notepad: November 2014

There is a devastating exchange in The Story of a New Name, the second of three—soon to be four—books in Elena Ferrante's masterful Naples novels, in which Lila, one of the two main characters, runs into her former schoolteacher, Maestra Oliviero, on the street. To the teacher's dismay, Lila, now in her late teens, did not continue her education after elementary school, in spite of her fierce intellectual promise, and is now married and has a small son. The maestra ignores the child, Rino, and looks only at the book Lila is carrying. Lila is nervous. "The title is Ulysses," she says. "Is it about the Odyssey?" the teacher asks.

"No, it's about how prosaic life is today."

"And so?"

"That's all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck."

The maestra chides Lila for her bad language, tells her that anyone can have a family, but that she had been destined for greater things. "Don't read books that you can't understand, it's bad for you," the teacher says. "A lot of things are bad for you," Lila answers.

This small exchange cuts to the heart of much that animates these remarkable books and their author—the most powerful and enigmatic writer to emerge from contemporary Italy. For one, Ferrante, who hides behind a pseudonym and has never made a public appearance—does not disguise the fact that, like Ulysses, her Naples novels, in their own way, are epic in their scope and ambitions. The narrator of these books—My Brilliant Friend (2012; English translation 2012), The Story of a New Name (2012; English translation 2013), and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013; English translation 2014)—is Elena Greco, literally Helen the Greek.

Her journey does not take place by sea; it is far more interior, revealed in a kind of Neapolitan bildungsroman that traverses the long afternoons of childhood, girlhood, adolescence, motherhood. Stretching out over more than 1,200 pages, the three books have as many characters and subplots as a nineteenth-century novel. But at their heart, they follow the intense friendship and rivalry between Elena and Raffaella Cerullo, known to others as Lina and to Elena as Lila, from the miserable outskirts of Naples after World War II, through the economic boom of the 1960s and political turmoil of the 1970s, to the present day. By turns, both Lila and Elena are seen to be the brilliant friend of the other; their lives, inextricably connected, dovetail and diverge over decades.

The tale opens in 2010, when Rino, Lila's now-adult son, calls Elena to say that Lila, now aged sixty-six, has disappeared. Elena, an accomplished writer, begins to look backward, to her Neapolitan youth, when she, the daughter of a porter and a housewife, and Lila, the daughter of a cobbler, pricked their fingers and bonded through blood, after losing their dolls in the dark cellar of the home of Don Achille, the much-feared neighborhood loan shark.

We then move forward in time, through marriages, children, love affairs, separations, successes and miserable failures, deaths, murders, literary triumphs. The characters, like those of the ancients, are forever negotiating between destinies that might be prescribed from the outset and their own attempts to gain some element of mastery over their fates. We begin, after all, in Naples, the epicenter of Italian fatalism, the heart of the Camorra organized crime network, the presence of which lingers in these books like a fog, setting a social code with which everyone must in some way reckon. ("I feel no nostalgia for our childhood," Elena says, early on in My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in the series. "It was full of violence."

Although Lila's interpretation of Ulysses is at once naively off the mark and brutally accurate, the point here is less about literal and literary readings or misreadings. The schoolteacher may not have heard of Joyce, but it is she who has single-handedly spotted the nascent talent of both Lila and Elena and encouraged them to study their way to independence, to escape the misery of their circumstances and a future as more or less imprisoned housewives. Ferrante's Naples books are essentially about knowledge—its possibilities and its limits. Intellectual knowledge, sexual knowledge, political knowledge. What kind of knowledge does it take to get by in this world? How do we attain that knowledge? How does our knowledge change us and wound us and empower us, often at the same time? What things do we want to know and what would we prefer to leave unknown? What can we control? Who has power over our lives?

In My Brilliant Friend, it is immediately clear that Lila and Elena and the other Neapolitan children show from an extremely early age a preternatural understanding of power dynamics. They know to whom they must pay respect and to whom they have to lose, even if they recognize that they have the power to win. In one fundamental scene in an elementary school classroom, Lila, respected for her intellect and her defiance against those to whom she is expected to be beholden, is pitted in a math contest against Enzo, the son of the fruit vendor. The boy barely speaks Italian, and utters the answers in Neapolitan dialect, after managing to do the complicated math calculations in his head. Lila, the star of the class, defeats Enzo. "Many modes of behavior started out there that were difficult to decipher," Elena says. "For example it became very clear that Lila could, if she wanted, ration the use of her abilities." Much later in their lives, Enzo, who has settled his accounts with his fate and with the world, will come to Lila's rescue. But after the math contest, the boys hate Lila for defeating him, and begin to throw rocks at her and Elena, a violence that is at once a sign of anger and of respect.

Some years later, still in childhood, Lila defends Elena against the taunts of the neighborhood boys by holding a knife to the throat of Marcello Solara, the son of a local cammorista, and making clear without the slightest ambiguity that she is prepared to use it. This terrifies Marcello but also sparks in him a love for Lila that he will carry throughout his whole life. This, too, is characteristic of Ferrante, tracing the barely perceptible line between brutality and love.

These books have blood, of murder and menstruation, as well as tears and sweat. Men do violence against women, and women against men. Women are betrayed and also betray—themselves and others. In all of Ferrante's writing, there is also a lot of visceral, often unromantic sex. It would be accurate, although perhaps reductive, to call these books feminist. It is enough to say that they bring a scrutiny and an intensity rare in contemporary literature—or in any literature, for that matter—to exploring in intimate, often excruciating detail the full experience of being a woman and, in the Naples novels, the deep complexity of female friendship. Among other things, these Naples books offer a brilliant and sustained study of envy, that most pernicious of emotions, because it can sometimes disguise itself as love.

Take this passage from The Story of a New Name, which begins with the day of Lila's wedding, at age sixteen, to Stefano Carracci, the son of Don Achille. (The Italian word in the title is cognome, surname, and the implied name change is Lila's.) As the wedding unfolds, Lila comes to understand that she doesn't love Stefano and may never, something that dawns on her when she comprehends that he is not entirely free, that he, like everyone in the area but, she would like to believe, not herself, is beholden to the Solara family, who arrive uninvited at the wedding with a courtesy that elegantly masks an implied threat of violence.

An awkward teenager, Elena is envious of her friend's imminent entry into the world of sex. The morning of the wedding, in a moment that recalls an almost tribal rite of passage, Elena washes Lila. The scene is characteristic of Ferrante's writing—a rush of emotion, life unfolding and documented in real time by a female narrator struggling to comprehend her own jumble of contradictory impulses, and to lay bare her own inescapable thoughts with a disarming honesty:

I washed her with slow, careful gestures, first letting her squat in the tub, then asking her to stand up: I still have in my ears the sound of the dripping water, and the impression that the copper of the tub had a consistency not different from Lila's flesh, which was smooth, solid, calm. I had a confusion of feelings and thoughts: embrace her, weep with her, kiss her, pull her hair, laugh, pretend to sexual experience and instruct her in a learned voice, distancing her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness.

But in the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment, entwined with her husband, in the bed in the new house, while the train clattered under their windows and his violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle. And it suddenly seemed to me that the only remedy against the pain I was feeling, that I would feel, was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.

Elena helps initiate Lila into womanhood, but it is Lila who awakens in Elena a sense of competition, both sexual and literary, inspiring in her the self-reflection that will later help her become a novelist, and also driving her to want to lose her virginity before marriage, an act of defiance in Naples of the late 1950s. (The man who performs the act will later write a dismissive review of her first novel.) The two friends' lives will be dark mirrors of one another for decades. Lila abandons her school and intellectual ambitions, after her father refuses to allow her to take the middle school exam. She works as a cobbler, then becomes a glamorous young bride. Later, she works at menial jobs, including at a meat-processing plant whose conditions put her in extreme physical pain.

Elena graduates from Liceo Classico, a fast track to the upper middle class. Although a dropout, Lila is still the better student, and helps Elena study Latin and Greek. Elena makes it to the prestigious Università Normale di Pisa. She marries a classics scholar and begins to write articles and eventually, to her own surprise, a novel. ("On every page there is something powerful whose origin I can't figure out," Elena's editor tells her.) Lila, too, turns out to have been keeping secret notebooks. In The Story of a New Name, she entrusts them to Elena for safekeeping. Later, in one of the most wounding moments in the entire trilogy, Elena throws the notebooks into the Arno—a murderous act, but something Elena feels she must do in order to claim her own power over her brilliant friend.

Throughout, Elena remains in awe of Lila, for her ability to have true feelings, "to be drawn beyond the limits," to seize the things she wants, while Elena so often feels that she has "stayed behind, waiting." Later on, Elena realizes that her celebrated novel in fact draws its emotional power from a short story that Lila had written in elementary school, "The Blue Fairy," a piece of writing that Maestra Oliviero had ignored. Sometime after this, Elena brings a copy of "The Blue Fairy" to Lila at the meat-processing plant. Lila tosses it on the fire.

In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena has won a literary prize for her book, which has been praised for its "modernizing force." It is 1969. A bomb has exploded at the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing seventeen people and wounding dozens more, one of the most mysterious episodes of the Years of Lead. In her acceptance speech, Elena says she feels as happy as the astronauts who have walked on "the white expanse of the moon." She calls Lila, back in Naples, to tell her about the prize. Lila has already read the news in the local paper and mocks her for her remarks:

The white expanse of the moon, she said ironically, sometimes it's better to say nothing than to talk nonsense. And she added that the moon was a rock among billions of other rocks, and that, as far as rocks go, the best thing was to stand with your feet planted firmly in the troubles of the earth.

Soon after, Elena has a daughter. "I had atrocious labor pains, but they didn't last long. When the baby emerged I saw her, black-haired, a violet organism that, full of energy, writhed and wailed, I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it," Ferrante writes. Elena calls Lila. "'It was a wonderful experience,' I told her. 'What?' 'The pregnancy, the birth. Adele is beautiful, and very good.' She answered: 'Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.'"

And now we arrive at the not small matter of the author herself. That Ferrante is a pseudonym, has no public presence, has never been seen, gives her a strange place in Italy, a country obsessed with image, where if you aren't on television, you barely exist.

Although she has a small cult following, I've been struck by the number of friends in Italy—intellectuals, journalists, readers—who had never heard of Ferrante until I mentioned her. In Italy, she is published by the small house E/O, and in English by its sister house, Europa Editions, both of which specialize in works in translation. Ferrante has begun to gain a devoted English-language readership, following an early laudatory review of My Brilliant Friend by James Wood in The New Yorker last year—and, of course, thanks to the splendidly vivid and fluent English translations of her six novels by Ann Goldstein. But in spite of the fact that The Days of Abandonment was a best seller in Italy in 2002, and Troubling Love, published in 1992, was made into a film directed by the Neapolitan director Mario Martone, Ferrante is not a household name in Italy.

Her anonymity has inspired many rumors. Is her work actually the product of collaboration by a group of authors? Does she work in cinema? (The Naples novels are cinematic in scope, and the rough prose of the third book in the Naples series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, which has a more political plot than the earlier ones, set amid the Years of Lead and the burgeoning feminist movement, at times has the feel of a screenplay.)

