As i write these words, a significant part of humanity finds itself in the curious state of “social isolation.” The term carries the paradoxical inanity of a college advertising tagline and is as close to the truth. We are not truly isolated. Many of us now spend most of our waking hours in the presence of people we used to see for only a fraction of each day. Others live alone but tune into the pounding static of social media, news websites, television, and podcasts for a sense of connection to the world outside their windows. Silence feels as distant as it ever was. Nor are we social, exactly, though we do try. Zoom and Skype and Instagram live beam faces and voices into our rooms, but we miss touch and scent of skin, the warmth of another’s body, the easy energy of a conversation in place. We are neither with one another nor alone with ourselves, neither imprisoned nor truly free.
As new as this situation feels, the frustrations it provokes are ancient. The question is how to be alone, and the answer, as Stephen Batchelor suggests in his new book, The Art of Solitude, ultimately has little to do with the place one inhabits or the other people in it. Batchelor considers solitude not as a state of mind, but “as a practice, a way of life — as understood by the Buddha and Montaigne alike.” It is not isolation or alienation, though these are its shadow side. Rather, it is a way of caring for one’s soul, of sheltering it from noise and agitation, of directing it toward its authentic purpose. Batchelor is less interested in defining an ideal form of solitude than in meditating on the ways it can be practiced and exercised, lost and regained.
It starts with a closed loop — any kind of curvy path that ends where it starts. The problem Greene and Lobb worked on predicts, basically, that every such path contains sets of four points that form the vertices of rectangles of any desired proportion.
While this “rectangular peg problem” seems like the kind of question a high school geometry student might settle with a ruler and compass, it has resisted mathematicians’ best efforts for decades. And when Greene and Lobb set out to tackle it, they didn’t have any particular reason to expect they’d fare better.
Horror isn't many readers' first choice during times like these. And while the prospect of wallowing in the murkier end of the emotional spectrum isn't exactly high on the list of anyone's self-care regimen right now, there's a lot to be said for confronting our demons on the printed page as well as in real life. Emma J. Gibbon gets it. The Maine-by-way-of-England author's debut collection of short stories, Dark Blood Comes from the Feet, is an assortment of seventeen scalding, acidic tales that eat away at society's thin veneer of normalcy, convention, and even reality. At the same time, these horrific confections leave a sweet aftertaste of humanity.
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not one of them. Mazur is out to muddy time’s waters, dismantling the easy opposition between clock time and mental time, between physics and philosophy, between science and feeling.
He was ridiculously good-looking. He was even Nigerian
− though Mum flits between this being a good thing in people
and the worst. I pulled his photo up on the internet, showed her.
She decided, on the spot, his Nigerianness was a good thing.
Mark but the little Ant, how she doth run,
In what a busy motion she goeth on:
As if she ordered all the World’s Affairs;
When ’tis but only one small Straw she bears.