Today a Flying Bear Will Kill Me: Quests, Inquiries, and Misadventures (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781932727418)

"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.