because the revelation is false. It isn’t because I’m incapable of thought. I simply don’t have thirty years of mathematical architecture sitting there ready for that final piece to drop into place.

And I think that’s where revelation really starts to break down as something transferable. You can transfer the information. You can transfer the argument. You can show somebody the evidence. You can talk about it passionately enough to nearly climb across the table. But you can’t hand them the exact revelation because the revelation isn’t just the idea. It’s the idea plus the person plus the moment plus the entire strange biological history that made that particular moment possible.

The really interesting part is when several people seem to arrive at something similar anyway. Different lives, different minds, different routes, and somehow they all stumble into roughly the same clearing. In a good way, because maybe there are certain ideas that human beings can approach from different directions. One person gets there through mathematics, another through religion, another through grief, another through art, another while staring at a tree for far too long on a perfectly ordinary morning. They may all point toward something that looks suspiciously similar, but even then I don’t think they’re having the exact same revelation. They’re seeing it through different machinery.

Revelation isn’t really a package you receive. It’s an event. Something meets something. Information hits experience. The outside world touches this enormous private archive inside you, and every once in a while the whole thing rings like a bell. Then, naturally, you want to grab somebody by the shoulders and say, “Do you see this?” But they’re standing somewhere else entirely, looking through another set of eyes.

Maybe they’ll see it.

Maybe they’ll see something completely different.

How to communicate a revelation seems next to impossible. I think that's why there's stories and songs and poetry. I think this is, this is the avenue.