Most often asked is: Is she really a man?—a question that may be more telling about contemporary Italy than about Ferrante's work. Is she, as some have suggested, the Neapolitan writer and screenwriter Domenico Starnone? Is she Anita Raja, a consultant for E/O who has translated the works of Christa Wolf and others from German into Italian and happens to be Starnone's wife? In a rare public exchange, a written Q&A published in the Financial Times in late September, Ferrante acknowledged that she has a day job. Asked how she would earn her living if she had to give up writing, she answers, "With the work I have been doing every day for years—which is not writing." She also cites Virginia Woolf and Elsa Morante as her greatest literary influences.

In many ways, Ferrante's pseudonym operates as a kind of witness protection program. Her books, especially the first three novels—Troubling Love (1992; English translation 2006), The Days of Abandonment (2002; English translation 2005), The Lost Daughter (2006, English translation 2008)—which are tighter and less plot-driven than the Naples trilogy, carry such an electric charge that even the slightest bit of detail about the author's own experience might cause acute emotional pain to anyone involved. In the absence of information, the questions multiply in the mind. Did Elena Ferrante have affairs like those in which Lila and Elena become involved? Did she slip into a kind of depressive madness for a time after a husband left her for another woman, as happens to Olga in The Days of Abandonment? Was she a tormented young mother like Leda, the divorced narrator of The Lost Daughter, who leaves her husband and two young girls because she feels suffocated?

Was she, like the protagonists of The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and also Elena in the Naples books, negotiating between the crushing daily demands of being a mother and wife while urgently trying to clear the mental space, the peace of mind, to write? Did she, like Elena in the Naples books, grow up in poverty in Naples with parents who could barely read, and through education achieve a kind of mastery over her life, only to live in constant fear of being pulled back into the world she thought she had escaped, of reverting to a more primal version of herself, one that speaks in Neapolitan dialect and not Italian? Who leaves and who stays?

Ferrante's anonymity has one significant effect: the teller recedes for the sake of the tale. Once again, we are back to the ancients. All of Ferrante's books, but in particular the three early novels, could be seen as a kind of contemporary Metamorphoses. The most significant transformations in all of her work are those of women at different stages of their lives. The daughter becomes the wife becomes the mother and yet retains elements of all three roles, which are often at odds within her. In The Days of Abandonment Olga's children make her pay for "murky, imagined sins that I had not committed." In Troubling Love, whose Italian title, L'Amore molesto, has darker overtones, the protagonist, Delia, an unmarried cartoonist, tries on the bathrobe that her newly dead mother wore before drowning, and in some ways becomes her mother. In one unsettling scene of sex that is not entirely consensual, but not entirely a violation, Delia goes to bed with the son of her mother's lover.

In The Lost Daughter, Leda, on vacation alone after leaving her husband and two daughters, finds herself obsessed with a Neapolitan family at the beach. The toddler daughter in the family—named, as it happens, Elena—loses her doll, Nani; Leda picks it up and, for reasons mysterious even to herself, holds on to it. Even the names morph into one another. These modern antiheroines create and recreate themselves, shift shapes, transform from one state of being to another, from anguish to calm, and often back to anguish. Unlike the literary heroines of past centuries, in Ferrante's novels the leading women characters have the luxury of operating in the contemporary world, with all its doubts and ambiguities, answering more to their own troubled consciences than to crushing social restrictions that have fallen away in postwar Italy.

The Days of Abandonment tells the story of Olga, a thirty-eight-year-old woman who is, in effect, razed to the ground by her husband's leaving her, but who rebuilds herself over time, after looking at herself from the outside, as if observing someone else. These women may be victims of circumstance, but they master their fates in the only way they know how: through extraordinarily close observation as an act of will, but one often without resolution or revelation. At the end of The Days of Abandonment, Olga explains to a man with whom she has become involved what happened in her moment of madness. "I had an excessive reaction that pierced the surface of things," she says. "And then?" her companion asks. "I fell." "And where did you end up?" "Nowhere. There was no depth, there was no precipice. There was nothing."

At the end of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena is working on a new book. She isn't sure if it's a novel or not. Asked its theme, she answers, "Men who fabricate women," and the conversation then turns to Pygmalion and similar stories. But in the original Italian, the phrase is more ambiguous. Elena's answer, "I maschi che fabbricano le femmine," could also mean "the men that women fabricate." At least since Dante's Inferno, the verb fabbricare, to fabricate, make, or forge, has contained within it the suggestion of falsification and trickery. Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

Although they are all set in Italy, there is nothing scenic in any of Ferrante's books. The action takes place in the ugly outskirts of Naples, or nondescript apartments; occasionally there is a splash of beach or the well-appointed apartments of the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. There is a memorable scene in My Brilliant Friend in which Lila and Elena, as young girls, try to walk from their home to the sea, which they have been told is nearby but have never seen. For the most part, the settings are as spare as the stage for a Greek drama, all the better to probe the inner life. The prose can be unlovely. There is rarely rhetorical flair. The early novels have an economy of language. The Naples novels are baggier, more focused on story and incident.

All of Ferrante's books lack humor. Nothing in them will ever make you laugh, except perhaps a dark, uncomfortable laughter. "Books don't change your life," Ferrante told the Financial Times in September. "At most, if they are good, they can hurt and bring confusion." That is the cumulative effect of reading her work. These novels all head terrifyingly quickly to a very deep place.

Like many, I came rather late to Ferrante. Reading her for the first time this year was revelatory. Is it possible that in all those years of Silvio Berlusconi's Italy—the Italy of showgirls and underage girls, of reality television and plastic surgery, the Italy of some of the lowest female employment rates in Europe, the Italy of economic and cultural stagnation, of pervasive torpor and resistance to change, years when many among the left-wing intelligentsia, in their lovely, inherited apartments, were engaged in halfhearted soul searching about how the Italy of Anna Magnani had somehow become the Italy of Ruby Heartstealer—is it possible that here, all along, was a clear and terrible voice, fully inhabiting the historical moment yet also transcending it, telling the stories of Italian women in all their contradictions and force? Can it really be possible that she has been here all along, if only we had turned off the television to listen?

At the end of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the latest volume in the Naples series, we are still in 1976, wondering what will happen with Elena, the successful writer and mother of two children, who has grown disenchanted with her inert professor husband only to find herself desperately in love with Nino Sarratore, a boy from the neighborhood who has grown up to become an intellectual, who is also married to someone else, and who in one crucial episode had been Lila's lover. In fact, he is the man who had inspired Lila to read Ulysses.

We still don't know what becomes of Lila, after her disappearance at age sixty-six, several years after warning Elena never to write about her. Will she meet the fate of Amalia, the mother in Troubling Love, who drowns in the sea, most likely a suicide? Will she find a kind of peace of mind, as does Olga in The Days of Abandonment? The fourth book in the Naples series has just appeared in Italian and is scheduled to be published in English in November 2015. To those of us fully entangled in the Ferrante universe, participants in this Greek chorus, who have come to care about these characters as much as we care about some people in our actual lives, to those of us who have come to scrutinize the world and ourselves all the more intensely for having read these unforgettable books, her latest report could not have arrived soon enough.

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What kind of funny is he?

Rivka Galchen

BuyKafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch
Princeton, 682 pp, £24.95, June 2013, ISBN 978 0 691 14751 2
BuyKafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach, translation by Shelley Frisch
Princeton, 552 pp, £16.25, June 2013, ISBN 978 0 691 14741 3

I have come to the conclusion that anyone who thinks about Kafka for long enough inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of Franz Kafka reads like a truly great comedy. I mean this (of course) in large part because of the tragedies in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines.

What constitutes the life of Kafka, at least the enduringly legible parts of it? Reiner Stach has written a chronological biography of nearly two thousand pages, all three volumes of which are out in German, with the second and third already translated into English by Shelley Frisch. (The first volume, covering Kafka's youth, was written last in the hope that the papers in the Max Brod estate – a mysterious suitcase full of documents – would exit the apartment of the septuagenarian daughter of Max Brod's presumed lover, but the destiny of those papers remains in legal dispute.) Part of what is so compelling about Stach's biography is that, although he has inevitably developed many well-substantiated convictions of his own, he mostly keeps them to himself. Resisting extended speculation, judgment and interpretation, he has chosen instead to be a conservative detailer of the unusually well-documented life of his subject. In addition to three novels, numerous stories and fragments and shorts, Kafka wrote diaries, letters to friends and family, lectures on accident prevention and fundraising appeals for injured soldiers. At the very end of his life, while undertaking a 'silence cure', he even wrote down basic communications on small slips of paper: 'Do you have a moment? Then please spray the peonies a little.' On another slip, addressing the woman, Dora Diamant, who loved and cared for him: 'How many years will you be able to stand it? How long will I be able to stand your standing it?'

Juxtapositions of the minor and practical with the emotive, impossible and profound emerge repeatedly in this biography, so much so that often they swap emotional valences. Here is the young writer and insurance worker reliably showing up to work every morning at 8.15; here he is getting on his best friend Brod's nerves over whether or not to keep the window open when they share a room at a hotel (Kafka prevails); here he is at a nudist sanatorium admiring the bodies of two young Swedish men. Here is young Kafka asking to be released from his job so he can be a soldier; here he is encouraging his father to invest in an asbestos factory and then disappointing his father terribly by not helping to run the asbestos factory, which loses money and goes under; here he is writing about the women who work at the asbestos factory; here he is annoyed that his father and mother stay up late playing the card game franzefuss. Here is his publisher referring to his story 'In the Penal Colony' as 'In the Gangster Colony' because 'gangster' is the more marketable word. Here our man asks his sister, Ottla, to go out and please buy twenty copies of the magazine that has run a Czech translation of his story 'The Stoker'; here he is writing to the married translator, whom he has wooed; here he is writing a 16-page letter asking for a promotion at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute; here he is giving a reading in Munich with Rilke, and being reviewed in the paper the next day as 'quite an inadequate presenter'; here he is, desperate to write his fiction but setting aside his two-week holiday period to write a very long letter to his father (which he never gives him) in which he explains that his father eats too loudly and too messily and that his father's large body made Kafka, as a child, feel small and weak when they would go together to the city pool. Here he is getting engaged and not getting married; here he is getting engaged and not getting married again; here he is getting into a similar tangle one more time; here he is relieved by his mortal diagnosis of TB. Here he is reading a letter from the tax office asking about capital contributions to the First Prague Asbestos Works, here he is writing back explaining that the factory had ceased to exist five years earlier, and here he is receiving another letter asking what his reply meant as no record could be found of the referenced original letter, and then here he is a few months later receiving a third letter threatening him with charges and a fine if he persists in not accounting for the capital accumulation on the First Prague Asbestos Works; here are 350 pages of Kafka's study notes on conversational Hebrew; here he is at the end of his life, making hand shadow-puppets in the evenings with Diamant; here he is in 1924, the day before he dies, unable to eat, doing a last round of edits on his short story 'The Hunger Artist'.

