Battersea Power Station
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So, this is a decades-old book, and it was first recommended to me 9 years ago, and I'm only getting to it now. I have to say, I love philosophy and I love pop psychology, but this is not really doing it for me. Maybe it's too much a product of its place in time and history, but I can't connect with it, despite being interested in the subjects of polyamory and existentialism.
I was going to sleep after reading some of it, and then woke up a couple of hours later with an idea of what bothers me about it. This is a little ramble-y and only half-related to the book. But I haven't had the time lately to really sit down and write something so I hope you'll permit me to share this one thing.
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I once heard an anecdotal observation from a physics... professor or student or researcher. I can't remember who it was. It was about perception:
When students first learn of Einstein's theories of relativity, they reject them. They cannot fathom that time, something that ticks away so constantly that we can measure everything in our lives against it, stretches and bends at the mercy of mass and speed. They often refuse to believe it, and when they eventually come around, it's through the brute force of logic as they begrudgingly weigh the math and evidence. Few of us ever really feel the essence of these theories, these truths that describe the workings of the cosmos. We are but Newtonian creatures, and to work with relativity, we must trust the numbers.
And yet, the same students, when presented with an even more outlandish and fantastical set of theories -- the rules of quantum mechanics -- eagerly embrace them. The quantum world is beyond most works of fiction. It's a world where particles constantly appear for no reason, out of a vacuum, for infinitesimal lengths of time only to be annihilated immediately. It's a world where particles defy Hamlet; they can be and not be at the same time. It's a world where the very act of observation -- us using our "eyes" to view reality, shapes that same reality. It's a world where "matter," the hard, firm stuff we can hold in our hands, exposes itself as the sum of mere vibrations, ripples among an ethereal field, some that fade away, and some that resonate indefinitely to form the hydrogen, the rock, the people that we see and know and touch.
When physics students first explore this wild world, they accept it wholeheartedly because it rings true. It's not just because of the tests that illustrate it, as in the case of the general and special theories of relativity. No, quantum theory feels familiar to the way we experience life.
... hence what prompted me to write this. I love amateur psychology: figuring out why I do certain things, why others act the way they do, and dreaming about the nature of the brain. I'm in the middle of the novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and frequently find myself disagreeing with the narrators analysis of the characters' motivations and personalities. Those characterizations are often simplistic to the point of Freudian caricature, where the hat a woman's authoritarian father wore now serves as a source of degradation for that woman, and wearing it is an act of rebellion against her female beauty.
There are other similar black and white analyses, such as the titular theme of "lightness" and "heaviness." Characters are considered "light" when they are able to experience love and life at face value and in the present moment and "heavy" when their experience is bogged down by insecurity, expectation, and dissatisfaction. There are often moments in the book that make my internal Donnie Darko protest against the teacher, in this case author Milan Kundera. "Things are not that simple!" And they're not. We're not driven by one single experience in our past, as many of his characters are, and we're not categorized into binary groups.
But why is life not that simple? And why does the bewildering truth of quantum mechanics resonate with us?
I believe it's because there's no such thing as a singular human emotion, just like there's no such thing as a particle. Particles are placeholders that allow us to do math and everyday calculations that take place in the Newtonian world. Emotions are placeholders that allow us to write and speak about humans in the world of language. But both are just approximations and probabilities.
The landscape of our feelings is an ever-flowing field of everything you can imagine and describe, and more. There can be swells of certainty and troughs of doubt, ripples of joy and elation and fear and despair and strength, instincts of flight or anger, breezes of wonderment and curiosity or jealousy or love; countless others.
These can pass you by unnoticed, or they can accumulate and hit you like a brick. They can intricately combine into stacks of emotions that have no name. They can fade away or resonate, like particles, for years, forming what we'd call a person's character.
But they can exist in superposition as well. A feeling of happiness can be there, and when pointed out by yourself or someone else, can fade away due to the mere act of observation. A person can go years without ever feeling confident, riddled with doubts, but by a singular act of imitating confidence, that wave can appear to have always been there.
