Rahman

That’s what maps mysteriously do: They obliterate information to provide some information at all.

Consequently, the loss of information and understanding that every act of representation involves is the effect of an act of destruction that serves a need.

Our memories do not visit us in chronology, and the story we form by joining up the memories involves choices with the purpose of making a whole and finding a pattern.

Knowledge, and especially disagreeable knowledge, cannot by any art be totally excluded even from those who do not seek it. Wisdom, said Aeschylus long ago, comes to men whether they will or no. The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall; and it is surely truer prudence to move our furniture betimes into the open air than to stay indoors until our tenement tumbles about our ears. It is and it must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them.

• A. E. Housman.

We believed that the passion was testimony to the depth of our mutual love, when in fact it exposed the intensity of the loneliness that had driven us toward each other, that had primed us for the intimacy of the act and the fantasy that fueled it all.

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Einstein believed in an abstract God, the God of Spinoza, he said, who apparently reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists and not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.

I felt in the glow of those words did not evidence something deeper in all human nature, a receding cry in every human heart, when the promise of home peeks into view.

Perhaps that’s what friendship can do: the presence of another indirectly giving us better access to the hidden parts of ourselves.

Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

—John le Carré, ‘A Perfect Spy

Therein lies the heart of the matter: England and an English education, in which to carry knowledge was a social act, a statement of class and position.

I hope so. It’s still early days. All I can say is that I have the impression there are things being said—and I mean even the stuff of idle banter in the corridors of chambers—things that mean more than the mere words being used to say them, and there are things that remain unsaid that possibly no words could convey.

Your Grace, there is a great upsurge of the urge in people for certainty. Their charge is that you offer them not that kind of certainty but doubt. The archbishop paused to reflect. With his hands clasped, as if in prayer, he replied: Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?” 

Mathematics, which doesn’t include the tawdry efforts of statistics or probability, pure mathematics, the product of the human mind turning to face itself, turning into itself, and finding in the realm of necessary consequences, where no contingent fact is to be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or touched—it discloses a beauty that exhausts human comprehension and a certainty the senses can never touch.

Our choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm and devour us.

He, like so many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people.

The earth is home to a creature, a great ape he calls himself, that has taken on the task of explaining the universe, of accounting for all that there is, his world, his social world, his physical world, the fall of empires and apples alike. The creature is now wending his way along the corkscrew path of his evolution, inside a few splintered years hewn from a vast time line not of his own making, a time line that goes back to some soundless bang venting all the nuclear waste studding the voids of space, a time line that goes far forward, beyond the day when this creature’s biological changes will make him as charming to his descendants as his artists’ impressions of the first biped hominid are to him now—a time line that will long outlive the hour his planet perishes in the final blaze of a dying sun. Does it not strike him as disturbing that the explanations of the world he finds are intelligible to him? Has he not paused to consider that if he finds an answer, it is only to a question he is capable of asking? Until he learned better, he said that man was unique among creatures for having language, unique among creatures for having reason, unique for the gift of conscience, unique for conceiving other minds, unique it seemed in every way. The animal’s hubris now persists in his idea that the truth beneath what he perceives, from the cosmic out there and forever to the mundane here and now, and even the man made, that such ever-present truth as he believes there could be will not exceed his capacity to understand. —attributed to Winston Churchill in Zafar’s notebooks.

For a long time, including the day I met Emily, I believed that decent people did not wish to cause suffering. This I now know not to be true.

Knowing how things are doesn’t make you see them correctly, doesn’t stop you from seeing things incorrectly. Stare at the image as much as you like, it’s all in vain. It will never surrender the truth, not to your naked eyes; you have to go in armed with a straightedge.

In his notebooks is this note: In order to catch even a fleeting glimpse of the world, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it. Is such a goal beyond our ability, beyond mine?

This is how fear works. It transforms our perceptual field. It changes how we allow ourselves to experience the world—in order to circumvent the fear.

At first, I saw it as an enormous change in the man I knew, but that notion did not survive reflection. What presumption is involved in attributing change to him when all that can be said is that I had come to know something about him that I had not known before?

There’s a line, he said, in Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt: It is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for hard times.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

—Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

Evangelize by all means and, if necessary, use words.

My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you’re made of, and what you want.

It’s when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved.

In an article in Science magazine in 2000—one of those links emailed to me by my father—the novelist David Foster Wallace writes:

Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc.… but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.

(Some years ago, he explained to me his belief that that kind of hollow consolation was disrespectful because it presumed that the person being consoled wouldn’t see or care about the absence of reason. The thing to do first and foremost, he believed, was not to talk but to listen, and listening, like anything difficult, is easier said than done.).

Sometimes, when properly regarded, the problem in front of us is understood to be no problem at all, or at least not of the kind we believe it to be.

A metaphor is useful only for transforming what happens, enriching it in some way. It never tells you what actually happened, how it happened, or why it happened.

Putting things on paper makes things real, hardens them, makes them unchangeable, even before things have made sense.

His scientific and medical reputation grew. He kept meticulous notes of all his consultations, regarding each patient, to use a current phrasing, as a human being first but also as the potential hope for others through what might be learned from his or her ailments. He was considered reliable so that more and more he came to be relied upon.

No, no, no! You’re not a pretender. You’re much further on. No, my boy, you are so unsure of your bearings that you wonder if you’re pretending to be the person you actually are.

Don’t tell me: Hate the sin but love the sinner. I believe that if hate doesn’t find its rightful place, there’s only one place left for it to go. Where’s that? Inward.

In practice there is seldom a conflict but rather a confluence, a mutually rewarding arrangement.

You said it yourself. I always noticed them. I noticed them because I couldn’t help it. Only from the inside can you know what it’s like from the inside. Understanding isn’t just knowing or learning what it is but knowing what it’s like.

This ruck between the liberal and his antithesis, continued Zafar, never touches the thing that the liberal and bigot take for granted, which is the feeling of belonging, his own feeling of belonging and another’s lack of such feeling, which is a question not of what ought to be but of what is, an epistemological question, a hard question, no doubt, but isn’t that the beginning of wisdom, to see how it is?

I couldn’t latch on to a thought and then be carried by it as it moved into new territory. To do that, I think you need a narrative self inside you connecting you with experience, telling you how you fit into the subjective encounter with what you’re seeing and attaching whatever significance it might hold for you.

I am reminded of what Einstein said on the death of his friend: He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.

I know, he said, that every memory is just a work in progress. But someday, if I make it to that rocking chair on the porch, I hope that all this, the love and loss, that it will all come back as little more than something somewhere long ago.

I don’t know, I said, as I remembered a trite homily I’d read somewhere: A bird and a fish can fall in love, but where will they make a home? Unlikely, I thought. They only meet when the bird has the fish in its claws. Fall in love?

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define.

—Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, translated by Arthur Wills.

But those who need to break free of their past and have the means to do so will not escape the requirement of violence.

What does an optical illusion tell you? It tells you that you have no direct access to reality. How do you begin to control a world you cannot see, a world that includes you?

There’s something about doing it with someone else, she said, something in just talking about it, something about how it leaves you feeling afterward. Decisions seem lighter; everything is lighter.

I never owned my marriage, never owned my friendships, never owned my relationship to my mother, never owned any of those things that cannot be bought.