Sunlight melts snowflakes. Fire turns logs into soot and smoke. A hot oven will make a magnet lose its pull. Physicists know from countless examples that if you crank the temperature high enough, structures and patterns break down.
Now, though, they’ve cooked up a striking exception. In a string of results over the past few years, researchers have shown that an idealized substance resembling two intermingled magnets can — in theory — maintain an orderly pattern no matter how hot it gets. The discovery might influence cosmology or affect the quest to bring quantum phenomena to room temperature.
Last night, as I carried a basin of hot water out to my balcony to wash my feet, I caught sight of a reflection of the moon on its surface, and I wondered whether I should count it as a friend.
The Empusium is the first novel that Tokarczuk has published since delivering her Nobel Prize lecture, in which she called—in somewhat utopian terms—for a “fourth-person” narrator who will preserve literature’s “eccentricities, phantasmagoria, provocation, parody and lunacy” and who is also “capable of expressing the vaguest intuition.” We encounter this fourth-person narrator in The Empusium as an all-seeing “we,” a narrative consciousness that goes beyond what might be observed empirically. It is at once an undramatic, witty Greek chorus and a psychoanalyst in an invisibility cloak. “No, we do not regard it as an obsession,” this voice says of Wojnicz’s self-consciousness about his appearance, “at most as innocent oversensitivity. People should get used to the fact that they are being watched.” This is not the voice of paranoia; it is simply one attuned to the collective unconscious.
My assumption that humanist academics were all on the left was foolish, of course. But so was my defeatist certainty that grad school hadn’t trained me for anything useful. In fact, as Elyse Graham shows in her snappy and entertaining Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, humanists and their comma-hunting, cross-referencing, collecting, and cataloging ways made pivotal contributions to America’s war effort in Europe, and may well have ensured its success.
The beauty of Live Forever? is that it acknowledges the fix we’re all in, but manages to do so in a way that almost feels like a comfort. By taking care of ourselves and, crucially, by leading happy and fulfilling lives, Tregoning reassures us that we can still make a decent fist of a bad hand. We’re all headed for the grave, but he’s as good a person as any to lead us there.