Of course you don’t really understand any given Really Long Book. You don’t – because no one truly can. These are not finished things, these are not self-contained things. There is no one single, clear and obvious thing that they are telling us. If nothing else, these things take so long for you to read them, that they worm their way completely into your life as you do so; you will be different every time that you approach them. If you ever think you’ve finished a Really Long Book, you have not understood it. If it contains any sense at all, then this sense is something that you will keep on returning to – revising, over and over again, throughout your life. At their best, these texts are every bit as opaque as the self. A true Really Long Book is something that you’re never done with.
They spice up dull hotel bars and live in corporate lobbies. They’re insta-gravitas props on movie sets and upgraded Zoom backgrounds for the pandemic era. Often they are sold to interior designers by the linear foot (about 10 to 12 books per foot typically), or to under-booked new homeowners, or chain store decorators and myriad others.
Want 10 feet of purple-spined, 10-inch-tall books that have never been opened? How about 100 feet of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet books to make your shelves look like a rainbow flag? It’s doable — and it’s been done.
I first held a violin in my late forties. Placing it under my chin, I let go an impious expletive, astonished by the instrument’s connection to mammalian evolution. In my ignorance, I had not realized that violinists not only tuck instruments against their necks, but they also gently press them against their lower jawbones. Twenty‑five years of teaching biology primed me, or perhaps produced a strange bias in me, to experience holding the instrument as a zoological wonder. Under the jaw, only skin covers the bone. The fleshiness of our cheeks and the chewing muscle of the jaw start higher, leaving the bottom edge open. Sound flows through air, of course, but waves also stream from the violin’s body, through the chin rest, directly to the jawbone and thence into our skull and inner ears.
Music from an instrument pressed into our jaw: These sounds take us directly back to the dawn of mammalian hearing and beyond. Violinists and violists transport their bodies—and listeners along with them—into the deep past of our identity as mammals, an atavistic recapitulation of evolution.
It makes no sense … until you imagine something else. Don’t imagine a snowy slope; it’s too passive. Imagine, instead, someone sitting at a desk. First, they boot up their computer. This is the quantum-foam stage, the computer existing in a state of suspended anticipation. Then, our desk person mouses over to a file called, oh I don’t know, KnownUniverse.mov, and double-clicks. This is the emergence of the inflaton. It’s the tiny zzzt that launches the program.
In other words, yes, and with sincere apologies to Tonelli and most of his fellow physicists, who hate it when anybody suggests this: The only explanation for life, the universe, and everything that makes any sense, in light of quantum mechanics, in light of observation, in light of light and something faster than light, is that we’re living inside a supercomputer. Is that we’re living, all of us, and always, in a simulation.
The trigger for this quantum of doubt was a new paper. There’s nothing particularly special about it; it’s just a proposal for an experiment that might tell us something more about how the universe works. But, to me, it felt like the final straw. It has opened my eyes to the possibility that, without radical change, quantum physics may forever let me down.
Essentially, I just want to know what I am made of. One hundred years ago this year, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr received the Nobel prize “for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms.” But I’m still waiting for a straight answer as to what the structure of the atoms that make up my body is. Quantum theory seems to promise an answer that it can’t deliver, at least not in any way that I can comprehend. As Bohr once put it, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
“I was obsessed with the notion of a poem as a kind of social grenade,” declares a major figure in Allegra Hyde’s “Eleutheria.” She and her creator both, I’d say. Hyde plants all sorts of IEDs in her first novel, shattering her protagonist’s heart, the streets of a decidedly un-United States and, especially, our fragile planetary ecosystem. This is cli-fi even when it turns intimate, with the first kiss between lovers or the failures of addict parents. Individual tensions generate unexpected crackle, but everyone’s caught in the same toxic knots, their environment collapsing around them. The upshot is a first novel way outside the norms: a work of imagination rather than autobiography.
Chen suggests that the repurposing of religion in this way is historically new, but in fact, America’s corporate titans have harnessed religion to motivate and control their workers since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. What strikes me as genuinely new in the world Chen depicts are the combinations of labor style and religion in play. Silicon Valley’s large working class — unstudied here — may still go to church on Sundays, but for the elite, work really is the source of meaning and mission. In the industrial era, it was brawn that made the hammers swing and energy that kept the furnaces firing.
As with all great books about dying, “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss” does not terrorize with grim statistics and forewarnings but rather destigmatizes euthanasia and enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude. It renews those joys of being “In Love” with the people around us — despite the numbing effects of routine and familiarity which so often cause happiness to lapse in middle age.