Stach makes clear the very humble limits of what he believes his biographical project can yield in terms of actually 'knowing' Kafka. 'The life of a human being,' he writes in his introduction, 'draws back, comes into view like an animal at the edge of the forest, and disappears again.' He also recognises concordances between Kafka's life and work as illuminating only in a minor way. Kafka often spent half the day lying down, daydreaming, and Stach believes these inaccessible parts of Kafka are the most important. Yet despite all this Stach pursues what can be known of Kafka so far and so exhaustively that I was reminded at some moments of the ending of A Handful of Dust, when we meet the illiterate man in the Brazilian jungle who loves Charles Dickens's writing so much he holds the protagonist, Tony Last, captive so that he can read Dickens to him until the end of his days. Sometimes I thought of Stach as the captive and Kafka as the captor in this analogy, and sometimes the other way around. It is a very long biography and so sometimes I had all sorts of thoughts I not long afterwards wanted to upend, or undermine. In that way, though by different means, prolonged exposure to Stach's work does have an effect-overlap with prolonged exposure to the work of Kafka.

It has been said of Kafka's work many times that the thing to remember is that it is funny. Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends, and though that sounds more like anxiety than hilarity to me, the funny point endures. But what kind of funny is he? Borges described Hawthorne's story 'Wakefield' as a prefiguration of Kafka, noting 'the protagonist's profound triviality, which contrasts with the magnitude of his perdition'. Part of the point here is an incongruity of scale – a natural structure of the comic, a way of relating to the cosmic. We might think here of Metamorphosis but also of the petitioner in The Trial who spends his whole life waiting at the Door of the Law, a door that is just for him, but through which he is never allowed entry. Or we might think of Kafka's dog (or his ape, or mouse, or burrowing animal), who takes his life as seriously, and thinks it over as analytically, as a human.

Or we might think of the humans who take their lives seriously, as if they, too, were, well, human. 'Often I doubt that I am a human being,' Kafka writes in a note to his first fiancée, Felice Bauer, as he is trying to get out of the engagement but doesn't want to break it off himself and instead wants her to take the action. 'You can marry if you put on sufficient weight,' a doctor later tells a tuberculous Kafka, who doesn't want to marry anyhow, or even really to eat. The comedy of scale is always simultaneously a tragedy of scale, if viewed from the proper angle, and as articulated in the famous words Kafka wrote on a postcard: 'The outside world is too small, too clear-cut, too truthful, to contain everything that a person has room for inside.'

And one element of the comedy of Kafka's biography is the way his life, at whatever moment, is dwarfed by his work. Whether or not the reasonably capable writer and insurance official living in Prague through the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and into the 1920s resembles the Kafka of your imagination depends in part on how attentively you've followed each succession of corrective articles and introductions, but also on your ability to assimilate dissonant information, and on how substantial external life seems to you.

If for many years, much of the reading public saw Kafka as a kind of cousin of Bartleby – if we were most swayed, say, by his never finishing his novels, or by his talk of ghosts and the unbearability of everything – it now seems hard not to see that although Kafka truly was a Bartleby-kin, he was at the same time just as much Bartleby's well-intentioned, overwhelmed, frustrated boss. Kafka himself found Kafka difficult. In an entry in his diary, in which he writes of himself, as he often did, in the third person, he says:

He could have resigned himself to a prison. To end as a prisoner – that could be a life's ambition. But it was a barred cage. Casually and imperiously, as if at home, the racket of the world streamed out and in through the bars, the prisoner was really free, he could take part in everything, nothing that went on outside escaped him, he could simply have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not even imprisoned.

Later, in a letter to Brod, in which Kafka is explaining his enormous dread over a pretty insignificant decision about whether to take a trip to Georgental, he writes:

He has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived. By this I do not mean that wife and child, fields and cattle are essential to living. The only essential thing for life is forgoing smugness, moving into the house instead of admiring it and hanging garlands around it. One might argue that this is a matter of fate and is not given to anyone's hand. But then why this sense of remorse; why does the remorse never stop? To become finer and more savoury? That, too. But why do such nights always end on this note: I could live and I do not live. The second major reason – perhaps it is all really one, I don't seem to be able to sort them apart now – is the idea: 'What I have toyed with is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be all the more terrible.'

Brod replies saying, basically, that he can't take Kafka's complaint too seriously. But in all the most important ways Brod took Kafka extremely seriously, both as a friend and as a writer: he was the one primarily responsible for Kafka's being published in his lifetime, and is almost wholly responsible for our knowing the work today. Kafka's singular brilliance and annoyingness are perfectly bound.

Often his character recalls both Larry David and Bertie Wooster. Many are the plans that Kafka makes in a manner that ensures their eventual unmaking. Over five years he courts, engages, un-engages, re-engages but never marries Felice Bauer, a woman with whom he spends less than 15 scattered and not always happy days, whose dear friend Grete Bloch he also woos in letters, and whom he makes clear he could not be sexually available to in a marriage. Then, in a letter he sends to her in advance of a meeting at which they plan to discuss things (she has even quit her job at his bidding so as to be able to move to Prague), he calls her 'my human tribunal'. During the First World War, Kafka repeatedly begs his superiors at work to release him from his job so he can become a soldier; but as he later writes in his diary, he doesn't go too far; he never becomes a soldier. Nor does he marry the next woman he asks to marry him, or the one after that. Nor does he deliver (or destroy) the long letter he wrote to his father. Nor does he, despite extensive plans and study of Hebrew, move to Palestine. Kafka at times causes others to suffer in a manner akin to the way the illimitably charming Don Quixote does, by adhering to an untrue but more ennobling view of the world.

What emerges from this pattern of Kafka's behaviour is a sense not just of a character who can never commit – the comic character who commits ends the series – but also of how powerful he is, and how ambivalent he is about being powerful. With both women and men, Kafka fairly effortlessly elicits their love. 'You belong to me,' he writes to Milena Jesenskà after she has inquired about translating his work; though sceptical at first, Jesenskà quickly responds to him, as nearly everyone does. A Hungarian doctor, Robert Klopstock, whom Kafka meets at a sanatorium, is similarly enamoured, and he seems to move to Prague mostly to be nearer to Kafka, who then disappoints him with his reclusiveness. Kafka seems unable to refrain from inciting affection, which he then finds overwhelming and retreats from. In a letter to Else Bergman, who along with her husband had emigrated to Jerusalem, and who is asking Kafka about his plans to move, Kafka writes: 'That the voyage would have been undertaken with you would have greatly increased the spiritual criminality of the case. No, I could not go that way, even if I had been able – I repeat, and "all berths are taken," you add.' Kafka does not come across as a very sexual person in this biography – not at all, really – but he understands the power involved in sexuality. He pursues positions of seeming inferiority, as he tries to both exercise and abdicate his magnetism.

At times he seems to be living in a situation comedy. When he goes to the countryside to write, he finds it 'extraordinarily beautiful' at first, but by the second day he can't work because he's troubled by a child practising the French horn, by the din from a sawmill and by happy children playing outside, whom he eventually yells at: 'Why don't you go and pick mushrooms?' He then discovers that the children belong to his neighbour, a sleep-deprived shift worker at the local mill who sends his seven children out so that he can get some sleep. At a sanatorium for his TB, Kafka and his friend Klopstock play a practical joke on another resident, a high-ranking Czech officer who conspicuously practises the flute and sketches and paints outdoors. The officer puts on a show of his work; Klopstock and Kafka write up pseudonymous reviews of it, one published in Czech, the other in Hungarian; the mocked officer then comes to Klopstock (in his room with a fever and kept company by Kafka) for a translation of the review. After this successful prank, Kafka sends his sister a spoof article about how Einstein's theory of relativity is pointing the way to a cure for TB; his whole family celebrates the good news, of which he then has to disabuse them.

Both these anecdotes from Kafka's life, of which there are many of a similar genre, are at once antic and death-haunted, illuminating and opaque. We might ask ourselves why we would read a biography of Kafka when we could instead just read Kafka. Why make breakfast, when you can just read Kafka? Why watch television or trim your fingernails when you could just read Kafka?

I have described Stach's method as if he were a kind of Joe Friday, which besides suggesting that investigating a life is like investigating a crime, is only approximately true. Though the biography is extensive – we learn about Milena Jesenskà's boarding school and what her parents' marriage was like – Stach has also had to leave much out. That even a three-volume biography cannot possibly be exhaustive puts what Stach has included in a different light. Though he's usually sparing with his own commentary, Stach gives space to counter in detail other writers on Kafka's famous diary entry 'August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.' He also counters some of the more famous commentary on Kafka's collected letters to Felice Bauer, a document easily readable or misreadable as a monologue totally blind to its purported audience. On the issue of Kafka's sexuality, he doesn't directly address suggestions that Kafka might have preferred men, and he chooses to note but not quote from Kafka's brief mention in his diary of sexual feelings for his sister. Stach makes note of but is not detained by Kafka's observations of male bodies, his physical distance from the women whom he wooed, and the intensity of his male friendships. (Saul Friedländer's Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt goes into these issues intelligently, without according them the false weight of bright, definite explanation.) Perhaps Stach has devoted less room to Kafka's sexuality than another biographer might have – though he doesn't shy away from it, and too often he seems to be trying to establish Kafka's heterosexual credibility by mentioning once again that he visited prostitutes – in part because even a line or two about sexuality, especially incest or attraction to children, can cast a misleadingly enormous shadow.

Or maybe he is simply trying to protect Kafka (an allegation I feel confident makes biographers miserable). Early in the biography I found it strange when Stach brought up, say, a minor contemporary Polish novel that takes licence in imagining the inner life of a correspondent of Kafka's, only to tear the novel down; most biographers and scholars would have just left that novel out. Even in his introduction, Stach opens a section with a relatively obscure quote from the 18th-century German satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, only to take issue with it, not in one way but in two, after which Lichtenberg never comes up again. These inclusions seem particularly strange since Stach has decided not to discuss Walter Benjamin's essays on Kafka, or the respected work of Eric Santner, even though much more minor scholarship is gone into. This does make for some good comedy with Stach as the protagonist. Consider his Bernhardian brevity on literary scholars, whom he describes as having 'dismantled, crushed and reconstituted' quotations from Kafka's diaries 'with a vengeance, generally in the form of essays written as stepping-stones to academic advancement'. This is a bit harsh, especially since it's reasonable that people who study Kafka for a living use their work on Kafka to keep getting to work on Kafka for a living. Stach, so even-tempered most of the time, emerges in these moments as a character who has left the relatively rational arena of the academic and entered into the more reliably irrational realm of the parent. It lends a further pathos to the biography: Stach himself is a better and better character as the book goes on.

His astute offhand descriptions accumulate. He succinctly describes 'the Kafkaesque' as consisting in part of a 'peculiar form of rhetoric, which obscures the situation with analytical precision'. On the evolution of the Kafka fragment on the Olympic swimming champion who doesn't know how to swim: 'Kafka does not seek out an image; he follows it, and would rather lose sight of his subject matter than the logic of his image, as even some of his early readers noted.' Stach notes that guilt and punishment are less present as themes in Kafka's later writings. Of the later passages in Kafka's diary, when he returns to writing of himself in the first rather than the third person, Stach observes that 'he struck a tone that sounds almost serene in comparison with the many laments with which he had always accompanied even the most easily foreseeable disturbances and disappointments.' (An example: 'No matter how wretched a constitution I may have … I must do the best I can with it, even in my sense, and it is hollow sophistry to argue that there is only one thing to be done with it, and this one thing is thus the best, and is despair.') Discussing 'The Burrow', written towards the end of Kafka's life, Stach observes the mysterious noise that disturbs the animal's serenity: 'A hissing and piping with regular pauses that the animal hears is its own sound of life, its own breath; the animal itself is the ultimate source of the disquiet that continually disturbs the perfect silence of its creation.' These are soft observations, not strictly defensible, not particularly biographical. But the softness, and the way Stach mostly but not entirely withholds it, is essential to the book's effect.

