Every National Geographic since the 1920s, and a hunt for the Herald Tribune in Rajasthan
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
He began reading very young and never stopped. He completed his first library — read it out — in Three Rivers, California, where his grandmother Pauline lived most of her life.
The reading is in this record because it is the mechanism by which a boy who knew his lineage stopped twelve hundred years back went and found the rest of it himself.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Pauline's studio in Three Rivers had been a storage building for an apple orchard before she converted it. At the back was a cold, dark, nearly windowless room, and in it were bookshelves holding a complete set of National Geographic back to the 1920s — inherited from her father and extended across her whole life. Every single issue, without a gap.
He skimmed all of them and read the ones that mattered to him: history, archaeology, aircraft, ships, exploration, geology, palaeontology.
New Scientist, Scientific American, Life, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Omni, The Economist, Business Week. The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune. Read religiously, wherever he happened to be. He would buy out newsstands to be sure of having material.
Traveling round the world twice, he hunted the Herald Tribune — and usually found it, several days out of date, because that was how long it took to reach lower Egypt, or Agra, or Rajasthan, or Nairobi, or Siem Reap.
Hundreds of books, with a particular focus on the history of mathematics and science as personal narrative — the lives of Euclid, Pythagoras and Archimedes, down through Riemann, Einstein and Bohr. Alongside them: anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, comparative religion, and the polytheistic philosophy he encountered through Ramagiri and the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.
Every culture, every religion, every branch of science or myth, back to the beginning of the written record and before it. He has requested his Amazon order history to reconstruct the list.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
“Grandma” — an MFA from Berkeley, and the trailer below Sequoia
Open →where the documented record stoppedHare, Whitson, Wickwire — three families, three lineage records, one tradition
Open →what he went and foundEveryone's mathematics, everyone's law — and no culture's alone
Open →the comparative-religion threadThe ashram, and an unlikely overlap with Berkeley engineering
Open →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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