Topical Guide 98
Mark Dorset
Reading and Readers
ONE QUIET MORNING, a Saturday, in the spring, when I was three, while Dudley Beaker was sitting on his porch drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper, the thought struck him that it was time I learned to read.
Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
Poor Julius! So many writers and so few readers! It’s a fact. People read less and less nowadays . . . to judge by myself, as they say. It’ll end by some catastrophe—some stupendous catastrophe, reeking with horror. Printing will be chucked overboard altogether; and it’ll be a miracle if the best doesn’t sink to the bottom with the worst.
Our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He had filled his imagination with everything that he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.
Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, “The Station in Life of Don Quixote” (translated by Samuel Putnam)
Barber, Matthew
Mrs. Barber had one child, a son named Matthew, who was about my age. It was Mrs. Barber’s custom, while she tended the shop, to keep Matthew in the back room, which was full of dusty furniture, antimacassars and doilies, knickknacks and books, or, in good weather, to let him play in the tiny yard behind the shop. When Matthew grew tired and cranky, Mrs. Barber would read to him from one of the books that she had for sale …
Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
About a year and a half ago, I was body-surfing and caught a wave badly. I came up spluttering and choking, with the salty taste of death by drowning, and found myself thinking of my old schoolmate Matthew Barber. I hadn’t thought of him for years, but I found that once he had re-entered my mind I couldn’t stop thinking about him until I had written this book.
Reservations Recommended, the Preface
Anticipation, Disappointment
“What have you got there, Dudley?” she asked. She stepped toward him again and tried to look behind him. He turned so that she couldn’t see. She turned the other way. “What are you holding behind your back?” she asked. She grabbed his arm and tried to turn him around. He twisted away. Her bathrobe fell open. Mr. Beaker drew a sharp breath. My mother blushed and pulled her robe closed. Mr. Beaker turned toward me.
“I—have—something—for—Peter,” he said, advancing toward me and releasing one word with each step.
“Oh,” said my mother. She let her arms fall to her sides. “Isn’t that nice. Isn’t that nice, Peter?” she said.Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience.
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, “Exactitude”
Considering the situation of a woman betting that a playing card standing upright on its bottom edge will fall to the left or the right:
It is instructive to split the universe into three parts: the object under consideration, the environment, and the quantum state of the observer, or subject. The Schrödinger equation that governs the universe as a whole can be divided into terms that describe the internal dynamics of each of these three subsystems and terms that describe interactions among them. These terms have qualitatively very different effects.
The term giving the object’s dynamics is typically the most important one, so to figure out what the object will do, theorists can usually begin by ignoring all the other terms. For our quantum card, its dynamics predict that it will fall both left and right in superposition. When our observer looks at the card, the subject-object interaction extends the superposition to her mental state, producing a superposition of joy and disappointment over winning and losing her bet. She can never perceive this superposition, however, because the interaction between the object and the environment (such as air molecules and photons bouncing off the card) causes rapid decoherence that makes this superposition unobservable.
Even if she could completely isolate the card from the environment (for example, by doing the experiment in a dark vacuum chamber at absolute zero), it would not make any difference. At least one neuron in her optical nerves would enter a superposition of firing and not firing when she looked at the card, and this superposition would decohere in about 10[to the]-10 second, according to recent calculations. If the complex patterns of neuron firing in our brains have anything to do with consciousness and how we form our thoughts and perceptions, then decoherence of our neurons ensures that we never perceive quantum superpositions of mental states. In essence, our brains inextricably interweave the subject and the environment, forcing decoherence on us.Max Tegmark and John Archibald Wheeler, “Decoherence,” Scientific American, February 2001
[more to come on Wednesday, September 29, 2021]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
Nicholson Baker has a great essay about display books in “The Size of Thoughts”.