“It looks like a surviving fragment of an actual letter, right?” says Erika Dowell, Lilly Library’s curator of modern books and manuscripts, as she examines the paper. In an 1893 short story called “The Final Problem,” John Watson quotes from the letter and explains how he found it on a narrow mountain ledge in the Alps outside Meiringen, Switzerland. It was there, he concluded, that Holmes tumbled to his death in the rushing waters of Reichenbach Falls.
Dowell knows, of course, that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character created in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle. She knows, too, that this is Doyle’s bold and precise penmanship; the Lilly Library owns numerous letters written in his hand. And although the full provenance of the letter fragment, which has been in the collection for decades, is unclear, she knows that it did not pass through Watson’s hands. He’s not real, either—unless, that is, you are “Playing the Game.”
One day a few years ago, an Englishman walked into a tourist shop on the ground floor of a Neapolitan palazzo and told a woman he encountered there that he was searching for the soul of Naples. The building, named Palazzo del Panormita, for an obscure fifteenth-century author of erotic Latin epigrams, stands near a small piazza named for the River Nile, recalling the Egyptian traders who once lived in a mini-quarter within the city center’s ancient Greek grid. (There was a Greek settlement there before the Parthenon was built.) Today, that grid runs into a thoroughfare cut by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, when the Kingdom of Naples was under their imperial control. Named Via Toledo by the Spanish, the street became Via Roma three centuries later, when Naples, at last free of a series of foreign overlords, joined a unified Italy. And yet for many Neapolitans the idea of being governed from Rome was apparently as abhorrent as Spanish dominion: the name Via Roma aroused so much resentment that, in the nineteen-eighties, the city brought the old Spanish name back into official use. Even now, Neapolitans differ sharply on what their central commercial street should be called.
The soul, then, of which Naples? Who could think of locating so elusive an aspect of a place built on such deep yet never fully buried layers of history, myth, culture, memory? What sort of dreamer enters a shop selling Pompeian-themed mouse pads to announce this quixotic goal? The circumstances would be ridiculous, except for the fact that the seasoned Neapolitan woman replied, as though she were a Sibyl in a cave and had been awaiting her questioner for centuries, “I am the soul of Naples,” and went on to prove her statement at least partly true.
Oreskes acknowledges the importance Popper placed on the role of attempting to refute a theory, but also emphasises the social and consensual element of scientific practice.
For Oreskes, we have reason to trust science because, or to the extent that, there is a consensus among the (relevant) scientific community that a particular claim is true – wherein that same scientific community has done their best to disprove it, and failed.
In the end, I’m not quite sure how we pulled it off. Did everything go our way because of good luck? Or did we channel Ferris’s buoyant optimism? I’d like to believe part of the magic came from impersonating Hughes’s hero. Chicagoans and visitors instantly recognized us and wanted to help us create the perfect day off. It might sound ridiculous, but “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” stirs both nostalgia and a certain civic pride for Chicagoans. After all, the film was Hughes’s love letter to the city.
I watched the leaves grow back on the trees on the street below my window. I craned my neck to see them from the top story of my New York City dorm overlooking the city. I could only spot four of them. And even so, they appeared microscopic. I moved here in January of 2021 when the air was too cold to enjoy the outdoors and when the masses were trapped indoors. Peering out the black industrial-looking windowpane, I saw my reflection appear, blurring into the city lights, like some sort of modern-day Kandinsky. I am taken back to my childhood, looking out the car windows smudged from my old dog’s nose. He used to pry his head out into the fresh air while dripping slobber all over. I am taken back to my side porch with screens instead of windows that allow indoor and fresh air to meet somewhere in the middle. I am taken back to when I could feel the outdoors take over my body whenever I pleased. But suddenly, the world existed in the confine of our own spaces. The locks on our doors tightened, leaving us isolated from the world around us.
At the heart of Svensson’s tumultuous epic lies a perennial query: Are our lives simply random intersections of space and time, or are they part of a grand master plan of the universe, where we are all but cosmic marionettes and nothing is coincidence? In the end, this vexing jigsaw puzzle of a novel issues a covert wink as it answers. In the words of the colorfully kooky Elif, the former child star now palling around Easter Island with Clara and a ragtag group waiting for the world to end: “Life’s just one big mess.”
Maybe it is a product of Fisher’s long Zen practice, but for all the finger-wagging in this wide-ranging text, his authorial voice is clear and gentle. Brimming with common sense and wisdom, a salmagundi of history, science, and informed opinion, The Urge should ignite the urge for invigorated conversation and debate about our current understanding and treatment of the malady you can catch from the corner dealer — or a lab-coated doctor.