Yet after I hung up, I thought and thought and thought and, by the time Tonin came back that night, something had clicked. Then when we talked about it together, something clicked for both of us.
“World Game. Think about it,” Tonin said. “That it’s a game makes people want to play. It’s straightaway brilliant.”
In my case, I was more intrigued with Fuller’s story—an architect without credentials who wrote poetry and built bubbles of love so big we could see them from the sky.
We’d been searching for several years now for something that made sense, at least had some of the compulsion of the anti-war movement. We weren’t certain that we wanted to pick up overnight and speed back to New York but we were sufficiently infected with Teddy’s enthusiasm to want to learn more.
Already a Fuller fan, Tonin was more than happy to update his knowledge. And so the following week, we hopped into the fire engine and drove the fifty miles to the cavernous public library in Knoxville where we found a mountain of material about Buckminster Fuller. It appeared that his adherents were widely distributed.
We discovered that Fuller had written more than a dozen books; countless pictures had been taken of him and his zany inventions; for the past 15 years, he’d self-published bulletins of the World Design Science Institute, also his creation, and the Knoxville Public Library had copies of them all. Just the "chronofile" of his life was fifty pages long.
—“The
Persuasion,” p. 75