That's why this-or-that characterizations (like strong or weak, "heavy" or "light," lucky or unlucky etc.) don't ring true. Just like with quantum particles, by the very nature of naming them (observing them), we are creating them. We are willing those characterizations into existence.
The man who lives down the block that we describe as stand-offish is stand-offish. We've decided that. Our very action of deciding that reinforces his personality, and he becomes even more stand-offish. The mere act of pointing it out to him, however, or the act of pretending he's sociable, can immediately change this characterization. All of a sudden he is not stand-offish. It turns out he was a sum of many waves of feelings, and that they were resonating to form what we considered his personality. But now that we measure them, the personality is already shifting. Now there are swells of sadness, and ripples of nostalgia and envy, and gusts of wistfulness and joy.
The coworker who we consider a happy woman is a happy woman. She's always happy, and we treat her as the happy person. And she is and we know that. But when we talk to her about the nature of happiness and we discuss with her our observation of happiness, we partake in the change of that characterization. She's not happy now. She's incredibly proud. She's optimistic. She's somewhat regretful. She's cautious. She's a little more tired today because of a long movie last night but every other day she's energetic. She's the sum of countless factors. She's not the happy coworker anymore.
Like one of the book's characters, there are real people in the world who were humiliated and traumatized by their parents. They are people who are next to you at the cubicle. They are people you see at the store. They are people you talk with at the dog park. They sell coffee. They own businesses. They write apps. They farm. They, like everyone else, are a sum of infinitely many waves of emotions, feelings, and impulses, combining to form a unique personality. So when the author (or narrator?) draws a straight line from her mother's abuse to her every taste in men, to her choice of career, to her lifestyle, it strikes the ear as hollow, as cartoonish. There's a beauty to the human psyche, like the beauty of quantum mechanics.
There's an ethereal nature to our feelings and our character. It's the sum of whispers. If spoken too loudly, the whispers fade. Or they pile on and on, reaching an irresistible fever pitch.
Let the waves of your existence wash over you, enjoying their unique ebb and flow. Visit someone else's surf. Perhaps you'll soon be awash a new, combined seascape.
I was going to sleep after reading some of it, and then woke up a couple of hours later with an idea of what bothers me about it. This is a little ramble-y and only half-related to the book. But I haven't had the time lately to really sit down and write something so I hope you'll permit me to share this one thing.
----------------------------------------------
I once heard an anecdotal observation from a physics... professor or student or researcher. I can't remember who it was. It was about perception:
When students first learn of Einstein's theories of relativity, they reject them. They cannot fathom that time, something that ticks away so constantly that we can measure everything in our lives against it, stretches and bends at the mercy of mass and speed. They often refuse to believe it, and when they eventually come around, it's through the brute force of logic as they begrudgingly weigh the math and evidence. Few of us ever really feel the essence of these theories, these truths that describe the workings of the cosmos. We are but Newtonian creatures, and to work with relativity, we must trust the numbers.
And yet, the same students, when presented with an even more outlandish and fantastical set of theories -- the rules of quantum mechanics -- eagerly embrace them. The quantum world is beyond most works of fiction. It's a world where particles constantly appear for no reason, out of a vacuum, for infinitesimal lengths of time only to be annihilated immediately. It's a world where particles defy Hamlet; they can be and not be at the same time. It's a world where the very act of observation -- us using our "eyes" to view reality, shapes that same reality. It's a world where "matter," the hard, firm stuff we can hold in our hands, exposes itself as the sum of mere vibrations, ripples among an ethereal field, some that fade away, and some that resonate indefinitely to form the hydrogen, the rock, the people that we see and know and touch.
When physics students first explore this wild world, they accept it wholeheartedly because it rings true. It's not just because of the tests that illustrate it, as in the case of the general and special theories of relativity. No, quantum theory feels familiar to the way we experience life.
