The Portal Story
When I was a kid, I read all of these stories that I thought were known to be the same story, but different versions of it. I called it The Portal Story, and it was always the same: somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence in an ordinary world, until some sort of magical portal, accidentally or on purpose, enters their life.
And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, a looking glass, platform nine and three quarters, or, you know, Dorothy famously was used to introduce Technicolor, where, in the first part of the film, she's in Kansas and it's in sort of grayscale, black and white. And then she lands in Oz and they open the door and it's Technicolor, and there's this transitional scene where you see Technicolor for the first time.
The question is: Where's The Portal? Like, why do we tell the same story over and over and over again with different protagonists? It's always the same formula. It's somebody trapped in an ordinary world, they find The Portal, and The Portal becomes the call to adventure. And they spend time in the alternate universe, and then somehow they're able to live.
Very often they return. At the end of the adventure, the tollbooth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it, you know? And so my question was always: Why? Why on earth would you tell the same story over and over and over and over again. It has the same format, and it's always a different context. And I came to believe that this story is actually this unkept promise for most people. That, in their adult lives, they don't find these portals.
So, for example, have you ever been to Barcelona, Spain? There is a church in Barcelona, Spain, called La Sagrada Familia. It is the most bizarre interior space I've ever seen in my life. There is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet. And that is a Portal, right?
And so if you think about, psychoactive chemicals, some of them are stupefying, but some of them are portals. And this concept of, if you look at a wall, how do you know that the wall doesn't have a door? How do you know that there isn't a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book?
We learn to stop looking for The Portal, and I think what I do differently than other people is that I became obsessed with exits, that there are other worlds, and they're real! That this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole in the matrix is a metaphor for very real things.
- Eric Weinstein on JRE
On YouTube[edit]
On X[edit]
Adult life: a tollbooth leading to a wardrobe enclosing a looking glass containing a rabbit hole with ... a magical tollbooth.
This article describes sheet music for a symphony that's never performed. It's unreadable.
But as one of the great insights into the purest elegance ever found, it's too beautiful not to know it's there. I dream of performing it for non-mathematicians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel%E2%80%93Weil%E2%80%93Bott_theorem
It says that for any collection of abstract symmetries, the flat ones can always be realized as a chorus of frozen waves dancing in place on the abstract symmetries themselves.
If we survive another 1000 years, we will remember the decent & good man who completed the symphony.
Here's my point: All those 'portal stories' you read as a kid, are about things like this. This is where the rabbit hole goes. This is where the phantom tollbooth leads. This is Narnia, and its *totally* real. If I ever figure out how to teach it, I'll take you there.
Promise.
Under no circumstances should you give this material to kids:
Great Brain Series
Surely Your Joking Mr Feynman
Pippi Longstocking Series
The Double Helix
The Phantom Tollbooth
Old Mad Magazines
Songs by Tom Lehrer
All the Trouble in the World
Harrison Bergeron
The True Believer
Gift list in honor of my friend Melanie Notkin, the @SavvyAuntie, and her writing that gives voice to the aunties out there who contribute to our next generation. Naughty aunts/uncles are essential to circumventing the excesses of parents.
Please read: https://t.co/iWe8pn7ode đ
The fictional character that changed my life.
RIP to Norton Juster. I canât tell you what that book meant to me. It was, in fact, the main inspiration for the title of my podcast.
- Portal = Tollbooth
Thank you for that one book. Perhaps my favorite of all time.
https://x.com/The_Pigeon/sta/The_Pigeon/status/1369270508206907396
Thank you Norton Juster. This illustration of your words got me through 7 years of my life when I couldnât function in K-12.
School, but for those of us with *significant* learning differences:
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