most appealed.
For adults, a prolonged bed stay usually means serious illness or surgery, with the attending pharmacological, environmental, and psychological stresses. It’s not the time to tackle Proust, Thucydides, or Thomas Pynchon because of all the external interruptions and internal distractions.
Finding myself in such a situation, I sought books that, while serious, would not require sustained focus: essays or similar works. Here are some I found.
You couldn’t call philosopher Jim Holt a lightweight. His last major work, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, asked that question of several deep thinkers, both living and dead. His newest work is a collection of short pieces on many challenging topics from mathematics, physics, computers, philosophy, and neighboring domains. When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought explores the baffling questions most of us have considered as we trod the slopes of geometry, pre-calculus, or simple mechanics. In 40 articles averaging fewer than 10 pages each, Holt recounts voyages through strange seas of thought—from quantum entanglement to fractals—along with those who ventured on them.
Holt continues to meet living thinkers, while placing the dead in their often-extraordinary circumstances. Some of his anecdotes would send a reader rushing to learn more, except for the pressing need to follow the intellectual quest. A single sentence may leave us writhing in suspense: “The real power of group theory was first demonstrated in 1832, in a letter that a twenty-year-old Parisian student and political firebrand, named Évariste Galois hastily scrawled to a friend late on the night before he was to die in a duel (over the honor of a woman and quite possibly at the hand of a government agent provocateur).”
But as intriguing as the people are, his subjects, particularly mathematics and physics, are the main attractions. Holt contends that “people who are otherwise cultivated will proudly confess their philistinism when it comes to mathematics. The problem is that they have never been introduced to its masterpieces.” Better than anyone I have ever read, Holt helped me understand, or at least be properly awed, by these works.
Curious by Nature
Philosopher Colin McGinn takes little bites of even larger subjects in Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays. McGinn is a well-known philosophical maverick and jack-of-all-subjects, having written on philosophy of language, mind, and epistemology, as well as on Shakespeare, fiction, and movies. He even wrote a book, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, questioning whether our brains are capable of understanding the nature of their own consciousness.His range is exceptionally wide: from the mind-body problem, to how English added a four-letter suffix to “bull” to indicate contempt for certain statements, leading to philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, one of the few modern philosophical works to reach a wide audience. A reader can choose serious examinations of large epistemological or metaphysical questions, or playful analyses of such matters as whether the neurological network found in our digestive system is equivalent to a second brain. “What is it like to be an intestine?” As I read, I thought it may have been a parody until I found that there are books and Scientific American articles on just this subject. Philosophical Provocations may not tell you everything you’ve always wanted to know about philosophy, but it will show you almost everything that one highly curious philosopher has always wanted to know.
Writer Amy Leach is as interested in the world as Holt or McGinn but in a markedly different fashion. In Things That Are, she considers exactly that: things that exist, mostly in nature. In her very short pieces, which might best be called poetic or fanciful meditations rather than essays, she acquaints us with a living bestiary that is more fanciful than any from the Middle Ages yet usually possessing a kernel of truth. Yes, there are takahe birds, bucardos, organistrums, and “chuckwallas, polygamous vegetarian iguanas of the Mojave Desert.”
Leach’s pieces are brief yet glittering with gems. One critic compared her to Lewis Carroll descended via Emily Dickinson. In describing, celebrating, and musing over birds, reptiles, plants, insects, and stars, she turns again and again to the most unexpected yet insightful similes. “In form, lizards are as experimental as pasta”; creatures hide themselves “among things [they] look like, but in a scene where no one will suspect…like Willie Nelson among Lithuanian peasants”; or pond beetles loop “like watermelon seeds with very small rowing teams.”
When not dazzling with imagery, Leach can startle with speculation. She is sad that sound waves decay. If they did not, “the world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once.”
Deep Thoughts
A sharp turn brings us to Marilynne Robinson, best known for novels such as Housekeeping and Gilead. As one reviewer wrote, Robinson seems “bioengineered to personify unhipness.” She is, after all, an Idaho-born Calvinist, whose essays take a perspective almost unique among American intellectuals: that of a religious believer who has explored a significant proportion of the western literary, and American historical, canons.Robinson is something of an exception to the “short reads” rule. Her essays are more substantial in length and, though not abstruse in the way of subatomic physics or theories of time, they are often demanding. Books named The Givenness of Things and What Are We Doing Here? are not opened lightly, and subtitles, including “The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self,” only enhance the sense you’re in for a deep read. Even her more casual When I Was a Child I Read Books is anything but childish in its themes. One essay opens: “The long-prevalent belief that what is proposed as truth or reason can only be credited in the degree that it is consistent with the strata of physical reality by any means available to our experience is mistaken.” Another begins: “I have been reading Jonathan Edwards lately, notably the Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, ‘affections’ being the eighteenth-century term for emotions, more or less.”
Robinson is indeed a religious writer, but she examines religion with the same clarity she does social conditions and political behavior. She writes about her love of “elderly and old American hymns,” and offers spiritual counsel: “In the first Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate.” To read her is to walk with giants—Shakespeare, Emerson, Moses, John Calvin—and to consider large themes, “Freedom of Thought,” “Mind, Conscience, Soul.” Her observations come from a grounded place out of which she can share family chagrin: “My mother lived to be ninety-two… a sharp-minded woman, aware and proud of her intelligence to the end of her life…Then she started watching Fox News.”
Robinson tells us in the eponymous essay When I was a Child I Read Books that “my reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard.” Her essays, neither thick nor old, are, despite being somewhat hard, both deep and rich.
Read any good books lately? Tell us—and your peers—about them! Tell us about it in a few sentences: Why did you like it? What made you want to read it? What was your biggest takeaway? Did you have a favorite line?
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