Will Buckingham’s Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes is a collection of short stories, each based on a hexagram from the Yi jing. It traces a meandering search for meaning through a broad expanse of cultural material from Baal to Billie Holiday.
Of course the meaning of life will never quite come into focus, yet contentment is possible for all who stop focusing on it. The lesson is perhaps most obvious in #48, “The Well,” about a stranger seeking to understand his adoptive home, a pursuit that would baffle native townsmen for its pointlessness:
They live, they eat, they sleep, they make love, they move down the thousand pathways of their lives, but they never ask themselves: ‘Do I understand this place?’ If the question were put to them, perhaps, they would think for a moment, then they would recognize the question for what it was, a question born out of confusion, out of a failure to live, and they would move on. (p. 259)
As it turns out, the strange place absorbs its would-be understander’s life. Around the time he realizes that a sip from a local well yields only a cool drink and not a mystical enlightenment, he is free of his confusion, his failure to live, his strangeness.
Another one of my favorite hexagrams is #13, “Fellowship,” which is a little Rousseauian in its narration of the bland civilizing of its lioness-raised protagonist. There are copious treatments of the meaningful meaninglessness of poetry, including #28 and #42. Really, with such a cornucopia of “chance pieces,” the reader will enjoy finding his own preferred treasures.
Each of Buckingham’s hexagram-stories is accompanied by a headnote and endnotes, and these can be rather personal and chatty. Although some editors disparage chattiness, in this book, the conversational style anticipates the natural randomness of the premise and provides structure and a friendly sense of humanity. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces succeeds so well because of Buckingham’s affability as tour-guide.
In sum, this Book of Changes, like the recently-reviewed Metagestures, has made me rejoice that I am living in an age that has produced such brilliantly unconventional, refreshing, and fulfilling books.
Yellow Crane in the Rain 