I have loved the Toynbee tiles for a while. They’re all over the east coast, and Philadelphia in particular. There’s something urgent and singular about them. I’d looked the phenomenon up on Wikipedia a few times, but what I found was always just a description of a mystery.
But it’s a mystery that turns out to be solved. My colleague Bob pointed me toward this documentary, which I watched tonight and really enjoyed. I won’t say it’s the most artfully composed film, but the story it tells is wonderful.
The underlying impetus is necessarily about mental illness, and as with every fascinating story in this vein, one is all but certain to find tragedy if the temptation to keep digging is indulged for too long. Luckily (though perhaps also callously) the film avoids this, while still convincingly explaining the Toynbee tile mystery.
Spoiler alert, I guess: one industrious stranger has been fixated, for decades, upon the idea that science will be able to deliver the afterlife that he feels God has promised but failed to deliver. Molecules will be traced to their historical source, and reassembled, and life will be renewed. On Jupiter.
It’s crazy, of course, but watching the movie’s subjects trace minute particles of information through decades, assembling them into a completely coherent whole–it’s a thing to behold, and makes the tiles’ thesis seem a little less nuts.
(Also worth noting: the extent to which this investigation is enabled by the internet has to give pause to anyone worried about our modern panopticon. The film doesn’t dwell on this point, but it’s absolutely clear that this mystery would have persisted–and perhaps never even been noticed–in the days before the net.)