... hence what prompted me to write this. I love amateur psychology: figuring out why I do certain things, why others act the way they do, and dreaming about the nature of the brain. I'm in the middle of the novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and frequently find myself disagreeing with the narrators analysis of the characters' motivations and personalities. Those characterizations are often simplistic to the point of Freudian caricature, where the hat a woman's authoritarian father wore now serves as a source of degradation for that woman, and wearing it is an act of rebellion against her female beauty.
There are other similar black and white analyses, such as the titular theme of "lightness" and "heaviness." Characters are considered "light" when they are able to experience love and life at face value and in the present moment and "heavy" when their experience is bogged down by insecurity, expectation, and dissatisfaction. There are often moments in the book that make my internal Donnie Darko protest against the teacher, in this case author Milan Kundera. "Things are not that simple!" And they're not. We're not driven by one single experience in our past, as many of his characters are, and we're not categorized into binary groups.
But why is life not that simple? And why does the bewildering truth of quantum mechanics resonate with us?
I believe it's because there's no such thing as a singular human emotion, just like there's no such thing as a particle. Particles are placeholders that allow us to do math and everyday calculations that take place in the Newtonian world. Emotions are placeholders that allow us to write and speak about humans in the world of language. But both are just approximations and probabilities.
The landscape of our feelings is an ever-flowing field of everything you can imagine and describe, and more. There can be swells of certainty and troughs of doubt, ripples of joy and elation and fear and despair and strength, instincts of flight or anger, breezes of wonderment and curiosity or jealousy or love; countless others.
These can pass you by unnoticed, or they can accumulate and hit you like a brick. They can intricately combine into stacks of emotions that have no name. They can fade away or resonate, like particles, for years, forming what we'd call a person's character.
But they can exist in superposition as well. A feeling of happiness can be there, and when pointed out by yourself or someone else, can fade away due to the mere act of observation. A person can go years without ever feeling confident, riddled with doubts, but by a singular act of imitating confidence, that wave can appear to have always been there.
That's why this-or-that characterizations (like strong or weak, "heavy" or "light," lucky or unlucky etc.) don't ring true. Just like with quantum particles, by the very nature of naming them (observing them), we are creating them. We are willing those characterizations into existence.
The man who lives down the block that we describe as stand-offish is stand-offish. We've decided that. Our very action of deciding that reinforces his personality, and he becomes even more stand-offish. The mere act of pointing it out to him, however, or the act of pretending he's sociable, can immediately change this characterization. All of a sudden he is not stand-offish. It turns out he was a sum of many waves of feelings, and that they were resonating to form what we considered his personality. But now that we measure them, the personality is already shifting. Now there are swells of sadness, and ripples of nostalgia and envy, and gusts of wistfulness and joy.
The coworker who we consider a happy woman is a happy woman. She's always happy, and we treat her as the happy person. And she is and we know that. But when we talk to her about the nature of happiness and we discuss with her our observation of happiness, we partake in the change of that characterization. She's not happy now. She's incredibly proud. She's optimistic. She's somewhat regretful. She's cautious. She's a little more tired today because of a long movie last night but every other day she's energetic. She's the sum of countless factors. She's not the happy coworker anymore.
Like one of the book's characters, there are real people in the world who were humiliated and traumatized by their parents. They are people who are next to you at the cubicle. They are people you see at the store. They are people you talk with at the dog park. They sell coffee. They own businesses. They write apps. They farm. They, like everyone else, are a sum of infinitely many waves of emotions, feelings, and impulses, combining to form a unique personality. So when the author (or narrator?) draws a straight line from her mother's abuse to her every taste in men, to her choice of career, to her lifestyle, it strikes the ear as hollow, as cartoonish. There's a beauty to the human psyche, like the beauty of quantum mechanics.
There's an ethereal nature to our feelings and our character. It's the sum of whispers. If spoken too loudly, the whispers fade. Or they pile on and on, reaching an irresistible fever pitch.
Let the waves of your existence wash over you, enjoying their unique ebb and flow. Visit someone else's surf. Perhaps you'll soon be awash a new, combined seascape.