In great comic novels, say Muriel Spark's Memento Mori or Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the element that generates the comedy – often social norms, whether norms of class or war – also generates the tragedy. But in Kafka's life, we see this structure in the more ahistorical aspects, in the situations generated by Kafka's way of going through the world, by his character.

Another element of many great comic novels is the extended set of minor characters, who by being funny, make a disproportionately deep claim on our emotions, however brief their appearances. Stach has brought to life so many fantastic minor 'characters' in this biography; they are what makes the way the biography ends so brilliant and so sad – or more precisely, it's through them that we feel the sadness of the endings, since of course we already know how it ends. I am not speaking only, or even mainly, of the 'major' minor characters, like Kafka's fiancées or family members, though Stach offers particularly vivid and valuable portraits of Kafka's sister, Ottla, and of his translator and romantic friend, Milena Jesenskà. Some characters come in only for a paragraph, or even just a line or two. Consider the 22-year-old Karl Müller, who publishes a piece in his local newspaper titled 'The Re-Metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa', in which Samsa comes back to life and things improve for him; shortly after publication of that piece, the very poor and very young Müller dies of TB. Or the writer Oskar Baum, blind since the age of 11 and supporting his family by giving piano lessons, who gets a letter from Kafka's mother in which she implores him, as the one married man in young Kafka's circle of friends, to help set Kafka's 'head straight'. In his lifetime, we learn in a footnote, Baum had trouble being seen by publishers as more than just a chronicler of specialist literature on being blind; his most but barely enduring work is called The Door to the Impossible. We see the once celebrated writer Johannes Schlaf at the age of fifty, having gone mad and giving cosmological lectures that make no sense, but make him (in Kafka's eyes) happy. We see Kafka's boss at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, who writes poetry himself, and who elegantly handles his employee's petitions to enlist and die as a soldier at the front. It turns out that several of the employees at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute wrote poems and stories. We meet the cheerful Czech man at the sanatorium who wants to show Kafka his throat abscesses with a mirror, and whose family never visits him. A young woman, Puah, just 18 years old, comes through Prague on a visit from Jerusalem and gives Kafka Hebrew lessons. The innkeeper Fraulein Olga Stüdl tells the modest, polite young Kafka staying at her boarding-house about her failed engagement, and he gives her a galley proof of his manuscript. Kafka's hapless brother-in-law can't keep a business going. The writer Ernst Weiss passionately hates Kafka for not writing him a blurb. A cute schoolgirl in the botanical gardens catches Kafka's attention as she calls something out to him; he smiles and waves to her, repeatedly, then realises what she had said: 'Jew.'

Comedy makes us feel safe, maybe because the form once implied a happy ending. It's difficult to claim the endings of Catch-22 or Memento Mori or Blackadder are happy. It turns out we had all along been reading about ghosts – which we had already known, but the comedy had allowed us to forget it for just long enough to be able again to remember. Stach's three-page epilogue to his three-volume biography moves swiftly through the final fates of many of those whose lives overlapped with Kafka's. Kafka is still with us; the most moving part of this biography is the absence of everyone else.

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World of Faces

T.J. Clark

Rembrandt: The Late Works
National Gallery until 18 January 2015

They say that when Jean Genet made occasional visits to London after the war his first stop was always the Rembrandt room in the National Gallery, to see Self-Portrait at the Age of 63. The portrait is dated 1669: Genet believed it was the last Rembrandt painted. (Not true, apparently.) He wrote a short essay called 'Rembrandt's Secret' for L'Express in 1958, and in his unfailingly Manichaean way he wanted to convince his readers of Rembrandt's goodness. This is what the picture made manifest, he felt. Goodness as a quality of character, primarily, looking evil in the face; but that aspect or dimension of the human brought into being by the act of painting. Fleshed out, so to speak. 'I use the word bonté as shorthand,' he wrote. 'Rembrandt's last self-portrait seems rather to be saying this: "I shall be so intelligent that even the wild animals will recognise my goodness." The morality that guides the artist, then, is not the vain quest for a proper apparel for the soul [une parure de l'âme], it is the métier itself, insisting on goodness, or rather, bringing goodness in its wake.'

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These are difficult sentences, and my translation works hard (too hard) to make them easier, but their terms came back to me immediately the other day as I rounded the corner and stood in Room One of Rembrandt: The Late Works. Out of the darkness came four self-portraits – the National Gallery's, and paintings from Washington, the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum – plus a strange, half-effaced, tender, despairing little print of the artist at work on an etching. The faces leaped towards me. Who they were and what they were thinking seemed secondary to the sheer outwardness of their attention: the wide-eyed, calm focus, which on one level might simply be that of a painter intent on getting the shine on a nose imprinted in his nervous system. Of course I knew that what the faces were attending to was 'themselves', but whether that idea was singular or plural to them, or whether they thought of it at all in terms of 'outsides' and 'insides' – as a matter capable of being looked at empirically – seemed questions that the paintings raised one moment, and consigned to outer darkness the next. The darkness in Rembrandt (which has always perturbed those confronting him, whether they have chosen to valorise it or not) did have the look, in this world of raised eyebrows and faint smiles about puffy lips, of 'doubt about the self and its motives' – the realm of the Protestant conscience, the world Erich Auerbach taught us to recognise as always 'fraught with background' – but out of this background, all the brighter for emerging from the murk, seemed to come a final decisive exteriority to the soul, a materiality, a workmanship. I think the intertwining of these three notions is what Genet's words 'goodness' and 'intelligence' were meant to suggest.

Twenty years ago when I wrote an essay on self-portraiture, it was the question of outside and inside that seemed to me key to the mystery. I thought the character of Rembrandt's 'look' in the National Gallery canvas derived from its being locked into – maybe trapped inside – a series of spatial and spiritual boxes. (The Rembrandt imagined in Self-Portrait as Apostle Paul, next door to the National Gallery picture in the present exhibition, is specifically put in prison: restorers tell us there are bars on a window just visible in the gloom.) Let us assume – this was my previous starting point – that what we are looking at in a self-portrait is the image a painter saw in a mirror. It seems to follow that the kind of attention we are shown is special, not to say exotic: the look of someone looking at himself looking. The trouble is that we can only decide where to put an end to that final phrase by pure fiat. It seems designed to go on for ever:

The look of someone looking at himself looking at the look he has when it is a matter of looking not just at anything, at something else, but back to the place from which one is looking … Would that do better? Is that what self-portraiture is about? Simple questions in this area seem to open onto infinite dialectical regress. And isn't one of the things we admire in the best of the genre precisely the effort to represent this dialectical vertigo? Isn't that what Rembrandt is doing?

Maybe. There are moments in Room One when questions of this kind do crop up. Dialectical intricacy is part of the game. Maybe the shadowy page of scripture in Self-Portrait as Apostle Paul is meant as a metaphor for the interiority – the space of hidden meanings – that the look in the mirror can never quite reach. Light hits the apostle's face, exposing its ruined façade; what is 'inside' it – what it is thinking and fearing – will always remain a kind of writing in the dark.

Nonetheless, I did not find in the show that being caught in the crossfire of Rembrandt's four gazes provoked new feats of dialectic. It mainly cancelled the old ones. I did not think that my previous scepticism about inside and outside in the model of mind quite captured what was happening as I turned from one picture to another. Somewhere in the back of my consciousness I clung to the idea that self and other, exterior and interior, immediacy and reflection were distinctions that shaped the look I was trying to come to terms with. I wanted to resist the distinctions, or at least question them, but I knew that the look short-circuited my intellectual defences. It addressed me directly. It put me in the place of self. Rembrandt and I – the look was our term of agreement – were face to face.

Let us call this the Rembrandt effect. It is an immensely powerful one, whose mechanics remain largely a mystery. It proved inimitable; or rather, the imitations seemed often to get the mechanics right, but mostly failed to deliver the effect. People in the 17th century appear to have wanted the effect and been willing to pay for it. Their dismal handbooks of art theory (and even more dreadful guides to the progress of the soul) had nothing germane to tell them about the picture of self on offer from the disreputable showman, with his 'whore' of a wife and his sordid bankruptcy, but there was apparently a thriving market for the kind of face-to-faceness he specialised in. A market for the unspeakable, we might say. Whether or not Rembrandt was bankrupt, his prices remained high. Italian noblemen and international bankers beat a way to his door – a German called Everhard Jabach, art dealer-cum-financier in Paris, seems to have been the first owner of Self-Portrait as Apostle Paul. Shades of the prison house clearly appealed.

What I now think was wrong in my previous approach to Rembrandt was my choice of terms. My essay assumed that the 'look' of self-portraiture was paramount, and extracted the look from the 'face'. Rembrandt did not. His pictures – not just his self-portraits, but the whole world he shows us, predicated as it is on faces – have to do centrally with the belonging of eyes and eyesight to the unlikely cluster of 'features' that cling to the lower front half of the skull, exposing the brain to the world. Exposure of this kind has dangers. It is entirely horrible when, in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Deyman, Joris Fonteijn's brain is literally laid bare. But the proximity of The Anatomy Lesson to the self-portraits in the show – one among many unnerving conjunctions – only serves to alert us to the strangeness of the brain's everyday, non-horrible externalisation. (What word will do here? 'Appearance' is weak, 'apparatus' too Cartesian, 'outlook' too clever. The cant word 'interface' might serve.)

Rembrandt paints faces. When he finds himself in a world where appropriate facial expressions do not come to mind he is in trouble. The Conspiracy of the Batavians, battered a bit cruelly by the lights in Room Two, shows him hitting an imaginative brick wall. In his few and uncanny landscape paintings (none of them from his last years) he seems to make a virtue of being out of his depth: no other depictions of the countryside, not even Cézanne at his most stony, seem so intent on showing nature as a territory human beings have strayed into essentially by mistake. But the world of faces is rightly his, and ours in turn: we inhabit it as we would a hall of mirrors. Rembrandt struts about the darkened room, owner and impresario, and what he intends to show us above all is our powerlessness in the 'face' of physiognomies. A face, he will demonstrate, is a machine for exteriorising – exchanging, universalising – subjectivity. (Rather in the way Le Corbusier thought a house was a machine for living in.) This is what the arrangement of nose, ears, eyes, cheeks, mouth and chin, plus muscles to give them special mobility, was evolved to do: to make the sensory apparatus of each individual respond to the apparatus of others; to make the 'features' into signs; to have eye and mind focus only on those vectors of another's facial appearance that matter semantically. The face is the form of the brain in the world. This peculiar array of receptors, so close to the grey matter pulling their strings (too close for comfort, Dr Deyman reminds us); all these weird openings and protuberances, set out in a symmetry that only just naturalises the bizarrerie – what are they but organs essentially avid for response, reciprocation, acknowledgment, mutuality? And ferocious if response doesn't follow. A face is a machine for universalising the 'I'. The 'I' can draw back from the process and interest itself in the machinery, recording evidence of wear and tear. Obviously Rembrandt did. But even in such moments of half-disengagement – here is what the late self-portraits show – the universal is triumphant. A face that encounters itself as an object, be it exhausted or immaculate, is always an ego luxuriating – fully and wonderfully entrenched – in its being-in-the-world.

