Reviews and News:
A couple of pieces on the relationship between fiction and history caught my eye this morning. First, there’s Christopher Scalia responding to Peggy Noonan’s trouncing of The Crown’s historical inaccuracies. Scalia defends the Netflix show by turning to Sir Walter Scott’s use of history in his own novels: “Kids start with soft romances such as Waverley, but before you know it, they’re hooked on Robertson’s History of Scotland, Hume’s History of Great Britain, and maybe even some of that hard antiquarian stuff on weekends.” Then there’s Shalom Carmy on Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier: “We read Dickens or George Eliot because these writers have vision and insight. They show us new and striking perspectives on the world, bringing to the fore aspects often invisible in works of nonfiction. They articulate a profound understanding of human nature, illuminating the often-obscure motives and reasoning that guide our behaviors. They give us something we cannot get from a social scientist, historian, or journalist.”
Can the real Mark Twain—that is, Samuel Clemens—ever be known? Gary Scharnhorst in The Paris Review: “His autobiography is so rife with inaccuracies, embellishments, exaggerations, and utter untruths that a cottage industry of naysayers has developed to debunk it. Many parts contain not so much a remembrance of things past but a remembrance of things that did not happen.”
If you have a job that requires you to listen to complaints, this story, I’m sure, will ring true: Just 10 people are responsible for nearly 75% of Heathrow’s 15,000 noise complaints.
I was sorry to learn yesterday that Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has died. I had an email exchange with him just a few days ago (I didn’t know Bruce well, but we corresponded intermittently), and now he’s gone. Death is always a surprise, even when it’s not unexpected. Yuval Levin remembers him in National Review, as does Indiana University where he taught for many years.
Gilbert Cruz of Vulture has been named Culture Editor at The New York Times.
Inside the fight between the University of Texas and the Miller estate over Arthur Miller’s archive: “The Miller archive, comprising 322 linear feet of material, is certainly a rich one…There is also intensely personal material, including early family letters and drafts of an essay about the death of Marilyn Monroe, Miller’s second wife, begun the day of her funeral and revised over many years but never published.”
Essay of the Day:
Francis Bacon thought science would cleanse language of its imprecision. A closer look at quantum physics suggests otherwise, Samuel Matlack writes in The New Atlantis:
“In the twentieth century, some physicists, notably Robert Oppenheimer, worried that physics had reached a point of extreme alienation from popular language, and even from the language of other scientific disciplines. Intelligibility to non-physicists was becoming increasingly difficult, in some cases even impossible.
“Many physicists and science writers today seem more optimistic. While recognizing the distance between physics and ordinary language, they tend to believe that our language can be transformed to make the truths of physics available to a wide public audience. For instance, physicist Frank Wilczek writes that ‘Modern physics has opened up imaginative possibilities for cosmology that outrun the anticipations of ordinary language. To do them justice, we must both refine and expand everyday usage.’
“The question of whether and how physics can be rendered in ordinary speech is nowhere more important than in our assessment of writers who try to present a vision of the world that is wholly other than what our everyday experience would have us believe, a world that, many think, is more real. This is the spirit of the recent book Reality Is Not What It Seems by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, which promises to be a ‘magic journey out of our commonsense view of things, far from complete.’
“There is something deeply paradoxical about this project. On the one hand, it is motivated by a desire to dispel everyday illusions about the physical world that contribute to our human-centeredness. ‘We are obsessed with ourselves,’ writes Rovelli. ‘We study our history, our psychology, our philosophy, our gods. Much of our knowledge revolves around ourselves, as if we were the most important thing in the universe.’ Physics, he thinks, can teach us better.
“On the other hand, the only way to take a popular audience on this ‘journey out of our commonsense view of things’ in writing is in commonsense language, which is intricately tied to our everyday experience of the world. Writers therefore try to make physics intelligible to the general reader by translating esoteric mathematical theories into plain terms, while at the same time trying to show how conventional descriptions of the world as it appears to us do not match up with physicists’ descriptions of actual reality. This is a vexing task.”
Photo: Dubranec
Poem: Charles Martin, “Octaves of another Eden”
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