When We Cease to Understand the World

Thoughts on Benjamin Labatut's Metamodern History

We shall not cease from exploration,

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

1

The other week, I was sitting in the emergency room for multiple hours—not to fear, everyone’s okay—trying to read through Benjamin Labatut’s experimental novel about genius scientists and mathematicians, and at some point I realized I’d already read through an entire section and still hadn’t managed to understand a single thing.

Given the title of Labatut’s book, When We Cease to Understand the World, I should’ve known what I was getting into. The book, which I’ll not-exactly-review-but-talk-about-below, is about what happens when genius scientists and mathematicians—Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, de Broglie and Grothendiek, to name a few—started to doubt everything they thought they knew about reality.

As I sat in the emergency room and waited for my loved one to be seen (they wouldn’t be called in for another eight hours), I watched the goings on at Hôpital Saint-Antoine Urgences and began to experience my own kind of surreality.

There was a competitive cyclist who’d come in still wearing his skin-tight jersey, which, given the high-speed accident he’d suffered, more resembled a draping of rags than a one-piece racing suit. The raw flesh of his right knee, right thigh, right ribcage, and right shoulder shimmered in the bright fluorescent lighting and was patched in various areas with white bandages stained pink. But while his left arm was in a sling and his face was in severe pain, he still seemed calm and far better off (at least audibly speaking) than the woman across the room who was groaning and clutching her stomach, who was herself in less danger (it seemed to me) than the witchy French woman—tattered shoes, multiple socks, at least two scarves—with a horribly infected ring finger that looked necrotic, its circulation cut off by a golden wedding band that in my mind was the last vestige of her dearly departed lover, cutting off all of the blood flow to her fourth digit, which was as black as the insect that landed on my knee and cleaned its mandibles—it was a fly.

As I waited for Dr. Godot to arrive, I ended up re-reading the entire section on Walter Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which says when faced with a pairing of physical properties, the more we know about one of the two properties, the less we can know about the other.

2

I was never particularly adept at math, but I think I understand Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle well enough because I, too, have been struggling to make sense of my various selves lately.

Since publishing my second novel, I’ve felt like anything but a novelist; for the first time in over a decade, I don’t have a clear idea of a book in my head. There’s freedom in this, and I like to say I’m letting the literary fields lay fallow, but this might simply be a poetic way to justify procrastination versus a genuine desire to stay away from the page.

Still, this sense of no-deadline freedom is in direct competition with the anxiety and uncertainty that come with being a novelist publishing a book, which means, almost exclusively in this day and age, trying to sell a book as if I’ve been put on this earth to be a salesman.

I’ve already written in “In Search of Artistic Integrity” about the myriad ways in which writers must be able to inhabit, paradoxically, the role of diligent, somewhat anti-social author + PR team + literary agent + biggest cheerleader + schmoozie cocktail hour extraordinaire—all of this predicated on the idea that writing a book is inferior to selling one … and while I’m proud to say *almost* all 300 limited 1st-edition copies are sold out, as an independent publisher I now have to deal with putting the book on the global market, which means I feel like a fraud because I am not, in fact, a salesman.

Yes, it’s been challenging to find time inspiration to write as of late whilst also trying to make a living as a literary tour guide, staying in shape, eating well, exercising properly, and drinking plenty of water, too, hosting old and new friends in Paris and cultivating newfound literary connections while also envisioning a world in which I am brave enough each day to get up and write … all of this without considering how much of a bummer the world seems like these days, what with the ceaseless scroll of doom and gloom headlines and fascism on the rise.

Woof.

Thankfully, there’s literature, and escaping into Story has never ceased to make sense to me, which is why when I feel a bit lost uninspired, I always resort to reading fiction.

3

Given my own reservations about comprehending existence these days, When We Cease to Understand the World seemed like a good fit.

Some might think writing about Labatut’s experimental metamodern historical fiction is old news (it was published four years ago), but a) I still haven’t read The Bible or Moby Dick, b) true works of art transcend the space-time continuum, which is more or less precisely what Labatut’s book is all about.

When We Cease to Understand the World purposefully blurs the lines of fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, and science, leading to one of the more unique narratives I’ve ever read about insanity and genius.