My eye swerves left from Apostle Paul to the self-portrait from Washington next to it, done two years earlier. The pose is reversed. The realm of the Word has been left behind. Blurred hands grip one another: the fingers of the hand furthest away are like tongues of slow-moving lava. They invite us to touch – to fill out their approximation. 'Placeholders' would be a word for them. Rembrandt's gaze, by contrast, is all insistence, assessment, sight screwed to the sticking point, materialisation. The force of such outwardness leaves affect in doubt (heaven knows what Rembrandt is feeling), but this too we experience as an aspect of character, the pressure of an ego against us. The gaze here could perhaps be understood as directed to a picture rather than an image in a mirror. It is practical: severe in judgment, but admiring of its handiwork. So intelligent that the animals bow down. Such is the self.

I found it hard to escape from Room One in the exhibition, you will gather, and I gravitated back to it constantly from the intensities that followed. It was as if I needed the shelter of the self-portraits (and there is a further one in Room Two: the famous enigma from Kenwood) in order to get the measure of Rembrandt's feeling for the world at large. The feeling is relentless. One turns away from the blood streaking Lucretia's shift in Room Two – the second version of the subject, done in 1666 – only to find oneself sucked into Joris Fonteijn's abdominal cavity. The Syndics, a few yards further on, devour the space of their room. Through the door The Jewish Bride smoulders on a far wall, across from Titus at His Desk and Woman Bathing in a Stream. The great portraits of the Dutch one per cent (whom the writers of wall labels reassure us are 'ordinary people') keep on coming. Bathsheba and Simeon with the Christ Child and Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph make up the rear. (I have not even mentioned etchings and drawings – an incomparable selection.) Cumulatively, it brought on the feeling I've always had as the last chorale of the St Matthew Passion starts up. I find myself wondering if human beings are properly equipped to deal with intensities of this kind. But it's worth the risk.

Just because the display of Rembrandt's vision here is so comprehensive, the show is likely to jolt the viewer into thinking about what the vision consists of, and how it can go on being administered in such strength. It must depend on exclusions. The darkness is our guide here: in order for a part of the world to be fixed on repeatedly, and be offered as sufficient and transfixing, an enormous surrounding – say, the world as plotted by Koninck and Vermeer – has to be left in shadow. That raises the question of Rembrandt's colour. Of course one accepts, completely and without thinking, the blaze of red, gold, off-white and endlessly modulated flesh pinks and yellows that is the key (a further key) to the Rembrandt effect. To say that Rembrandt is a supreme colourist is to state the obvious. Only look at the way the white linen of Woman Bathing in a Stream gathers touches of yellow from the dress discarded on the bank. Or the awful triumph of Lucretia's green undergarment. Or the coal-fire red in The Jewish Bride, and the softness of whites and golds, like dirty snow, in Simeon with the Christ Child. Nonetheless, it came on me as I went from room to room what a very strange 'supreme colourist' I was looking at. What other colourist worth the name is so little interested in the spectrum beyond yellow? Why does it seem that blue and green – Giotto blue, Bellini blue, the blue of Vermeer and Van der Weyden – hardly existed for Rembrandt? Blue, as far as I can see, is truly absent from his world. Green appears very occasionally, but always as a sign of pallor and putrefaction more than photosynthesis. The green in Lucretia is death incarnate. The pot plant in The Jewish Bride is a ghost.

It may be that partly this has to do with practicalities, material events – fading and darkening of colours, the price of pigments and so on. But this cannot be decisive. We are dealing so clearly with an aesthetic choice, which is in turn an ethical and hermeneutic one. Perhaps blue is excluded from Rembrandt's worldview because he knew that the other great colourists, who were always in his sights, had made it so indelibly the marker of heaven on earth. And in Rembrandt there is no heaven. He is the purest of believers in a hidden God. Looking at his staging of scenes from the Old Testament, I heard Auerbach on the Elohist:

'And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am.' Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told …
Of Abraham too, nothing is made perceptible except the words in which he answers God: Hinne-ni, Behold me here … Moreover, the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham's words and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground.

It is beautiful that Auerbach's terms are pictorial. His whole account seems meant to illuminate Rembrandt's brand of indeterminacy. And it allows us to grasp, at least for a moment, the most extraordinary aspect of Rembrandt's staging of presence: the fact that, close as his figures and substances all seem, projected towards us by the darkness that is their God, they are never established as entities in a foreground. A foreground implies a background to match – a distance, an openness, an emptiness. Rembrandt's dark is none of the above. Proximity – the presence of the self – is absolute. Woman Bathing in a Stream is as close as we get in Rembrandt's world-picture to a body just feeling and enjoying the elements, escaping from Auerbach's 'We are not told.' (It is that rarity in Rembrandt, a picture whose bottom edge is not a falling or fading.) The Syndics are strong in their bourgeois good faith. They know a good piece of cloth when they see it. But their world, like the painter's, is wholly confined.

The reality we try to encapsulate in the words 'bourgeois society', of which Rembrandt's Holland was the prototype, permeates the rooms in the National Gallery like an atmosphere – slightly contaminated, more than a touch distasteful, but electric with energy and earned self-satisfaction. Art historians see it as their task to trace connections between the fiction of the 'I' that Rembrandt perfected and the mercantile empire that gave him house-room. The connections seem obvious – and that is the trouble. Rembrandt is a bourgeois individualist (I remember Sartre saying much the same thing about Flaubert), but then what needs explaining is the strangeness, the recalcitrance, and at the same time the entire typicality, of his version of the creed. Rembrandt's is a stifling world, chock-full of hypocrisies. We turn from the carefully stage-managed humility of so many of the portraits (the starched ruffs and parrots, the gold hairpins and kid gloves) to the unredeemed suffering of Lucretia. She, like the vast majority in this Calvinist Republic, should be understood as going to hell – in the company of Joris Fonteijn, assuredly, and of 18-year-old Elsje Christiaens, landlady-killer, whom Rembrandt drew twice on the gibbet. 'Ordinary people' …

And yet ordinariness was something this artist was intent on drawing into the realm of art. Magnifying, isolating, giving a tragic grandeur. No painter has ever made an image so suggestive of guarded, complex, careful mutual acknowledgment of man and woman – indeed in a world of darkness – as Rembrandt did in The Jewish Bride. This is 'bourgeois society' with a vengeance: all its new tact and considerateness, all its advisable circumspection. (Even the showiness of the man's gold sleeve is part of the story. And the idea that we are meant to imagine the lovers as characters out of the Old Testament – a blameless couple spied on by Abimelech – only amplifies the point.) No sitter looks death in the face more fearlessly than Margaretha de Geer – starched ruff and all. Lucretia's pale colours are pain materialised. The landlady-killer is just a young waif. That such feats of empathy are not merely compatible with the self-regard on view in Room One, but seem deeply to depend on it, is the bourgeois paradox Rembrandt sums up.

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Friday, November 28, 2014

How did the Enigma machine work?

On the day The Imitation Game hits cinemas, a look at how Allied codebreakers untangled the Enigma

Enigma machine. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Alex Hern

Friday 14 November 2014 16.23 GMT

2,111

Like all the best cryptography, the Enigma machine is simple to describe, but infuriating to break.

Straddling the border between mechanical and electrical, Enigma looked from the outside like an oversize typewriter. Enter the first letter of your message on the keyboard and a letter lights up showing what it has replaced within the encrypted message. At the other end, the process is the same: type in the "ciphertext" and the letters which light are the decoded missive.

Inside the box, the system is built around three physical rotors. Each takes in a letter and outputs it as a different one. That letter passes through all three rotors, bounces off a "reflector" at the end, and passes back through all three rotors in the other direction.

The board lights up to show the encrypted output, and the first of the three rotors clicks round one position – changing the output even if the second letter input is the same as the first one.

When the first rotor has turned through all 26 positions, the second rotor clicks round, and when that's made it round all the way, the third does the same, leading to more than 17,000 different combinations before the encryption process repeats itself. Adding to the scrambling was a plugboard, sitting between the main rotors and the input and output, which swapped pairs of letters. In the earliest machines, up to six pairs could be swapped in that way; later models pushed it to 10, and added a fourth rotor.

Despite the complexity, all the operators needed was information about the starting position, and order, of the three rotors, plus the positions of the plugs in the board. From there, decoding is as simple as typing the cyphertext back into the machine. Thanks to the reflector, decoding was the same as encoding the text, but in reverse.

But that reflector also led to the flaw in Enigma, and the basis on which all codebreaking efforts were founded: no letter would ever be encoded as itself. With that knowledge, as well as an educated guess at what might be encrypted in some of the messages (common phrases included "Keine besonderen Ereignisse", or "nothing to report" and "An die Gruppe", or "to the group"), it was possible to eliminate thousands of potential rotor positions.

Eventually, the team at Bletchley Park built a machine, the Bombe, which could handle that logical analysis. But the final steps were always performed manually: the job of the Bombe was merely to reduce the number of combinations that the cryptanalysts had to examine.

Even as the Allied code-breaking team were working on Enigma, the Axis was improving its machines, adding more and different rotors, and minimising operator error. Eventually, the Enigma was superseded by the Lorenz. These required yet more codebreaking in Britain, and more automation to do it – leading to the production of Colossus, the world's first digital programmable computer.

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The Best Science Books of 2014by Maria Popova

The Best Science Books of 2014

by Maria Popova

The math of soul mates, the psychology of nothing, the physics of faith, and more illuminating insights on the universe and our place in it.

On the heels of the year's most intelligent and imaginative children's books come the most stimulating science books published this annum. (Step into the nonfictional time machine by revisiting the selections for 2013, 2012, and 2011.)

1. THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE

"If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from," Carl Sagan wrote in his timeless meditation on science and religion, "we will have failed." It's a sentiment that dismisses in one fell Saganesque swoop both the blind dogmatism of religion and the vain certitude of science — a sentiment articulated by some of history's greatest minds, from Einstein to Ada Lovelace to Isaac Asimov, all the way back Galileo. Yet centuries after Galileo and decades after Sagan, humanity remains profoundly uneasy about reconciling these conflicting frameworks for understanding the universe and our place in it.

That unanswerable question of where we came from is precisely what physicist Alan Lightman — one of the finest essayists writing today and the very first person to receive dual appointments in science and the humanities at MIT — explores from various angles in The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew (public library | IndieBound).

At the intersection of science and philosophy, the essays in the book explore the possible existence of multiple universes, multiple space-time continuums, more than three dimensions. Lightman writes:

Science does not reveal the meaning of our existence, but it does draw back some of the veils.
[…]
Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion.

