Gotham Diary:
Evolution/History
3 April 2012
Until I sat down at the computer just now, my head was brimming with interesting ideas, but they all wilted by the screen’s early light. I was going to mention that both George Dyson and Jonathan Haidt, authors of big , thick books that I’ve been reading, believe that human evolution has been occurring at a rate much, much faster than even such recent scientists as Stephen Jay Gould proposed. Dyson writes about “lateral gene transfer” as though it were a readily available lunch special. Haidt asserts that “religions and righteous minds had been coevolving, culturally and genetically, for tens of thousands of years before the Holocene era.” (Haidt also tips me off to the likely inspiration for Dyson’s title.) I’m more than inclined to agree; I’m convinced that human brains have undergone material changes since the Protestant Reformation — some human brains, anyway. I believe that the consciousness that we experience today was unknown before the Fifteenth Century.
So I’ve gone ahead and mentioned all of that, but in the process I’ve exhausted my ability to discuss it. I was about to say that the two books have little in common, but I suspect that that’s wrong; the books merely seem to differ sharply because The Righteous Mind is so painstakingly organized, while Turing’s Cathedral seems designed for random access. I have no idea why Dyson arranged his chapters in what seems to me to be reverse sequential order, but I understand that his penchant for telling stories is what makes him an incoherent historian, endlessly back-and-forthing among the years between the late Thirties and the middle Fifties. Whatever Alan Turing is doing in the title, the pre-eminent theme of the book is the life and thought of John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born charismatic polymath who by sheer force of personality organized the teams that created the hydrogen bomb. (The Manhattan Project, we learn, was really only a stage in the larger project.) The second theme — and it’s very distracting in a book involving so much advanced engineering and mathematics — is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. This is where Dyson grew up; his father, Freeman, was a professor at the IAS. Too many of the stories that Dyson tells belong in a scrap-book. Once these themes recede, in the final quarter of the book, Turing’s Cathedral becomes more intellectually intriguing, and I’m not sure that you have to have read the earlier chapters to enjoy them.
It occurred to me that somebody really ought to write a book called Mathematics for Novelists. This book would explain, as lucidly as possible, the things that interest mathematicians, but, more than that, it would convey a sense of their attraction to such things. Why does anybody care about sets? I’ve never understood. What is so pressing about David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, and why does it matter that Kurt Gödel solved it? Writers like Dyson assume that the allure of these issues is self-evident, but it’s not.
***
A View of the Harbour, Elizabeth Taylor’s third novel, took a while to capture my undivided interest, but it did so round about a passage that I want to mention for an entirely different reason — that’s to say, not as indication of the novel’s excellence. And before I get to that, here’s something that I just read a moment ago: “Detail entrances a child and warms his imagination and at school there is a dearth of detail, so that the imagination loses its glow and often dies.” So true — about the dearth of detail at school. Schools abound in three or four kinds of things — desks, hallways, posters, irritating lighting fixtures — but are deserts otherwise.
As to the earlier passage, I’m just going to jump in.
He looked out at the harbour from her front window and found all the buildings arranged differently. From here — for the foreshore curved slightly — the Cazabons’ house stood forward, a square stone house built, said Bertram, about seventeen-forty, its slates tucking down under a parapet … and two front windows so as to save the tax (Lily had sometimes wondered why); this curiosity did not extend merely to those who now lived in the house but to the ones who had built it and all those who had gone in through its front door in so many different kinds of clothes from seventeen-forty onwards.
This view of life was novel to Lily, who had always thought of the past in two sections — what seemed to her to be living memory, and then the great stretch of darkness behind that curtain which had come down so finally, so sharply-dividing on January the first, nineteen-hundred. Now, people began to peek through this curtain at her, and she found herself wondering about them.
What we have here is nothing less than the dawn, presented with Taylor’s offhand but amazing concision, of historical consciousness, together with an image that illustrates in everyday terms what historical consciousness feels like: it is the sense of “all those who had gone in through its front door in so many different kinds of clothes.” I believe that Lily’s previously limited understanding of the past occludes most people’s view of the future as well: beyond the lives of grandchildren, the imagination falters. Of course, we can’t foresee what the clothes will look like a hundred years hence with anything like the accuracy of our grasp of what they looked like a hundred years ago, but it helps to have a sense of change.
Now I’ll say something about the novel itself: I’ve been imagining it in a staged adaptation. Almost everything takes place in or before the houses on the front of a seaside village, and it’s easy to imagine the deft lighting of scrims opening up now this interior and now that to show the various lives that Taylor has collected under her microscope. This isn’t to say that I’d like to see a staged version of A View of the Harbour (a view from the harbor, it would be), only that the synesthesia of novel-reading and theatre-going is a pleasure in itself.