The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I previously read Rovelli’s better known book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which is a quick and easy to understand look at the physics revolution of the last century. 

The Order of Time is still a short book, but at over 200 pages, it is significantly longer than the other one. It also is more directly connected to the research that Rovelli himself has devoted his life to: Quantum Gravity and Thermal Time. 

 

As with the other book, this one is translated from Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, who bring the beauty of Rovelli’s prose to life in English. 

 

Based on the previous book, I expected a book that took difficult topics and made them understandable to a lay audience. After all, Rovelli is a great communicator. I was not at all disappointed: this book is definitely that. 

 

But it is more than that. A lot more. From Rovelli’s starting each chapter with a quote from Horace’s Odes, to the liberal references to poetry and literature and philosophy, this book is quite a bit more emotionally moving. It also intersected with metaphysics and theology in ways that I definitely did not expect - and really gave me plenty to think about regarding mortality, human nature, and existence in the world we live in. 

 

I won’t even really try to go into the substantive stuff. Time is, as Doctor Who put it, rather “timey-wimey and wibbly-wobbly.” It isn’t the same everywhere, but moves at different “speeds.” It is dependent on velocity and gravity. At the quantum level, it doesn’t have a direction. It is connected to, well, connections. It is the interactions of spacetime and quantum dimensions that allow us to observe it at all. And it is, well, just really weird. 

 

Rovelli also argues, based on our current understanding of time, that it isn’t some objective passing, or connected to some great cosmic clock. Rather, time is made up of events, occurrences, interactions.

 

We as humans experience time in a certain way, but our ability to do so is limited. It really is our memory and ability to predict the future based on the past that allows us to see time beyond the present moment. 

 

It is this exploration of the subjectivity of time, and the limitations of human experience that sound strikingly like the theological discussions about eternity and human limitations. 

 

Finally, Rovelli makes a compelling case that all existence - all life for certain - is inextricably tied to an increase in entropy. Life is decay, disintegration, entropy. Life simply builds dams delaying the decay one step at a time in order to harness that decay. 

 

If there were no change in entropy, no life could exist. In fact, a static universe like that could never change, could never live in any real sense. 

 

Again, there is no way I can summarize better than Rovelli’s thoroughly delightful writing and lucid explanations. You really should read the book and enjoy for yourself.

 

Let me start out with a few of the poetic things. I could have quoted all of the Horace, for sure, but this was my favorite:

 

Happy

and master of himself

is the man who

for every day of his life can say:

“Today I have lived;

tomorrow if God extends for us

a horizon of dark clouds

or designs a morning

of limpid light,

he will not change our poor past

of events that the fleeting hour

will have assigned to us.”

(III, 29)

 

The author also quotes the Grateful Dead, in a quote that is simply perfect for the discussion he uses it in. 

 

Look out 'cause here comes some free advice

Walk in the sunshine, watch for the bright sun

Be all those things you're able to be

You got to listen to the heavens

You got to try and understand

The greatness of their movement

Is just as small as it is grand

Try not to hurry, it's just not your worry

Leave it to those all caught up in time

You got to deep-six your wristwatch

You got to try and understand

The time it seems to capture is just the movement of its hands

I ain't preachin', 'cause I don't know

How to make fast things move along slow

Can't stop it, can't make it go

Just 'cause I say it, that don't mean that it's so, no, no

 

There is a lot more, but I will leave that to the reader. Oh, and many of his illustrations for time use the Smurfs. He clearly has a great sense of whimsy. 

 

I’ll hit a few highlights from the text itself as well. 

 

First, the book literally starts with a simple fact:

 

Time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level.

 

Did you know that? It’s true. The difference is really small, but you can actually measure it with a precision timepiece, available online for a few thousand bucks. 

 

Why, though? Well, gravity affects time. The more gravity, the slower time. Hence why at the event horizon of a black hole, time…stands still. Hence, “event” horizon. Which, well, that’s pretty wild. 

 

This, in addition to the fact that time slows as the observer approaches the speed of light. 