In one of the most beautiful essays in the book, titled "The Spiritual Universe," Lightman explores that intersection of perspectives in making sense of life:

I completely endorse the central doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree with [scientists who argue] that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations. Obviously, vast territories of the arts concern inner experiences that cannot be analyzed by science. The humanities, such as history and philosophy, raise questions that do not have definite or unanimously accepted answers.
[…]
There are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of "right" and "wrong." We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing. The previous questions are questions of aesthetics, morality, philosophy. These are questions for the arts and the humanities. These are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion.
[…]
Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

Dive deeper with Lightman on science and spirituality, our yearning for immortality in a universe of constant change, and how dark energy explains our accidental origins.

2. THE HUMAN AGE

In the most memorable scene from the cinematic adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel Contact, Jodi Foster's character — modeled after real-life astronomer and alien hunter Jill Tarter — beholds the uncontainable wonder of the cosmos, which she has been tasked with conveying to humanity, and gasps: "They should've sent a poet!"

To tell humanity its own story is a task no less herculean, and at last we have a poet — Sagan's favorite poet, no less — to marry science and wonder. Science storyteller and historian Diane Ackerman, of course, isn't only a poet — though Sagan did send her spectacular scientifically accurate verses for the planets to Timothy Leary in prison. For the past four decades, she has been bridging science and the humanities in extraordinary explorations of everything from the science of the senses to the natural history of love to the slender threads of hope. In The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us (public library | IndieBound), Ackerman traces how we got to where we are — a perpetually forward-leaning species living in a remarkable era full of technological wonders most of which didn't exist a mere two centuries ago — when "only moments before, in geological time, we were speechless shadows on the savanna."

With bewitchingly lyrical language, Ackerman paints the backdrop of our explosive evolution and its yin-yang of achievement and annihilation:

Humans have always been hopped-up, restless, busy bodies. During the past 11,700 years, a mere blink of time since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, we invented the pearls of Agriculture, Writing, and Science. We traveled in all directions, followed the long hands of rivers, crossed snow kingdoms, scaled dizzying clefts and gorges, trekked to remote islands and the poles, plunged to ocean depths haunted by fish lit like luminarias and jellies with golden eyes. Under a worship of stars, we trimmed fires and strung lanterns all across the darkness. We framed Oz-like cities, voyaged off our home planet, and golfed on the moon. We dreamt up a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels. We may not have shuffled the continents, but we've erased and redrawn their outlines with cities, agriculture, and climate change. We've blocked and rerouted rivers, depositing thick sediments of new land. We've leveled forests, scraped and paved the earth. We've subdued 75 percent of the land surface — preserving some pockets as "wilderness," denaturing vast tracts for our businesses and homes, and homogenizing a third of the world's ice-free land through farming. We've lopped off the tops of mountains to dig craters and quarries for mining. It's as if aliens appeared with megamallets and laser chisels and started resculpting every continent to better suit them. We've turned the landscape into another form of architecture; we've made the planet our sandbox.

But Ackerman is a techno-utopian at heart. Noting that we've altered our relationship with the natural world "radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad," she adds:

Our relationship with nature is evolving, rapidly but incrementally, and at times so subtly that we don't perceive the sonic booms, literally or metaphorically. As we're redefining our perception of the world surrounding us, and the world inside of us, we're revising our fundamental ideas about exactly what it means to be human, and also what we deem "natural."

Dive deeper with Ackerman on what the future of artificial intelligence reveals about the human condition.

3. THE BOOK OF TREES

Why is it that when we behold the oldest living trees in the world, primeval awe runs down our spine? We are entwined with trees in an elemental embrace, both biological and symbolic, depending on them for the very air we breathe as well as for our deepest metaphors, millennia in the making. They permeate our mythology and our understanding of evolution. They enchant our greatest poets and rivet our greatest scientists. Even our language reflects that relationship — it's an idea that has taken "root" in nearly every "branch" of knowledge.

How and why this came to be is what designer and information visualization scholar Manuel Lima explores in The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (public library | IndieBound) — a magnificent 800-year history of the tree diagram, from Descartes to data visualization, medieval manuscripts to modern information design, and the follow-up to Lima's excellent Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information.

'Genealogical distribution of the arts and sciences' by Chrétien Frederic Guillaume Roth from Encyclopédie (1780)

A remarkable tree featured as a foldout frontispiece in a later 1780 edition of the French Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, first published in 1751. The book was a bastion of the French Enlightenment and one of the largest encyclopedias produced at that time. This tree depicts the genealogical structure of knowledge, with its three prominent branches following the classification set forth by Francis Bacon in 'The Advancement of Learning' in 1605: memory and history (left), reason and philosophy (center), and imagination and poetry (right). The tree bears fruit in the form of roundels of varying sizes, representing the domains of science known to man and featured in the encyclopedia.

'Tree of virtues' by Lambert of Saint-Omer, ca. 1250

Palm tree illustration from the 'Liber floridus (Book of flowers),' one of the oldest, most beautiful, and best-known encyclopedias of the Middle Ages. Compiled between the years 1090 and 1120 by Lambert, a canon of the Church of Our Lady in Saint-Omer, the work gathers extracts from 192 different texts and manuscripts to portray a universal history or chronological record of the most significant events up to the year 1119. This mystical palm tree, also known as the 'palm of the church,' depicts a set of virtues (fronds) sprouting from a central bulb. The palm tree was a popular early Christian motif, rich in moral and symbolic associations, often used to represent the heavens or paradise.

'Plan of Organization of New York and Erie Railroad' by Daniel Craig McCallum (1855)

Diagram viewed by economists as one of the first organizational charts. The plan represents the division of administrative duties and the number and class of employees engaged in each department of the New York and Erie Railroad. Developed by the railroad's manager, the engineer Daniel Craig McCallum, and his associates, the scheme features a total of 4,715 employees distributed among its five main branches (operating divisions) and remaining boughs (passenger and freight departments). At the roots of the imposing tree, in a circular layout, are the president and the board of directors.

Lima writes in the introduction:

In a time when more than half of the world's population live in cities, surrounded on a daily basis by asphalt, cement, iron, and glass, it's hard to conceive of a time when trees were of immense and tangible significance to our existence. But for thousands and thousands of years, trees have provided us with not only shelter, protection, and food, but also seemingly limitless resources for medicine, fire, energy, weaponry, tool building, and construction. It's only normal that human beings, observing their intricate branching schemas and the seasonal withering and revival of their foliage, would see trees as powerful images of growth, decay, and resurrection. In fact, trees have had such an immense significance to humans that there's hardly any culture that hasn't invested them with lofty symbolism and, in many cases, with celestial and religious power. The veneration of trees, known as dendrolatry, is tied to ideas of fertility, immortality, and rebirth and often is expressed by the axis mundi (world axis), world tree, or arbor vitae (tree of life). These motifs, common in mythology and folklore from around the globe, have held cultural and religious significance for social groups throughout history — and indeed still do.
[…]
The omnipresence of these symbols reveals an inherently human connection and fascination with trees that traverse time and space and go well beyond religious devotion. This fascination has seized philosophers, scientists, and artists, who were drawn equally by the tree's inscrutabilities and its raw, forthright, and resilient beauty. Trees have a remarkably evocative and expressive quality that makes them conducive to all types of depiction. They are easily drawn by children and beginning painters, but they also have been the main subjects of renowned artists throughout the ages.

Dive deeper here.

4. THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

Just as the fracturing of our inner wholeness ruptures the soul, a similar fissure rips society asunder and has been for centuries — that between science and the humanities. The former explores how we became human and the latter what it means to be human — a difference at once subtle and monumental, polarizing enough to hinder the answering of both questions. That's what legendary naturalist, sociobiologist, and Pulitzer-winning writer E.O. Wilson explores with great eloquence and intellectual elegance in The Meaning of Human Existence (public library | IndieBound).

Three decades after Carl Sagan asserted that "if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed," Wilson — a longtime proponent of bridging the artificial divide between science and the humanities — counters that "we've learned enough about the Universe and ourselves to ask these questions in an answerable, testable form."

And that elusive answer, he argues, has to do with precisely that notion of meaning:

In ordinary usage the word "meaning" implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.
There is a second, broader way the word "meaning" is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. During organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. This concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.
Whether in the cosmos or in the human condition, the second, more inclusive meaning exists in the evolution of present-day reality amid countless other possible realities.

The idea that we are a cosmic accident is far from new and, to the unexamined existential reflex, far from comforting. And yet, Wilson suggests, there is something enormously gladdening about the notion that out of all possible scenarios, out of the myriad other combinations that would have resulted in not-us, we emerged and made life meaningful. He illustrates this sense of "meaning" with the particular evolutionary miracle of the human brain, the expansion of which was among the most rapid bursts of complex tissue evolution in the known history of the universe:

A spider spinning its web intends, whether conscious of the outcome or not, to catch a fly. That is the meaning of the web. The human brain evolved under the same regimen as the spider's web. Every decision made by a human being has meaning in the first, intentional sense. But the capacity to decide, and how and why the capacity came into being, and the consequences that followed, are the broader, science-based meaning of human existence.
Premier among the consequences is the capacity to imagine possible futures, and to plan and choose among them. How wisely we use this uniquely human ability depends on the accuracy of our self-understanding. The question of greatest relevant interest is how and why we are the way we are and, from that, the meaning of our many competing visions of the future.

Perched on the precipice of an era when the very question of what it means to be human is continually challenged, we stand to gain that much more from the fruitful cross-pollination of science and the humanities in planting the seeds for the best such possible futures. Like an Emerson of our technoscientific era, Wilson champions the ennobling self-reliance embedded in this proposition:

Humanity … arose entirely on its own through an accumulated series of events during evolution. We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own. Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us.

Dive deeper here.

5. THE EDGE OF THE SKY

"If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it," pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in the 1979 volume Some Personal Views, "one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter." Whether or not theoretical cosmologist Roberto Trotta read Mead, he embodies her unambiguous ethos with heartening elegance in The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is (public library | IndieBound) — an unusual "short story about what we think the All-There-Is is made of, and how it got to be the way it is," told in the one thousand most common words in the English language. Under such admirable self-imposed restriction — the idea for which was given to Trotta by Randall Munroe, who knows a thing or two about illuminating complexity through simplicity — Trotta composes a poetic primer on the universe by replacing some of the densest terminology of astrophysics with invariably lyrical synonyms constructed from these common English words. The universe becomes the "All-There-Is," Earth our "Home World," the planets "Crazy Stars," our galaxy a "Star-Crowd" — because, really, whoever needs supersymmetric particles when one could simply say "Mirror Drops"?

What emerges is a narrative that explains some of the most complex science in modern astrophysics, told in language that sounds like a translation of ancient storytelling, like the folkloric fables of African mythology, the kinds of tales written before we had the words for phenomena, before we had the understanding that demanded those words. Language, after all, always evolves as a mashup of our most commonly held ideas.

Trotta's story, which spans from the Big Bang ("Big Flash") to the invention of the telescope ("Big-Seer") to the discoveries and unknowns that play out at the Large Hadron Collider ("Big Ring"), also features a thoughtfully equalizing play of gender pronouns, casting both women and men as "student-people" — the protagonist-scientists in the history of cosmology and astrophysics.

