A decade later I write this essay in South Korea, the decidedly non-English-speaking country where I’ve lived for years, motivated in no small part by an interest in its language (its abundance of coffee and coffee shops, so essential to the working process of the essayist, also plays a part). Not long ago I returned from a trip to Taiwan, a destination also chosen out of interest in its language, or rather in its lingua franca, Mandarin Chinese (I did consider learning Taiwanese Hokkien, its most widely spoken local language, but couldn’t find much in the way of study materials). Now and again, my Mandarin-learning project has brought to mind a local news segment I saw back in New Zealand. It told of the introduction of immersion Mandarin classes into certain primary schools. Interviewing a teacher, the reporter closed with a question asked out of seemingly genuine concern for the students: “But aren’t you afraid their little brains will explode?”
It seems New Zealanders share with Americans and other Anglophones not only the English language, but also the perception of bilingualism as an impressive, potentially life-threatening achievement. Eddie Izzard expressed this attitude best: “Two languages in one head? No one can live at that speed.” That quote appears more than once in the work of Gaston Dorren, a Dutchman who’s made his name over the past 20 years writing books about languages.
Against such a background, it is not surprising to learn that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were in demand for their services as military engineers no less than as artists. Both were involved in large-scale projects, and da Vinci famously left designs for assorted weaponry, including what is often described as a machine gun. It was certainly the case that artists were expected to have a good basic grasp of engineering, and that the boundaries between art, architecture and engineering were very fluid.
The stereotype of the “renaissance man” is accurate to the extent that the culture of the age characteristically did not favour specialisation, but the record of actual achievement is patchy. Some of da Vinci’s military designs were more or less feasible, others were not; the elegance and flair of his sketches should not mislead us into thinking that all these projects represented some visionary anticipation of modern machinery, and it is better to see them as brilliant thought experiments in solving engineering problems rather than exact designs.
It is a sad paradox, but perhaps not surprising, that some of humanity’s greatest writing has been born in times of turmoil. In an effort to make sense of painful encounters with death and loss, authors have always tried to turn their sorrow and confusion into enduring monuments of beauty among the ruins, masterpieces that stubbornly surface in the wake of natural and man-made catastrophes, wars, civil strife, revolutions and political and economic upheaval.
Depending on who you ask, for example, present-day mathematicians have nearly as much chance of solving the Riemann hypothesis — the most famous unsolved problem in math — as da Vinci had of building a machine that could actually fly.
“As of yet there’s not been a proposed strategy for handling the Riemann hypothesis that’s even semi-plausible,” said Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.
But while it may have been obvious in da Vinci’s time that a functional version of the aerial screw would have to wait, often in math it’s not clear what’s possible and what’s not.
Will it be so in our own times of pandemic, suffering and grief?
Brit Bennett's first novel, The Mothers, was the sort of smashingly successful debut that can make but also possibly break a young writer by raising expectations and pressure. Four years later, her second, The Vanishing Half, more than lives up to her early promise. It's an even better book, more expansive yet also deeper, a multi-generational family saga that tackles prickly issues of racial identity and bigotry and conveys the corrosive effects of secrets and dissembling. It's also a great read that will transport you out of your current circumstances, whatever they are.
Those with high literary standards have often enjoyed Dickens against their better judgment. In The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Wilson sides with the gaping yokels.
One day, you will awake from your covering
and that heart of yours will be totally mended,
and there will be no more burning within.
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,