I have been thinking about memory these days, because I have been gathering contributions for Class Notes from my classmates at the Brearley School. Seven contributions have come in, either instantly or, after many weeks, reluctantly. They are long or short, emotional or matter-of-fact, describing adventures abroad or hard work at home, and now my job will be to cut and select, paraphrase and quote, and count words from each contributor—our entire collection will have to add up to no more than six hundred and fifty words. The hard part is trying to give more or less equal space to each of these life accounts, since some of us tend to recount incidents in great detail while others are tight-lipped. If nine of us altogether, including me and my co-agent, contribute notes, then each note is allowed a little over seventy words. If another contribution comes in at the last minute, we all go down to about sixty-five. Do I cut out the trip to Costa Rica, or the visit to the nephew in New Jersey? The recent grandchild, broken hip, or Scrabble competition?
“Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder, who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”
Perhaps that’s no surprise given that the concept can be difficult for the brain to grasp. It takes children longer to understand and use zero than other numbers, and it takes adults longer to read it than other small numbers. That’s because to understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing. It must recognize absence as a mathematical object.
Before you step into “Private Lives: From the Bedroom to Social Media,” an enticing exhibition at Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, let’s address the word intime, which anchors the French title: L’Intime. De la chambre aux résaux sociaux. You could be forgiven for instantly thinking of sex (intimate relations) or the body (intimate products). But intime encompasses more than the English translation, intimate.
I will leave it to the Belle and Sebastian obsessives, of whom there are many around the world, to figure out which details in this debut novel by the band’s lead singer and main songwriter are made up. As far as I’ve been able to work out, just a few names have been changed, of people and cafes. Apart from that, Nobody’s Empire could as well have been published as a recovery memoir. So let’s agree to call it autofiction, and take the book on its merits – which are considerable.