The story is peppered with appropriately lyrical illustrations by French artist Antoine Déprez.

DARK MATTER: 'In the time it takes you to blink, the number of dark matter drops that fly through your hand is two times the number of people living today in the city that never sleeps.'

In a particularly poetic chapter on space-time and the quest to grasp the scale of the universe, Trotta, who works at the astrophysics group of Imperial College London and has held research positions at Oxford and the University of Geneva, chronicles Einstein's most enduring legacy:

Doctor Einstein was to become one of the most important student-people ever. He had a quick brain and he had been thinking carefully about the building blocks of the All-There-Is. To his surprise, he found that light was the key to understanding how far-away things in the sky — Crazy Stars, our Star-Crowd, and perhaps even the White Shadows — appear to us.
[…]
You could not explain this using the normal idea of space and time. Mr. Einstein then said that space and time had to be married and form a new thing that he called space-time. Thanks to space-time, he found that time slows down if you fly almost as fast as light and that your arm appears shorter in the direction you are going.
He then asked himself what would happen if you put some heavy stuff, as heavy as a star, in the middle of space-time. He was the first to understand that matter pulls in space-time and changes the way it looks. In turn, the form of space-time is what moves matter one way or another.
It followed that light from stars and the White Shadows in the sky would also be dragged around by the form of space-time. Understanding space-time meant understanding where exactly and how far away from us things are in the sky.
[…]
Mr. Einstein then began to wonder what would happen if he used his space-time idea for the entire All-There-Is.

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER: 'Near that city, student-people have built a large ring under the ground. It would take you over five hours to walk around that Big Ring.'

But Trotta's greatest feat is the grace with which he addresses the greatest question of cosmology, the one at the heart of the ancient tension between science and religion — the idea that the universe we have seems like a miraculous accident since, despite an infinity of other possible combinations, it somehow cultivated the exact conditions that make life viable. Science rejects the idea of a grand "Creator" who orchestrated these conditions, and religious traditions are predicated on the terror of admitting to such purely accidental origin — a bind with which humanity still tussles vigorously to this day, yet one Trotta untangles with extraordinary intellectual elegance:

Imagine for a minute the following situation.
You enter a room where you find a table with a large number of small, gray, round pieces on it — of the type that you can use to buy a coffee, or a paper, or to pay for parking. The ones with one head on one side and some other picture on the flip side.
Let's say that there are four hundred of the gray pieces on the table. And they all show heads.
You would not believe for a second that they were all just thrown on the table and happened to land this way. Although this could happen, it would be a hard thing to accept.
It would be easier to imagine that someone had walked into the room before you and had put them all down like this, heads up, all four hundred of them.
The strange thing about the Dark Push is that it is a bit like the four hundred heads-up gray pieces in the room.
If the Dark Push were only a tiny bit larger than it is, then everything we see around us would be very different.
It is as if changing only one of the heads in the four hundred would make the entire world change.
Change the Dark Push by a little bit, and Star-Crowds could not form; none of the stars we see in the sky would be there; the Sun would not be there; our Home-World would not be there; and life, as we know it, could not be here.
We wouldn't be here to talk about this in the first place.
So the question is: Who or what put down all four hundred heads exactly this way?

MULTIVERSE THEORY: 'Let's say that there are four hundred of the gray pieces on the table. And they all show heads.'

Trotta offers an answer through a remarkably succinct explanation of the concept of the multiverse and the notion of parallel universes:

Some student-people came to believe that they could understand this by imagining more rooms. A very large number of rooms.
In each of them, the four hundred gray pieces are all thrown up in the air and flipped. And they land in some way, however they may.
In most of the rooms, some of pieces will land heads, and some won't.
But if you have enough rooms, in the end you'll find one room where all of the pieces have landed heads-up. Just like that.
There is no need to imagine anyone setting them up in this way.
It's only a question of having enough rooms and trying them all.
And so the idea is that perhaps the All-There-Is is not all there is.

Dive deeper here.

6. THE SCIENCE OF SHAKESPEARE

William Shakespeare — to the extent that he existed at all — lived during a remarkable period in human history. Born the same year as Galileo, a founding father of the Scientific Revolution, and shortly before Montaigne, the Bard witnessed an unprecedented intersection of science and philosophy as humanity sought to make sense of its existence. One of the era's most compelling sensemaking mechanisms was the burgeoning field of astronomy, which brought to the ancient quest to order the heavens a new spirit of scientific ambition.

In The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright's Universe (public library | IndieBound), science journalist Dan Falk explores the curious connection between the legendary playwright and the spirit of the Scientific Revolution, arguing that the Bard was significantly influenced by science, especially by observational astronomy.

Of particular interest is what Falk calls "one of the most intriguing plays (and one of the most overlooked works) in the entire canon" — the romantic tragedy Cymbeline. Pointing to a strange and highly symbolic scene in the play's final act, where the hero sees in a dream the ghosts of his four dead family members circling around him as he sleeps, Falk writes:

Shakespeare's plays cover a lot of ground, and employ many theatrical tricks — but as for gods descending from the heavens, this episode is unique; there is nothing else like it in the entire canon. Martin Butler calls the Jupiter scene the play's "spectacular high point," as it surely is. But the scene is also bizarre, unexpected, and extravagant — so much so that some have wondered if it represents Shakespeare's own work.
[…]
If anything in Shakespeare's late plays points to Galileo, this is it: Jupiter, so often invoked by characters in so many of the plays, never actually makes a personal appearance — until this point in Cymbeline. And of course Jupiter is not alone in the scene: Just below him, we see four ghosts moving in a circle. . . . Could the four ghosts represent the four moons of Jupiter, newly discovered by Galileo?

First atlas of the moon, 1647, from 'Ordering the Heavens.' Click image for more.

The timeline, Falk points out, is right — Cymbeline is believed to have been written in the summer or fall of 1610, mere months after the publication of Galileo's short but seminal treatise on his initial telescopic observations, Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger). Examining a specific passage from the play for evidence, Falk writes:

The passage seems to allude, at least in part, to the sights one might see in the heavens; at the very least, it has something to do with distinguishing different kinds of objects (including, it would seem, stars) from one another. But the context is crucial: The first line is spoken to Imogen; the remaining lines are clearly an aside, spoken only to the audience. He seems to be saying, My story is unbelievable; why would Posthumus stoop so low, when his own wife is so beautiful? After all, he reasons, the eye gives one the power to tell the stars apart, and even to distinguish one stone on the beach from another; can't Posthumus see the difference between his wife and a common whore? [Penn State University astronomer Peter] Usher passes over the sexual aspect of these lines, however, and focuses on the astronomical: The "vaulted arch" is surely the sky; the "fiery orbs above" must be the stars. Could the precious "spectacles" be a reference to a telescope-like device?

Dive deeper here.

7. A STING IN THE TALE

The great E.O. Wilson is credited with having once said, "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos." But while the one million or so named species of insects make up about 70% of all known species on Earth, one type of insect is more vital to our planet's survival — as well as our own — than any other: the humble, mighty bee. In A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees (public library | IndieBound), British biologist, lifelong wildlife enthusiast and Bumblebee Conservation Trust founder Dave Goulson explores how bees gave our cosmic home not only its beauty but also its bounty of nourishment, and what responsibility we have — as Jane Goodall once eloquently urged — in repaying that existential gesture.

Inviting us into his evolutionary time machine, Goulson takes us back to the Cretaceous period, between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago, when Earth was covered in lush forests of giant greenery. The dinosaurs had just taken to the air as newly evolved feathers produced the first birds. Our own ancestors at the time were small and unseemly rat-like creatures lurking under the ferns and feeding on insects and fallen fruit. Goulson writes:

If we could travel to this ancient land, we might be too concerned with the dangers posed by the larger wildlife to notice that there were no flowers; no orchids, buttercups or daisies, no cherry blossoms, no foxgloves in the wooded glades. And no matter how hard we listened, we would not hear the distinctive drone of bees. But all that was about to change.

So why did it change? It turns out that sex does indeed rule the world — two hundred million years after the first ejaculation in Earth's recorded history, bees stepped in to perform a vital function in our planet's blossoming into maturity:

Sex has always been difficult for plants, because they cannot move. If one cannot move, then finding a suitable partner and exchanging sex cells with them poses something of an obstacle. The plant equivalent of sperm is pollen, and the challenge facing a plant is how to get its pollen to the female reproductive parts of another plant; not easy if one is rooted to the ground. The early solution, and one still used by some plants to this day, is to use the wind. One hundred and thirty-five million years ago almost all plants scattered their pollen on the wind and hoped against hope that a tiny proportion of it would, by chance, land on a female flower. This is, as you might imagine, a very inefficient and wasteful system, with perhaps 99.99 per cent of the pollen going to waste – falling on the ground or blowing out to sea. As a result they had to produce an awful lot.
Nature abhors waste, and it was only a matter of time before the blind stumbling of evolution arrived at a better solution in the form of insects. Pollen is very nutritious. Some winged insects now began to feed upon it and before long some became specialists in eating pollen. Flying from plant to plant in search of their food, these insects accidentally carried pollen grains upon their bodies, trapped amongst hairs or in the joints between their segments. When the occasional pollen grain fell off the insect on to the female parts of a flower, that flower was pollinated, and so insects became the first pollinators, sex facilitators for plants. A mutualistic relationship had begun which was to change the appearance of the earth. Although much of the pollen was consumed by the insects, this was still a vast improvement for the plants compared to scattering their pollen to the wind.

But this system presented our proto-bees with a serious wayfinding problem: Because flowers were as drably brownish-green as the surrounding vegetation, spotting them was no small task. In order to attract insects, they had to get better at standing out over the competition and "advertising" their delicious pollen.

Dive deeper into how that happened here.

8. THE UNIVERSE

"The mystery of being is a permanent mystery," John Updike once observed in pondering why the universe exists, and yet of equal permanence is the allure this mystery exerts upon the scientists, philosophers, and artists of any given era. The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos (public library | IndieBound) collects twenty-one illuminating, mind-expanding meditations on various aspects of that mystery, from multiple dimensions to quantum monkeys to why the universe looks the way it does, by some of the greatest scientific thinkers of our time. It is the fourth installment in an ongoing series by Edge editor John Brockman, following Thinking (2013), Culture (2011), and The Mind (2011).

In one of the essays, theoretical physicist Leonard Suskind marvels at the unique precipice we're fortunate to witness:

The beginning of the 21st century is a watershed in modern science, a time that will forever change our understanding of the universe. Something is happening which is far more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. This is one of those rare moments when our entire outlook, our framework for thinking, and the whole epistemology of physics and cosmology are suddenly undergoing real upheaval. The narrow 20th-century view of a unique universe, about 10 billion years old and 10 billion light years across with a unique set of physical laws, is giving way to something far bigger and pregnant with new possibilities.
Gradually physicists and cosmologists are coming to see our ten billion light years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse.

Dive deeper with Harvard physicist Lisa Randall on "branes" and the science of multiple dimensions and some thoughts on gender in science publishing.

