Dr. Metablog

Three Observations on "Books"

Charlie Dressen: "You  know something? I never read a book in my whole life... I can read newspapers and magazines. But I never read a book. You think I should?"

Jean Harlow (on her birthday): "Don't get me a book. I already got a book."

Anatole Broyard: "If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

Fermat's Room; Goldbach's Conjecture.

I reached my peak with numbers when I was a child at P. S. 217 (under the tutelage of Mrs. McNulty).  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division -- that's my area of expertise. Geometry, algebra, trig -- way too abstract for my pedestrian brain. Calculus and up -- not the least chance.

Arithmetic yes, mathematics no.

Sometimes I try to read popularizations of mathematical theory, but I rarely make it beyond the first few sentences. Once symbols start to appear, I'm done. Especially Greek letters (in parentheses). 

The consolation prize is that I'm better than most people at mental arithmetic. I can do sums and approximations and other stuff in my head.

Last night, we watched Fermat's Room. It's the kind of movie that is often called an "ingenious thriller."  It's also a member of a very small group of films that concern mathematics or mathematicians:  Good Will Hunting, Stand and Deliver, Antonia's Line, Straw Dogs. 

Fermat's Room focuses on a possible proof of Christian Goldbach's Conjecture. I suppose that I should have known about Herr Goldbach and his guess, but I confess to ignorance. Goldbach's conjecture dates to 1742 and is apparently one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory. In brief, Goldbach theorized that every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. For example, 10 is equal to 3 plus 7, 20 to 17 plus 3 (or 13 plus 7), and 100 resolves into 47 plus 53. Although no one has found a number that doesn't work, the conjecture can't be proved -- or, at least, hasn't been proved because there are some very large numbers out there. In Fermat's Room, two of the characters claim to have proved the conjecture. And they are consequently at odds.

I had always thought of prime numbers as a kind of novelty or curiosity. But if primes are a component of all even numbers -- well, that's something.  Goldbach's idea raises the stature of primes in my perennially naive eyes -- in exactly the same way that the Fibonacci series became more important to me when I learned that the chambered nautilis is structured Fibonacci-wise.  

While watching the movie (which is a good one), I ran through the even numbers from 10 to 70.  Everything was in order. But why?

Later in the evening, I read that every even number can also be resolved into the sum of a semi-prime (which is the product of two primes) and a prime. So 100 equals 77 (7 time 11) and 23. I spent a restless  night summing, in my bed, semi-primes and primes from 10 to 100. All in order, once again.

Why should it be so?

Whether it should be, or not, it is.  I remember that I used to answer my children and my students with the response, "That's not a why question?" Goldbach's Conjecture is a fact, not a why.

It's like gravity. I understand that the apple falls to the ground and that the moon doesn't head out into space and that it's harder to walk uphill than downhill. But I still don't understand why. It works, and that's enough. For me.

"Paradise" in Measure for Measure

The word to watch in a most riveting speech in Measure for Measure is "paradise." 

Young Claudio. whose head is scheduled to be lopped off tomorrow morning, is the speaker. He panics -- and why shouldn't he? After all, his only slip is that he has impregnated his ladylove Juliet. A venial sin, yet in newly-puritanical Vienna, the act of love has led directly to the executioner with his ax and his big black block. Although everyone, certainly including Shakespeare himself, knew that there were many things far worse than to depart this vale of trouble and tears, Claudio is so terrified by his imminent execution that he goes off the philosophical rails. He argues the extreme position (and here comes the speech and the crucial word) that "The weariest and most loathed worldly life/ That age, ache, penury and imprisonment/ Can lay on nature is a paradise/ To what we fear of death." A "paradise?" Goodness gracious!

Although everyone can sympathize, no one should agree with Claudio. Neverthless, the three-and-a-half lines of verse that contain the climactic  word "paradise" (and indeed the long speech in which these lines reside) are so brilliant and colorful that they almost persuade us to do so. One of the reasons the sentence is so wonderful is because Shakespeare brings to bear one of his favorite and most useful figures of speech. To depict Claudio's hysteria, Shakespeare employs a full-throttle hyperbole.