 

Time also isn’t a continuum, even though we humans experience it that way. Rather, like electron energy levels, or photon energy levels, it exists at particular discrete moments. I love how Rovelli explains this.

 

Continuity is only a mathematical technique for approximating very finely grained things. The world is subtly discrete, not continuous. The good Lord has not drawn the world with continuous lines: with a light hand, he has sketched it in dots, like the painter Georges Seurat.

 

I also want to point out this excellent observation, in the passage on the explosion of science surrounding the French Revolution. 

 

Rebellion is perhaps among the deepest roots of science: the refusal to accept the present order of things.

 

If you want to understand why MAGA and the authoritarians they worship are so anti-science, this is why. MAGA is all about returning to a particular order, with women and minorities put firmly back in their place. Science challenges all of that, as well as the religious and political delusions that MAGA uses to support its hierarchical view of the world. 

 

Science seeks absolute truth, not absolute authority. 

 

One of the figures that features early in the book is Leibniz. You may have heard of him. In addition to co-inventing Calculus, he disagreed with Newton about the nature of time. Leibniz actually agreed with the earlier Greek tradition that time is only the order of events, not some autonomous quantity. 

 

What I hadn’t heard previously about him was the legend (which may or may not be true - no one is sure) that Leibniz, whose name was originally Leibnitz, removed the “t” from his name in protest against the Newtonian idea of time, written in equations as “t.” 

 

Another truly mind-blowing idea in this book is that “things” as such, do not exist. While we humans think of the universe as consisting of objects, it really doesn’t, at the quantum level. What we experience as objects are really just the events of interaction between the various grids of dimension. (He explains this a lot better than I do.) By analogy, then:

 

What works instead is thinking about the world as a network of events. Simple events, and more complex events that can be disassembled into combinations of simpler ones. A few examples: a war is not a thing, it’s a sequence of events. A storm is not a thing, it’s a collection of occurrences. A cloud above a mounts is not a thing, it is the condensation of humidity in the air that the wind blows over the mountain. A wave is not a thing, it is a movement of water, and the water that forms it is always different. A family is not a thing, it is a collection of relations, occurrences, feelings. And a human being? Of course it’s not a thing; like the cloud above the mountain, it’s a complex process, where food, information, light, words, and so on enter and exit…A knot of knots in a network of social relations, in a network of chemical processes, in a network of emotions exchanged with its own kind. 

 

And later:

 

We therefore describe the world as it happens, not as it is. Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are. We understand biology by studying how living beings evolve and live. We understand psychology (a little, not much) by studying how we interact with each other, how we think…We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.

 

As you can see, this is right at the intersection of physics (which in this case is fairly well understood) and metaphysics, philosophy, theology even. God is change. 

 

In another amazing passage, Rovelli uses the analogy of descending from a mountain into a foggy valley, for how our limited perception warps how we see and experience the universe. From afar, the fog looks like a well-defined surface, but as you descend, there is not clear dividing line. Likewise, the surface of my desk here at my office sure seems solid enough, but if I could see it at the atomic scale, it would be a fog of electrons. 

 

We see through a glass, dimly, as Saint Paul would have it. And it is even deeper than that. 

 

If we give a description of the world that ignores point of view, that is solely “from the outside” - of space, of time, of a subject - we may be able to say many things but we lose certain crucial aspects of the world. Because the world that we have been given is the world seen from within it, not from without. 

Many things that we see in the world can be understood only if we take into account the role played by point of view. They remain unintelligible if we fail to do so. In every experience, we are situated within the world: within a mind, a brain, a position in space, a moment in time. Our being situated in the world is essential to understanding our experience of time. 

 

Again, very in line with some of the theological ideas that have resonated for me from my childhood. As a friend who was raised Episcopal put it, in her view now, perhaps humans are atoms in God’s body. We see God from the inside, which is why what we see is both incomplete and inseparable from our perspective, our point of view, our vantage point to see. 

