Go look it up.

I've been engrossed in the World Books since they arrived UPS last week, though more out of nostalgia than a need for information. Even this new seventy-fifth anniversary edition reads like a wonderful old scrapbook, something I've come across in an attic somewhere.

Twice already they've answered the kind of dinner table questions we got them for: How and when did house cats come to America? (With the Pilgrims.) And how big was the Spirit of St. Louis? (Only 23 feet, 8 inches long.) For the next ten years we want to be able to say "go look it up" and have the kids racing to the shelves, grabbing a volume, and falling on the living room carpet, maps and transparencies cracked open.

The facts come in handy for grown-ups like me, too, since I tend to be a little fuzzy and intuitive. Knowing the length of the Spirit of St. Louis makes me feel solider.

But so far I've been reading for memories, and the past I'm recalling is my own. Or not so much my past as my past image of the world, of knowledge, and of things. The print today is smaller than in the 1963 edition we had when I was growing up--a white and blue set, in the hallway by the bathroom, the only books in the house. There's more information now, more scientific advances and wars to include. More women are mentioned, more blacks. Most of the astronauts in the pictures are captioned without name. They're just "astronauts," not the five-star heroes I remember from the '63 set.

But it's all more or less still there: the glossy pages and the color drawings, the calm, detached, sixth-grade, social-studies-teacher voice patiently describing the hierarchy of dogs, or the evolution of engines, and the structure of bicameral legislatures. An odor of dusty libraries and chemistry labs and science fairs and high-school health assemblies comes off the books, and even of the green cut lawns and neat curbs of suburban America. Even now, all the photographs of people and places and processes look as if they were taken in the fifties somewhere in Ohio. A man drives a car. A woman turns on a stove. A student lifts up a petrie dish--everyone has just had a haircut, everyone is wearing new clothes. Even the platypuses and sweet peas look posed and stiff.

Just taking a volume down and paging through it, as I used to as a kid, reading what interests me, has that soothing effect of walking through a museum or gallery. It's silent. You're wandering along quietly, stopping to look at this and at that, light reflecting off the glass cases, voices murmuring in the distance, the echo of footsteps. Hours pass before you look up and notice it's lunch time. There's an exquisite tenuousness, a thinness, about the quality of your attention. Your interest in any one thing is never passionate--nothing registers fully or loudly--and yet your concentration holds over long stretches of time, and dozens of subjects. It's as if your heart has slowed, your temperature dropped.

On one level what I appreciate about the World Book is its dullness. My life is chaotic and exciting and troubling enough already, and so I'm grateful for the books' monotonous clarity, their flatness. No one cries, bleeds, frets, struggles, despairs in the World Book. The helter skelter of life has been nominalized, made into an abstract subject ("Crying," "The Circulatory System," "Emotional Disorder"), and there is comfort in that. In the article on "War," for example, all the major blood baths of history are simply tics on a shaded time line, progressive examples of political theory. "Most countries fear the possibility of attack and maintain armed forces to defend themselves. Sometimes this fear may be directed toward a particular country. In that case a nation may decide to choose its own time and strike the first blow." Or "When a nation makes war, its government always states the reasons for the war. This is necessary if the people are to be united in the war effort. But the reasons given for a war need not be the same as its causes." It's the boldface that calms me, the stating of the obvious, and the general absence of subordination.

A graph titled "Wars Involving the United States" has three columns, "Wars, .... U.S. Military Deaths," and "U.S. War Costs," from which I learn that the Vietnam War cost 58,000 lives and $150,000,000,000 while World War II cost 405,399 lives and $263,259,000,000. I don't mean to imply that the author of this article is without horror at the thought of the lost lives represented by the zeroes. Real people write the Worm Book, their names in tiny print at the end of each piece, and I believe that taken individually they spend just as many sleepless nights and rejoice at just as many sunrises as I do. It's the conventions of encyclopedia article-writing that factor out those human elements. Deliberately. And I'm glad. I take the voice as artificial. I don't consider it in any important sense true (only factual). But I'm soothed by it anyway--soothed because it's unreal, because it's finally fantasy, in much the way I'm soothed by the conventions of children's stories, fairy tales, and myths. In the World Book life is made to look like history, and often that's a therapeutic, distancing illusion.

Several colored illustrations and graphs accompany the article on "Environmental Pollution": minimalist sun, straight blue lines for rain, little Monopoly-style buildings and cars, then arrows moving from one level to another to indicate the flow of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides from cars and planes, branching out into a pale World Book sky, where they generate smog and dissipate the ozone layer. The arrows of another illustration indicate the direction and effect of treated sewage, untreated sewage, agricultural drainage, industrial waste, and heated water. "Our desire for convenience is another cause of pollution," we are told. "Many synthetic materials that pollute the environment were developed to save people time, work, or money. With effort, some of the pollution from these materials could be eliminated. But, just as prevention of pollution is often considered too expensive, it is often considered too inconvenient."