The most transparently hyperbolical words are the grammatical superlatives "weariest" and "most loathed." The hyperbole that resides in the word "paradise" is less obvious but more potent. "Paradise" is the climax -- the word that any good actor or reader must hit hard when he recites or reads the passage. An hyperbolist less gifted than Shakespeare might have written "The weariest and most loathed life is pretty darn good compared to dying," but our author pulls out all the rhetorical stops. To lie in poverty, in pain, in prison is, Claudio asserts, compared to death, a "paradise." 

If, dear attentive and intelligent reader, you will now return to quotation, and read Claudio's lines again, you will feel the hyperbolical power of "paradise." Try it, please. And when you recite the sentence, you will also notice that the initial "p" in climactic "paradise" is prepared for by the plosives in the words that precede it -- "penury" and "imprisonment."

And if you are following instructions and reading aloud, you should be aware that in Shakespeare's time, "ache" was pronounced "aitch" -- a pronunciation that produces a strong and ingenious contrast between the affricates (age, aitch) and the plosives (penury, imprisonment, paradise).

Claudio's hyperbolical lines bring to conclusion a speech which is querulous at the start and panicky at the end.  Here they are in context.  

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit

To bath in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thought

Imagine howling.  'Tis too horrible.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.  

("Cold obstruction" means that the body no longer moves -- as opposed to "sensible" (i.e capable of sensation or feeling) "warm motion".  A "kneaded clod" is what a "warm motion" is compressed or compressible into by death. A "delighted spirit" is generally glossed as "formerly capable of delight" but is better understood as "darkened" -- that is, de-lighted. "Viewless" means simply "invisible.")

Shakespeare does not feel obliged to distinguish or judge between these painful visions of an afterlife; instead, he prefers simply to heap together naturalistic, Christian, pagan and "lawless" ideas. 

Students of hyperbole will take note of the inventive phrase "worse than worst," where, it seems, "worst" is insufficiently superlative. Here Shakespeare pushes against the limits of grammar. Bad, worse, worst suffices for most writers, but Shakespeare invents a new adjectival category -- a comparative superlative.

Shakespeare's interest in the worstness of things will reappear in King Lear  when Edgar, encountering his blinded father, realizes that he has not yet touched bottom: "O Gods. Who is't can say "I am at the worst?'/ I am worse than e'er I was." And then an worser insight comes to him: "And worse I may be yet: the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" For Edgar, of course, death, that so frightens Claudio, is understood to be a relief and a liberation. Edgar's father dies "smilingly."

Even More on Lola's Language

Let us understand what Lola (the exemplary two-year-old granddaughter) meant when she cryptically observed, "Nay, no ba."

Nay --perhaps better spelled  neigh -- means horse or horses. "Ba" are of course sheep. Lola watched them last summer when the two grazing animals shared the same Vermont pasture. But when her father took her to a Virginia farm, she noticed that there were no sheep among the horses. Hence her succinct formula: "nay, no ba."

As Duke Vincentio says, "all difficulties are but easy when they are known."

Another Replacement Child -- Peter Sellers

A "replacement child," narrowly defined, is a person who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for such persons to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, and in worst-case scenarios, pathological.  

One of the ways in which the "replacement child syndrome" manifests itself concerns the matter of self-identity. An adult "replacement child" might wonder, Who am I exactly?  He might find himself, especially if he has been raised from his earliest days as if he were someone else, uncertain of his own boundaries. 

The great comic actor Peter Sellers, was a classic replacement child. At birth, Sellers was named Richard Henry, but his parents, curiously, always called him Peter, after an older stillborn brother. And Peter he remained. Why would his parents do such a thing?  Would it not effect a child to be called not by his own name but by the name of a missing brother?

Sellers is famous for his ability to subsume his identity into the role he played.  He said that "If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am" -- because even when not acting, he was always Richard Henry playing the part of Peter.

To confuse him all the more, Sellers' father, who was Anglican, and his mother, who was Jewish, sent him to Roman Catholic schools.