The poetry of the cosmos in two books

"How in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness- do we attain completeness of being?”

Jan 10, 2024

Dear Global Jigsaw,

As I mentioned in my last post, my New Year resolution is to read more. This week’s newsletter is on a related subject - the first of a trio of posts focused on some of the best books I read in 2023.

But first, could I please ask you to consider upgrading to paid subscriber? You could become a patron of the arts for the price of a cup of coffee a month :-)

For me, 2023 was a year of introspection. I spent the first half getting chemotherapy and the second half grieving the abrupt loss of my mother. It often felt like the stuffing had been taken out of reality. What had once been substantial, was now weightless and shifting, like smoke.

I tried to make friends with fragility; with the idea that day does not always follow night. The inevitable corollary of this attempt was time spent thinking about what makes a life well lived. What are the building blocks of contentment? What manner of mind is able to divest regrets? How does one acquire the gift of seeing beauty in the mundane? How do you still?

All of which is why I was probably so taken by Maria Popova’s debut, Figuring, a book somewhere at the intersection of poetry and science, biography, and philosophy, that asks at the outset: “How in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness- do we attain completeness of being?”

Through the stories of (mostly female) scientists, and other intellectually striving characters, Popova illustrates the myriad ways that a life acquires meaning: depth of feeling, courage of convictions, curiosity. “The hunger for beauty is inseparable from the search for truth, both indelible pillars of the human spirit,” she concludes.

But amongst the greatest truths of being human, is pain. Many of Popova’s subjects live with physical pain almost as though it were an undergarment. There is Caroline Herschel (1750 – 1848), for example, who was the world’s first professional female astronomer, discoverer of eight comets and calculator of the locations of 2,510 nebulae. Herschel also suffered from pain for almost the entirety of her life, having barely survived typhus at the age of eleven, an affliction that left her half blind and stunted.

Popova quotes from a letter that an 81-year-old Herschel wrote to her niece, “My complaint is incurable, for it is a decay of nature…What a shocking idea it is to be decaying. decaying!”

Popova concludes, “Our psychology (today) has remained just as vulnerable to the shock of our mortality, the emotional upheaval of which endures unpalliated by reason.”

But 2023 was also a year when vulnerability, emotions, and other human characteristics became the subject of a more general interrogation, given the rise of large language model AI, like ChatGTP. What does it mean to be human when AI is more “intelligent” than us homo sapiens? Our anthropomorphic view of the world has always put “Man” at the center, differentiating us from other animals by virtue of our use of language, reason, and logic.

So what happens when the phone in our pocket is suddenly better than us at all these things? It becomes clear that what still makes us “special” is not knowledge or memory, but our emotional lives. Our passions, grief, longings and other deeply felt experiences. It is our intuitions, idiosyncrasies, epiphanies, and non-transactional kindnesses that will perhaps differentiate us from artificial forms of intelligent – at least for a while.

But while these questions feel urgent and present, they have been the subject matter for science fiction writer, Ted Chiang, for decades. I recently came to his collection of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others, and was entranced by its blend of philosophy and science. It is what the New Yorker described as “soulful science fiction.”

Each chapter is in essence an epistemological exploration, attempting to unpack how we know what we know, often by imagining worlds where the mental pathways to knowledge are radically different from how they work in the here and now.

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In the titular, Story of Your Life, the protagonist gains prior knowledge of the end of her own story and narrates the future as if it were something that had already occurred. She remembers the future. The central question here is the free will- determinism question that has long vexed philosophers and is currently poking at me – nature vs nurture, lifestyle vs genes, an inability to control how you die vs an ability to control how you live. How do you get your mind around the fact that both elements in these dichotomies are vital? Light behaves as both waves and particles. And so perhaps, we must act as though we are both free to choose and subject to laws beyond our control.

I am increasingly aware that we are all, each one of us, in a state reminiscent of Schrödinger’s cat. The veil separating stability from chaos is so fine, that it’s almost as though we inhabit two states at the same time: here and gone, healthy and sick, happy and distraught.

What ties the two books together is their amalgamation of the formalism of science and mathematics, with the aesthetics of poetry. They both reach for the rhythmic beauty of the cosmos, appealing to our whole selves, both rational and emotional.

*****

Next week, I will be running a week-long writer’s retreat at our home in the rolling hills of south west Spain, on the border with Portugal.

The view from the balcony of the house. Pic credit: Pallavi Aiyar

The retreat offers participants quiet time for writing and reflection in soulful surroundings filled with fruit trees, olive groves and stunning vistas. Our merry international band of fellow-writers (together we will represent India, France, the Philippines, Mexico, the United States and Russia) will spend the days writing. In the evenings we will convene to explore literature and craft over dinner, a wood burning fireplace crackling in the background. Non-writing activities will include hiking and taking in the star-crammed skies through powerful telescopes in what is one of the best spots in the world for Astro-tourism.

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