I like having a place to go for terms like hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, which I can never keep straight, but what's really encouraging about the World Book is its form, its voice, how it contradicts and dampens the content, transcending the world's true chaos. It's a voice that lulls you into forgetting the stupidity and avarice of your neighbors, your own anger and anxiety, the insolubility of the problems we all face, the tragedy of a natural world destroyed. It even whispers, in its obviousness, its avuncular directness, of competence; hints that the problems are actually manageable, something that in our life away from the World Book, in the world itself, we don't believe for a minute.

This is the Reader's Digest, Good Housekeeping, North Hill Library life I aspired to when I was a boy, or that part of me did--the good kid part of me, the Boy Scout, the Associated Student Body representative. I longed for citizenship and expertise in a world I thought of as one big bicameral legislature, where all the representatives show up on time and sit in their assigned places and make laws that help people cook and drive cars and perform experiments in straight-edged, cinder block buildings forevermore. Words like "democracy" and "raw material" had real resonance for me then, were conjuring words. I'd take down a volume, and lie down on the green living room shag and look for the presidents--Taylor, Tyler, Harrison, Harding, Jefferson, Kennedy--dreaming of my own steady progress toward glory, stage by stage, narrating my own biography in the World Book voice: "Chris Anderson was born in Colville, Washington, and raised in Spokane, the oldest of three sons...."

I'd take down P and fantasize about planes, imagining cockpits and dials and the blurting sky, imagining more the adulation of assembled friends and strangers on the ground as 1 scrambled out and posed beside the fuselage, smiling, helmet cradled in my arm. I'd find the chart listing all the major colleges and universities in America, pictures showing campuses and classrooms, and spend long minutes comforting myself with how much I would one day know, the Ph.D.'s I would hold, the obscure books I would write.

My solar energy project took first prize at the Madison Elementary Science Fair, despite the fact that it didn't actually work. It won because I was immersed in the world of the World Book and could speak in its confident rhythms. Dad and I had built a little triangular box, a half square, with a window on the flat open side and two thermometers, one inside and one out, the idea being to capture the sun, make it bounce around inside the house--the Greenhouse effect harnessed. Why it didn't work I'm still not sure, though I remember frantically painting the inside black and doing some research on the capacity of rocks and of water to retain heat. Mostly I just wanted to sound as if I knew something, play that part, and my charts and reports were first-class, lots of flat arrows branching out in stages from one paragraph to another, appropriate phrases in boldface.

But orderliness is only the first level, and it's finally illusory. What's even more pleasing and profound about the World Book, I think, is that it's organized alphabetically. Individual articles make claims of synthesis, and the set as a whole aspires to the presentation of general knowledge, a pretty big ambition. But on a level deeper than that, and finally at odds with it, in the juxtapositions the alphabet requires, is a very different vision of the world, undiscriminating, democratic, and delighting. The truest world of the World Book is the one you glimpse reading a volume front to back.

Eleanor of Aquitaine ( 1122-1204) was the wife of King Louis VII of France and later of King Henry II of England. The elecampane is a coarse perennial plant closely related to asters, growing as a roadside weed in parts of the United States and Canada. Elephants have no sweat glands, ridding their bodies of excess heat by flapping their ears or spraying water on themselves. Elevator--Elf--Sir Edward Elgar--T.S. Eliot--Elk-- Ellipse. The American Elm, spreading out like an umbrella against a blue sky. Elohim, the Hebrew word that means gods, a god, or God.

Fact follows fact, object follows object, each entry unashamed and unapologetic, without irony, everything safe and available, equally interesting, worthy of attention, and you keep turning the pages, absorbed, humming to yourself. The Who (one of the most popular British rock groups in history) is followed by Wichita (the largest city in Kansas) is followed by Wild Carrot, Wilson Cloud Chamber, Winch, Wind Surfing, Women's Movements, Stevie Wonder, Wood, the names and labels like accidental poetry. You can pull out any entry and subordinate it to any argument, use any fact for any larger purpose, political or personal; but when you read a volume as a book, assume the sequence as a structure, a deeper, more innocent wholeness emerges. This is the world undifferentiated, prior to specialization and use. This is things the way they are, a jumble of shapes and forms and sensations, nothing more important than anything else, an array of objects all ends in themselves. This is the world as a child first knows it, despite the Latin names and the assigning of species, just rocks and trees and birds and things, seen with a child's detached and thoughtless pleasure.

Even here the encyclopedia is biased, of course. Its preference is clearly for the physical. Thrush and Titmouse merit as much space as Paul Tillich and Dylan Thomas, though not nearly as much as Tire or Tin or Texas. Montaigne takes up far less space than Montana. But that's part of the point, and the pleasure. You can go elsewhere for literary history, and you can simply look into your own head for a record of the chaos and complexity of ideas. You go to the World Book to put ideas back where they belong, back in perspective, "Existentialism" no bigger than "Eggplant," much smaller than "Electricity." The world we're all finally nostalgic for is the world prior to our own persistent, tiresome ideas of it, prior to our own urgent involvements and needs. Just the world. There. Present. Intrinsically interesting.

Chris Anderson, a frequent Commonweal contributor, teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He is the author of Free/Style: A Direct Approach to Writing (Houghton Mifflin).