9. NEUROCOMIC

Scientists are only just beginning to understand how the brain works — from what transpires in it while we sleep to how to optimize its memory to what love does to it to how music affects it — and the rest of us fall somewhere on the spectrum between fascinated and confused when it comes to the intricate inner workings of our master-controller.

From British indie press Nobrow — who also brought us Freud's graphic biography and Blexbolex's magnificent No Man's Land — comes Neurocomic (public library | IndieBound), a graphic novel about how the brain works. This remarkable collaboration between neuroscientist Dr. Hana Roš and neuroscience-PhD-turned-illustrator Dr. Matteo Farinella, with support from the Wellcome Trust, explains the inner workings of the brain in delightful and illuminating black-and-white illustrations, covering everything from perception and hallucinations to memory and emotional recall to consciousness and the difference between the mind and the brain.

We take a stroll through a forest of neurons, then learn about neuroplasticity. ("This is the great power of the brain, it's plastic!" they tell us in one of the most heartening and reassuring parts. "Once you learn something it is not set in stone, it's continuously shaped by experience.") We meet Pavlov and his famous studies of memory in 1897 Russia. We visit the haunting memory caves and the convoluted castles of deception.

This wonderful trailer for the film about the project, directed by Richard Wyllie, takes us behind the scenes of the duo's marvelous collaboration and creative process:

See more here.

10. THE TALE OF THE DUELING NEUROSURGEONS

"In both writing and sleeping," Stephen King wrote in his meditation on "creative sleep" and the art of wakeful dreaming, "we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives." But while he was exploring the creative process from a metaphorical angle, he was inadvertently describing one of the greatest neurological nightmares that could befall us. Due to the sheer enormity of what happens in the brain while we sleep, there is also a sizable possibility that things would go wrong; when they do, things can get scary. And few sleep-related brain glitches can be scarier than what is known as "sleep paralysis" — the evil twin of lucid dreaming.

Four years after The Disappearing Spoon, his wonderful chronicle of crazy tales from the periodic table, science writer Sam Kean returns with The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (public library | IndieBound) — a mind-bending tour of the mind, which Kean opens with a fascinating example, at once very personal and powerfully illustrative of the brain's humbling complexity:

I can't fall asleep on my back — or rather, I don't dare to. In that position I often slip into a fugue state where my mind wakes up from a dream, but my body remains immobile. In this limbo I can still sense things around me: sunlight trickling through the curtains, passersby on the street below, the blanket tented on my upturned feet. But when I tell my body to yawn and stretch and get on with the day, nothing happens. I'll recite the command again — Move, you — and the message echoes back, unheeded. I fight, I struggle, I strain to twiddle a toe or flex a nostril, and it does no good. It's what being reincarnated as a statue would feel like. It's the opposite of sleepwalking — it's sleep paralysis.
The worst part is the panic. Being awake, my mind expects my lungs to take full, hearty breaths — to feel my throat expanding and my sternum rising a good six inches. But my body — still asleep, physiologically — takes mere sips of air. I feel I'm suffocating, bit by bit, and panic begins to smolder in my chest.

Dive deeper with Kean's explanation of how this Rube Goldberg machine of neurological disaster sheds light on how the healthy brain works.

11. WHAT IF?

For years, NASA-roboticist-turned-comic-creator Randall Munroe has been delighting the world with his popular xkcd webcomic, often answering readers' questions about various aspects of how the world works with equal parts visual wit and scientific rigor. The best of these, as well as a number of never-before-answered ones, are now collected in What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (public library | IndieBound) — questions like what would happen if a submarine was hit by lightning to what it would actually take to eradicate the common cold to the physics of trying to hit a baseball pitched at the speed of light.

Munroe writes in the introduction:

I've been using math to try to answer weird questions for as long as I can remember. When I was five years old, my mother had a conversation with me that she wrote down and saved in a photo album. When she heard I was writing this book, she found the transcript and sent it to me. Here it is, reproduced verbatim from her 25-year-old sheet of paper:
Randall: Are there more soft things or hard things in our house?
Julie: I don't know.
Randall: How about in the world?
Julie: I don't know.
Randall: Well, each house has three or four pillows, right?
Julie: Right.
Randall: And each house has about 15 magnets, right?
Julie: I guess.
Randall: So 15 plus 3 or 4, let's say 4, is 19, right?
Julie: Right.
Randall: So there are probably about 3 billion soft things, and . . . 5 billion hard things. Well, which one wins?
Julie: I guess hard things.
To this day I have no idea where I got "3 billion" and "5 billion" from. Clearly, I didn't really get how numbers worked.
My math has gotten a little better over the years, but my reason for doing math is the same as it was when I was five: I want to answer questions.
They say there are no stupid questions. That's obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.

Dive deeper with Munroe exploration of the math of finding your soul mate.

12. NOTHING

In 2013, Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a mind-bending debate on the nature of "nothing" — an inquiry that has occupied thinkers since the dawn of recorded thought and permeates everything from Hamlet's iconic question to the boldest frontiers of quantum physics. That's precisely what New Scientist editor-in-chief Jeremy Webb explores with a kaleidoscopic lens in Nothing: Surprising Insights Everywhere from Zero to Oblivion (public library | IndieBound) — a terrific collection of essays and articles exploring everything from vacuum to the birth and death of the universe to how the concept of zero gained wide acceptance in the 17th century after being shunned as a dangerous innovation for 400 years. Webb writes:

You might think a book about nothing sounds suspiciously like an oxymoron. But fortunately there's plenty to explore, because nothing has been a topic of discussion for more than 2,000 years: indeed, the ancient Greeks had a lively disagreement about it. And such have been the changing fortunes of nothing that you can pretty much tell where you are in history just by finding out the prevailing views on nothing.
Take zero, for example, the symbol for the absence of things. Part of it came into being in Babylonia around 300 bc. The rest of it emerged 1,000 years later when the Indians fused that idea with an ancient symbol for nothingness. Another 400 years passed before it arrived in Europe where it was initially shunned as a dangerous innovation. By the 17th century it had gained acceptance, and today it is critical to the definition of every number you use.
[…]
Nothing becomes a lens through which we can explore the universe around us and even what it is to be human. It reveals past attitudes and present thinking.
[…]
Nothings can be difficult to attain: we haven't reached absolute zero and most likely never will . Nothings can also be messy: what is described as the vacuum of space turns out to be not one, but many. And nothings can be powerful: sick people can get better after talking with a doctor even though nothing material passes between them.

Dive deeper with Jo Marchant's mind-bending account of the latter power of nothingness — a look at the new science of the placebo effect and how our minds actually affect our bodies.

13. 30 DAYS

"The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper," the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science. A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of "quantum poetry" by xYz — the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology. In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo — an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month. Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London. Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a "super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun," to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.

Tilsley's choice of pseudonym is itself remarkably poetic — besides the scientific sensibility, XYZ was the pen name of her grandfather, the late British novelist and war correspondent Frank Tilsley.

Tilsley wrote and illustrated her quantum poems simultaneously, using her vast collection of scanned vintage paper ephemera, old typewriter fonts, and 19th-century artwork (I recognize Benjamin Betts's "geometrical psychology" illustrations), which she manipulated digitally into beautiful backdrops for her verses. Not unlike the work of William Blake, text and image work together to channel a cohesive atmosphere.

It's also interesting that Tilsley chose to capitalize nouns and pronouns in the style of religious texts — a poignant juxtaposition with the scientific sensibility of the poems, hinting, consciously or not, at the spiritual element of science.

14. DATACLYSM

In Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) (public library | IndieBound), writer, musician, and entrepreneur Christian Rudder takes a remarkable look at how person-to-person interaction from just about every major online data source of our time reveal human truths "deeper and more varied than anything held by any other private individual," and how the tension "between the continuity of the human condition and the fracture of the database" actually sheds light on some of humanity's most immutable mysteries.

Rudder is the co-founder of the dating site OKCupid and the data scientist behind its now-legendary trend analyses, but he is also — as it becomes immediately clear from his elegant writing and wildly cross-disciplinary references — a lover of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and all the other humanities that make us human and that, importantly in this case, enhance and ennoble the hard data with dimensional insight into the richness of the human experience. Rudder writes:

I don't come here with more hype or reportage on the data phenomenon. I come with the thing itself: the data, phenomenon stripped away. I come with a large store of the actual information that's being collected, which luck, work, wheedling, and more luck have put me in the unique position to possess and analyze.

For the reflexively skeptical, Rudder offers assurance by way of his own self-professed "luddite sympathies":

I've never been on an online date in my life and neither have any of the other founders, and if it's not for you, believe me, I get that. Tech evangelism is one of my least favorite things, and I'm not here to trade my blinking digital beads for anyone's precious island. I still subscribe to magazines. I get the Times on the weekend. Tweeting embarrasses me. I can't convince you to use, respect, or "believe in" the Internet or social media any more than you already do—or don't. By all means, keep right on thinking what you've been thinking about the online universe. But if there's one thing I sincerely hope this book might get you to reconsider, it's what you think about yourself. Because that's what this book is really about. OkCupid is just how I arrived at the story.

Dive deeper with the data on what it really means to be extraordinary.

15. EVOLUTION

We were once amoebae, and here we are today, singing opera and typing on iPhones with opposable thumbs. That alone is enough marvel to put the petty nuisances of everyday life in perspective and fill our human hearts with humility.

As a lover of unusual coloring books and of science-oriented children's books, especially ones that replace myth with science, I was instantly smitten with Evolution: A Coloring Book (public library | IndieBound) by London-based Finnish illustrator Annu Kilpeläinen — the best thing since Darwin's graphic biography, and also a fine addition to the best children's books of the year.

This simple yet imaginative primer on science via art explores natural selection, continental drift, what killed the dinosaurs, how birds descended from them, and all the other processes and phenomena that took us to where we are today. Die-cut delights add an element of interactive playfulness to the classic coloring-book experience.

One particularly apt application of the die-cut technique is a series of pages which, through strategically placed cuts, invite an exploration of how human facial features evolved.

Supplement with Bill Nye's grownup version, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation.

For more stimulating science reads, keep an eye on this evolving virtual bookshelf.

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Saturday, November 29, 2014

Italy’s Great, Mysterious Storyteller

Italy's Great, Mysterious Storyteller

My Brilliant Friend

The Story of a New Name

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

The Lost Daughter

Troubling Love

The Days of Abandonment

What kind of funny is he?

What kind of funny is he?

Rivka Galchen

World of Faces

World of Faces

T.J. Clark

Friday, November 28, 2014

How did the Enigma machine work?

How did the Enigma machine work?

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The Best Science Books of 2014by Maria Popova

The Best Science Books of 2014

1. THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE

2. THE HUMAN AGE

3. THE BOOK OF TREES

4. THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

5. THE EDGE OF THE SKY

6. THE SCIENCE OF SHAKESPEARE

7. A STING IN THE TALE

8. THE UNIVERSE

9. NEUROCOMIC

10. THE TALE OF THE DUELING NEUROSURGEONS

11. WHAT IF?

12. NOTHING

13. 30 DAYS

14. DATACLYSM

15. EVOLUTION

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