Ostensibly, Labatut’s novel is about how some of the most intelligent book-smart human beings ever to set foot on planet Earth almost lost their minds trying to pursue the most profound truths (the “book-smart” distinction is vital here because most of the men discussed felt trapped within their own troubled minds; they were neither good dinner party guests nor were they memorable lovers, and one gets the sense that for all of their advances in scientific achievement, the “geniuses” in When We Cease died miserable and unfulfilled).¹

If Labatut’s novel concerns genius, it is only because of genius’s connection to insanity. Consider this excerpt about a painter named Vasek:

“Vasek was a painter, but he had also compiled an extensive collection of works he called art brut: poems, sculptures, drawings and paintings composed by psychiatric patients, mentally disabled children, drug addicts, alcoholics, perverts and sexual deviants, whose twisted visions, it seemed to him, bore the seeds from which the myths of the future would spring forth.”

Throughout When We Cease to Understand the World, one gets the sense that as the adage goes, the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. Labatut’s assessment of quantum mechanics sums up the conundrum of intelligence best, albeit speaking of quantum mechanics:

“[Quantum mechanics] has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions.”

I felt exactly the same way reading the novel: simultaneously enthralled and bewildered, hopeful yet disillusioned, I read tales of some of the smartest human beings to ever walk the planet, many of whom lost their minds or otherwise concluded there was something very wrong with our understanding of existence.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a timely reminder of the limits of the intellect—and the sanctity of art—when faced with the absurd, and while I confess 1) I spaced out at various times throughout the book and 2) many of the explanations of the physics, math, and especially quantum theory² went entirely over my head, what I appreciated most about Labatut’s work was acknowledging that being confused is part of the point, because

how else are we expected to make sense of that which is senseless?

My favorite takeaway from the entire book was the beautifully elucidated fact that the world of binaries simply no longer exists.

According to Labatut, if Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr had anything to say about the matter of existence, the oh-so-tired paradigm of x and y, left and right, black and white, blue and red no longer serves us on a fundamental level:

“Reality, [Heisenberg & Bohr] said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. A quantum object has no intrinsic properties. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured; it is only in that instant that it appears. Before being measured, it has no attributes; prior to observation, it cannot even be conceived of. It exists in a specific manner when it is detected by a specific instrument. Between one measurement and the next, there is no point in asking how it moves, what it is, or where it is located. Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.”

5

It is the act of measuring that reifies the object.

I imagine I’ll be thinking about the implications of this for a long time because I have an intrinsic sense that I inhabit at least two distinct forms in my writing life: as a writer who romanticizes the idea of writing in my notebook without hope or despair for publication, let alone profit, and as a published author who really does hope every book store will love him … but also as a husband who wants to continue writing his love story with his lovely wife far away from the city; and as a singer-songwriter who misses writing and playing songs in Paris with his twin brother; and as a solo artist who has aspirations for a piano/vocal solo album; and finally as a literary tour guide in Paris who loves telling stories in the flesh, out in the “real” world.

Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World is a triumphant example of a book that made me think about truth… but less about what Truth is than why we are so obsessed with defining it.

Just like the principles of quantum mechanics, and whether in mathematics, physics, or our everyday lives, the definition of truth is inseparable from the motivation to define it, forever attached to our ceaseless attempts to explore a fundamentally unknowable mystical world.

1. The idea of locating and defining “genius,” a subject I discussed in essay format with

Elle Griffin

last year, reminds me of a conversation with a German gentleman at a party years ago.

“Given the advent of brain-mapping technology,” he said, “it’s hypothetically now possible to locate the parts of the human brain where genius is located. And if we did that, well then, couldn’t we learn how to develop geniuses in our society?”

I looked at him with a mixture of horror and fascination. “Are you suggesting we create a superhuman race of geniuses?”

“Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

“I feel like there was another group of people in recent German history who were convinced that with pseudoscience, they could also create a superhuman race…”

The German gentleman shook his head. “You’ve got me all wrong. It all depends on how you use it.”

2. Isn’t it curious that Cormac McCarthy’s last novels, The Passenger + Stella Maris, were about mortality, string theory, quantum physics, and the terrifying grandiosity/emptiness that comes with a superior intellect?