Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They’ve searched for a “theory of everything” that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms; atoms, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be clusters of protons and neutrons; each of these is, more microscopically, a trio of quarks; and quarks, in turn, are presumed to consist of something yet more fundamental. Reductionists think that they are playing a game of telephone: as the message of reality travels upward, from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, it becomes garbled, and they must work their way downward to recover the truth. Physicists now know that gravity wrecks this naïve scheme, by shaping the universe on both large and small scales. And the Rashomon effect also suggests that reality isn’t structured in such a reductive, bottom-up way.
If anything, Feynman’s example understated the mystery of the Rashomon effect, which is actually twofold. It’s strange that, as Feynman says, there are multiple valid ways of describing so many physical phenomena. But an even stranger fact is that, when there are competing descriptions, one often turns out to be more true than the others, because it extends to a deeper or more general description of reality. Of the three ways of describing objects’ motion, for instance, the approach that turns out to be more true is the underdog: the principle of least action. In everyday reality, it’s strange to imagine that objects move by “choosing” the easiest path. (How does a falling rock know which trajectory to take before it gets going?) But, a century ago, when physicists began to make experimental observations about the strange behavior of elementary particles, only the least-action interpretation of motion proved conceptually compatible. A whole new mathematical language—quantum mechanics—had to be developed to describe particles’ probabilistic ability to play out all possibilities and take the easiest path most frequently. Of the various classical laws of motion—all workable, all useful—only the principle of least action also extends to the quantum world.
While you sit at your computer now, the world seethes behind the letters as they appear on the screen. You can toggle to a football match, a parliamentary debate, a tsunami. A beep tells you that an e-mail has arrived. WhatsApp flashes on the screen. Interruption is constant but also desired. Or at least you’re conflicted about it. You realize that the people reading what you have written will also be interrupted. They are also sitting at screens, with smartphones in their pockets. They won’t be able to deal with long sentences, extended metaphors. They won’t be drawn into the enchantment of the text. So should you change the way you write accordingly? Have you already changed, unwittingly?
“Good Riddance” is a caper novel, light as a feather and effortlessly charming. It will not save lives or enrich them in an enduring way (as Marie Kondo can do; two years in, my sock drawer can attest to that). But the book inspires a very specific kind of modern joy. I read it fast, in a weekend, during which I did not find my social media accounts or tidying my house nearly as diverting as what was on these pages. Being more attractive than Twitter may sound like a low bar, but in these distractible times, it feels like a genuine achievement.
Mouthful of Birds presents a medley of fantastic and absurd situations, but with a heaping spoonful of self-awareness, so that the curtain is partially pulled back on its own wonder, making the sleight of hand known, but no less understood, and all the more thrilling.
Numbering 208, there are more border crossings between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland than there are between the European Union and the countries to its east, which amount to a mere 137. That troubled border in the north-east of the island of Ireland runs for 310 miles along the middle of 11 roads, meets in the middle of at least three bridges and dissects two ferry crossings.
These facts come from a joint report between the Republic’s Department of Transport and the Northern Ireland Department for Infrastructure and are to be found in the Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter’s richly detailed The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics.
Tourgée attended and lectured a roomful of liberal reformers, educators and clergymen for over an hour. He celebrated the progress freedmen had made since emancipation, wondered if the churches had forgotten who Christ was and what he stood for, and criticized the presumption of the guest list: “We have sought testimony about the Negro from his avowed friends and confessed enemies, and think we shall obtain the truth by ‘splitting the difference’ between them. The testimony of the Negro in regard to his past and present conditions and aspirations for the future is worth more than that of all the white observers that can be packed upon the planet.”
This incident, which comes toward the end of Luxenberg’s absorbing book, is a valuable reminder of something easy to forget. Not that the North also had a race problem; no sentient American should be able to forget that. Rather, that in the century after Reconstruction, segregation was not the worst possible outcome for black people. There was also exclusion (not separate schools but no schools) and elimination. Thousands of African-Americans were murdered by lynching alone.
By its feverish climax — the last 20 pages spill out in one single, streaming sentence — Luiselli isn’t just giving us a story, she’s showing us new ways to see.
Within a week your sons emptied
your apartment, removed the Giacometti.
A daughter-in-law cancelled
your Tuesdays at the hairdresser’s.