“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth.
Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison.
McClintock had a reputation for eccentricity. Still, her question seemed more likely to come from a philosopher than a plant geneticist. She went on to describe lab experiments in which she had seen plant cells respond in a “thoughtful manner.” Faced with unexpected stress, they seemed to adjust in ways that were “beyond our present ability to fathom.” What does a cell know of itself? It would be the work of future biologists, she said, to find out.
Forty years later, McClintock’s question hasn’t lost its potency. Some of those future biologists are now hard at work unpacking what “knowing” might mean for a single cell, as they hunt for signs of basic cognitive phenomena — like the ability to remember and learn — in unicellular creatures and nonneural human cells alike. Science has long taken the view that a multicellular nervous system is a prerequisite for such abilities, but new research is revealing that single cells, too, keep a record of their experiences for what appear to be adaptive purposes.
Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own.
The book is divided into six very different sections, including a stay in Venice, a treatise on masturbation, a description of a beloved dog’s euthanasia and a vivid erotic daydream involving Robin Hood. It is hard, at first, to understand how these parts relate to one another, for this uncompromising book offers few obvious clues, but on second reading they shift and merge, and the payoff for this extra mental and imaginative effort is a truthful and vivid portrait of a highly particularised human consciousness.
Democracy proves as fragile as its leaders, but TV’s expanse has led to all kinds of unintentional consequences. The Simpsons found such immediate success that it took on NBC’s The Cosby Show Thursday prime-time slot for a ratings tie and led, in at least some small way, to Murdoch’s News Corp owning The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins books, and Fox News. That The Simpsons wins consensus as one of the medium’s greatest creations defies industry gravity.