Of course, all art is an attempt to come to terms with and explain the human condition. However, the way the novel has evolved makes it supremely successful in investigating our lives – or, more significantly, revealing other lives to us. You can write a long and complicated novel about a single day in an individual’s existence (Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway) or you can write a novel about war and conquest and the decline and fall of empires (War and Peace and the Fortunes of War and I, Claudius novels), but the novel’s unique power lies in its scrutiny of the human factor. No other art form – though theatre runs it close – can deal so effortlessly with the minutiae of our everyday lives. Crucially, no other art form can penetrate the subconscious mind so easily, can expose and elucidate the tiny shifts in nuance of a person’s behaviour and thinking. Other people are opaque, mysterious – even those closest to you. If you want to know what makes human beings tick, in every sense, good and bad, banal and sinister, read a novel.
And yet, looking at the 400-year history of the form there is, it seems to me, something of a lacuna. Novels have covered every possible aspect of human experience but very few have attempted to do full justice to the entirety of that “brief crack of light” that Nabokov describes. By this I mean the whole-life or cradle-to-grave novel. The genre is small and its exemplars rare. Even long novel sequences such as Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu or Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time end long before their protagonist’s demise. The life described is not complete.
The way that New York publishing kept itself pure back then was to recruit entry-level workers exclusively from liberal arts colleges in the area. That is how I, a middle-class dipshit from Oregon who knew nothing about anything but somehow landed at Vassar (whereupon I learned primarily about smoking cigarettes), ended up in a cubicle in the iconic Flatiron building, answering phones and parking my tuches in a chair that was the rightful property of some debutante. I knew, though, that even a hayseed like me could make it in publishing with financial discipline, prodigious talent, and sheer, unadulterated hunger.
But it was the ’90s and I had none of those things. I had a brand-new credit card that I used to outfit myself in the era-appropriate vestments of shiny over-pocketed gunmetal, and I had a weight-management plan that consisted of vending-machine Chuckles, and that was about it. My opinion on ambition — any sort, by anyone, toward anything — was unadulterated scorn. That is precisely why webzines were so appealing. Not only did most of them deal in exactly the sort of weaponized sarcasm I already deployed against my well-bred betters, but their writers were randos like me from wherever (Wisconsin! Seattle! Canada!), and seemed just as unambitious as I was.
It’s no wonder then that different interpretations of the double-slit experiment offer alternative perspectives on reality. For example, in the late 1920s and early ’30s, some physicists made the startling claim that a particle going through two slits has no clear path or indeed no objective reality until one observes it on a screen on the other side. At a gathering of physicists and philosophers at the Carlsberg mansion near Copenhagen in 1936, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir recalled someone protesting: ‘But the electron must be somewhere on its road from source to observation screen.’ To which Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, replied that the answer depends on the meaning of the phrase ‘to be’. In other words, what does it mean to say that something exists? One philosopher in the group that day, the Danish logical positivist Jørgen Jørgensen, retorted in exasperation: ‘One can, damn it, not reduce the whole of philosophy to a screen with two holes.’
Yet it is extraordinary just how much of quantum physics and philosophy can be understood using a screen with two holes – or variations thereof. The history of the double-slit experiment goes back to the early 1800s, when physicists were debating the nature of light. Does light behave like a wave or is it made of particles? The latter view had been advocated in the 17th century by no less a physicist than Isaac Newton. Light, Newton said, is corpuscular, or constituted of particles. The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens argued otherwise. Light, he said, is a wave – the name given to the vibrations of the medium in which the wave is travelling. For example, a wave in water is essentially the way water moves up and down as the wave propagates. Huygens argued that light is vibrations in an all-pervading ether.
“If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissable in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone,” Prejean writes, “not just individuals but governments as well.” In the quarter-century since the publication of “Dead Man Walking,” the evidence remains unchanged: executions do not prevent crime, and taking another person’s life is a poor cure for inconsolable grief. Killing is always a moral crime, if not always a legal one. Near the end of her memoir, Sister Helen states her conviction that if executions were made public—if more people knew the truth of the act—“the torture and violence would be unmasked, and we would be shamed into abolishing executions.” “Dead Man Walking” pulled back that mask. We cannot close our eyes. We must not look away.
After reading “Farsighted,” am I more aware of all the difficulties of making long-term decisions? Definitely. Do I feel better equipped to make those decisions? I’m not sure. This is an idea book. You won’t find the easy formulas that dominate the self-help genre or the 2x2 matrices common to business books. Johnson left me more convinced than ever of the psychologist Ellen Langer’s advice for making tough choices: “Don’t make the right decision. Make the decision right.” Since you’ll never have enough information to make the best choice, all you can do is make the best of the choice you’ve made.
Yet maybe that’s the point. As a species, we’re wired to be nearsighted. Flipping to farsighted requires peering into a crystal ball. Your vision will always be blurry. But there’s no better corrective lens than a clear diagnosis of just how myopic you are. If you want to improve at predicting the future, start by recognizing how unpredictable it is.
Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), the regal American literary and social critic, was an ardent letter writer — he composed as many as 600 a year — but a slow-moving one. Corresponding with him was like playing squash with an opponent who pockets your serve, walks off the court and returns four months later to fire it back.
Nearly all the letters in “Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling,” edited by Adam Kirsch, begin with apologies and small arias of explanation for delay. Most of these explanations have to do with course- and committee-work at Columbia University, where Trilling taught for most of his career. Sometimes the excuses were existential. My favorite appears in a 1951 letter, in which Trilling tells Norman Podhoretz that “nothing less than the totality of The Modern Situation, the whole of Democratic Culture, has kept me from writing to you.” Kids, do not try this excuse at home.