In the Wave Lies the Secret of Creation by Walter Russell
Published 1995 · 37,898 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Science & Nature
How hard is In the Wave Lies the Secret of Creation to read?
In the Wave Lies the Secret of Creation scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Binder's commentary is saturated with Russell's invented cosmological lexicon — 'octave wave,' 'locking point,' 'cube-sphere,' 'dynameter,' 'gyroscopic plane angle,' 'genero-radiative' — coined terms that appear on nearly every page with no glossary. These aren't archaic literary words but a private technical vocabulary readers must learn from scratch, denser and more repetitive than Gravity's Rainbow's jargon since the same several dozen neologisms recur across all 54 plates.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences run long but stay declarative and additive rather than nested — Binder piles clause after clause describing what a painting 'reveals' or 'symbolizes' without Jamesian subordination. The prose reads more like extended captioning than literary syntax, closer to 2666's navigable long paragraphs than to Ulysses-level grammatical demand.
- Abstraction: 86 out of 100
- There is no scene, character, or event — only diagrams of forces: gravity cycles, wave polarity, the cube-sphere archetype. Every plate is discussed purely as an abstraction of universal principle, sustained across all nine plate series without narrative or concrete grounding, placing it above Gravity's Rainbow's metaphysical digressions since the entire book never leaves this altitude.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Each plate's commentary cross-references figure numbers, prior Russell texts (The Secret of Light, The Home Study Course), and multiple simultaneous claims about color, geometry, and polarity in a single paragraph. The analysis of Figure 20 alone packs octave-ratio mathematics, a planetary comparison, and an etymological correction of Russell's own wording into a few hundred words.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Binder and Russell state their interpretations directly — 'this painting reveals,' 'this symbolizes' — rather than requiring the reader to infer meaning from implication. When something is genuinely uncertain, Binder says so outright ('the significance...is unclear') instead of leaving it submerged in subtext.
- Symbolic density: 84 out of 100
- The entire book is an exercise in symbol-reading: colors encode sex polarity, cubes and spheres encode creation and dissolution, spirals encode motion, and every one of the 54 plates is explicitly decoded as allegory for the Russell Cosmogony. This exceeds Moby-Dick's whale-as-everything because here literally every visual element, without exception, is assigned symbolic function.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- Binder writes with total sincerity and reverence, never questioning the cosmology's premises, only occasionally correcting what he takes to be Russell's own errors of expression. There is no gap between what the text asserts and what it means — the tone is closer to scripture than to literature.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- The overarching cosmology claims complete resolution — 'the mechanism is hereby revealed' — yet Binder repeatedly admits defeat on specific plates, calling the Enigma Series paintings ones whose 'ultimate significance...escapes me.' The tension between totalizing certainty and admitted local mystery keeps several plates genuinely open.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- The book follows a simple catalog structure — plate, then commentary, organized into nine numbered series with an index — with no timeline shifts, competing narrators, or formal experiments. Cross-references between plates add some non-linearity, but the overall shape is a straightforward reference sequence.
How In the Wave Lies the Secret of Creation is regarded
In the Wave Lies the Secret of Creation holds a literary regard score of 13 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.