QI The Book of the Dead

Fuller: he wasn’t interested in inventions as such. Instead of the dome, he said, ‘I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.’ His designs were merely a by-product of his larger quest: ‘My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe.’ Fuller’s real influence has been in the world-view he has helped to create. Words we now use as standard like ‘synergy’ and ‘holistic’ are a direct result of Fuller’s work. Every global campaign against poverty, or in favour of sustainability, owes something to Fuller’s vision outlined in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) and to his ‘doing more with less’ mantra. As his friend John Cage wrote, ‘His life was so important that it shines almost with the same intensity now that it did when he had it.’

     
    The lives of all the visionaries in this final chapter were changed by something they could not control , whether they called it inspiration, the Universe, an ‘altered state’ or the voice of God. Few of us have visions of anything like the same intensity (and let’s face it, given a life like Ann Lee’s, few of us would want them) but anyone who has ever been so absorbed in something that they forget where they are, will recognise the phenomenon described by the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell: ‘What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.’
    This is one of the great mysteries of life and (like most ofthem) it is also a paradox. If I’m most myself when I’m least aware of myself, then, who, or what, am I? As Buckminster Fuller put it: ‘I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.’
    Standing inside the vaulting lightness of a geodesic dome or admiring the beauty of a Shaker bowl, a Blake engraving or St Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham Cathedral brings us face to face with another mystery. Where do ideas come from? The lives of all the people in this book have survived because they left behind them something they made: a body of work, an idea, a bundle of stories. We have seen some of the common factors that unite those whose achievements were built to last. A few of them are obvious advantages – a positive outlook, a gift for languages, good luck – but the majority – terrible childhoods, parents dying young, being hopeless at school, illness, psychological trauma – look more like distinct drawbacks. The Dead were no better than us – they made mistakes, behaved badly, lost the plot, lost hope, treated each other cruelly – and, as we have seen, they certainly cannot be said to have had better lives. Ultimately, though, whatever they started with, and however badly it sometimes ended, all of our distinguished Dead did something that made a difference – and they did it by making something of themselves. And so can you. As a watchword for living, the old Lebanese proverb cannot be bettered:
    The one who is not dead still has a chance .
     

Further Reading and Acknowledgements
     
     
    M any of the books listed below acted as sources for the lives in this book. More importantly, they seem to us the perfect places from which to start your own explorations in the Underworld.
    All books of this kind are built on the scholarship and insight of others. Some repositories were raided more regularly than any others. At the head of the table stands the completely revised 2004 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com), which somehow manages to be both accurate and interesting about 57,000 people’s lives. It is a national treasure without parallel. Close behind it comes the American National Biography (www.anb.org), and the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica , the last great encyclopaedia to be written by real people, rather than teams of academics, with entries by Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Bertrand Russell, Algernon Swinburne and even the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. One of the many excellent things about dead people is that, unlike scientific knowledge or our taste in music, the details of their lives never go out of date. It would be churlish not to mention www.wikipedia.com. For all its unevenness and flaws it is an invaluable tool that will only grow in usefulness the more of us that use it.
    Wherever possible we have tried to indicate editions of books that are still in print.
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