 

“In him we live and move and have our being.”

 

I definitely was the most affected, however, by the explanation of the relationship of entropy and time. It is one of the most lucid explanations of the fundamental truth of “life, the universe, and everything” that I have seen. 

 

Death is not separable from life. If we did not die, we could not live. This is not a theological viewpoint, but a simple fact of the universe. Life is decay. Life is death. And life is fleeting and beautiful anyway. 

 

Regarding these chapters, let me start with this. We mislearn some things in school, and one of them is the idea of “energy.” We are taught that living organisms need “energy” to function. This is not true. Otherwise, we could all park ourselves at Death Valley, where there is plenty of energy, and never have to eat again. 

 

Clearly this doesn’t work. 

 

Because what we need is not energy, but sources of low entropy. 

 

Energy - as I was also told at school - is conserved. It is neither created nor destroyed. If it is conserved, why do we have to constantly resupply it? Why can’t we just keep using the same energy?

The truth is that there is plenty of energy and it is not consumed. It’s not energy that the world needs in order to keep going. What it needs is low entropy. 

What makes the world go round are not sources of energy but sources of low entropy. Without low entropy, energy would dilute into uniform heat and the world would go to sleep in a state of thermal equilibrium - there would be no longer any distinction between past and future, and nothing would happen. 

 

Rovelli makes a pretty good case that without changes in entropy, time would not exist. Indeed, time itself consists of changes in entropy. 

 

We are processes, events, composite and limited in space and time. But if we are not an individual entity, what is it that founds our identity and its unity? What makes it so - that I am Carlo - and that my hair and my nails and my feet are considered part of me, as well as my anger and my dreams, and that I consider myself to be the same Carlo as yesterday, the same as tomorrow; the one who thinks, suffers, and perceives? 

 

His answer to this is too long to reproduce here, but it can be summed up as being a point of view, our own perception of ourselves and others as individuals (rather than groups of cells including bacteria that outnumber us), and most importantly, our memory. 

 

This is definitely into the realm of philosophy, metaphysics, and theology. The science can tell us a lot about what, but the why of perception is complex, and not easily reduced to the physics of it all. 

 

I will end with a passage on mortality that I think is just amazing. It really sums up a lot of my own feelings about things. 

 

You can read a bit more about this in my recently posted review of White Noise by Don DeLillo, which is all about the fear of death. 

 

I would not wish to live as if I were immortal. I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me…I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest. The sister of sleep, Bach calls it.

 

The Order of Time is pretty mind-blowing in so many ways. But it also is, surprisingly, deeply human. Rovelli’s ability to combine both science and humanity is a great reason I love his writing. 

 

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This was our selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. We originally thought that this was the 40th anniversary of the book, but it turns out it was published in 1984, so technically 41 instead. 

Two of our attendees (including one of our founders) had read this book decades ago, and wanted to see how it held up. 

 

My personal opinion on that is that, while the cultural references seem dated (as all cultural references will eventually), there is a surprising amount of stuff in this book that not only has held up, but seems prescient today. 

 

The writing style of the book is also a bit of its time, a certain snarky, snide, ironic posture. The narrator, Jack, a professor of Hitler Studies at a fictional midwestern university, flirts with self-awareness and emotional revelation, yet also pulls back, hides, and seeks safety in denial. 

 

The form of the novel also is fascinating. It is in three parts of unequal length, with each part having a particular flavor and form. 

 

The first is made up of very short chapters, mostly setting the stage as far as the characters and the themes go. 

 

The second is the toxic disaster. That part is a single chapter, essentially a long-take that goes from the first to the last of the disaster, evacuation, and the aftermath. 

 

It is also notable to me that the first part feels very disjointed: each character is alone, meeting only briefly for interactions. In contrast, everyone in the family is stuck in the same car and later shelter together. The feeling is continuity and unity. 

 

The final part, the longest, explores both the aftermath of the toxic leak, particularly Jack’s belief that he is developing cancer, and his quest to track down what is going on with Babette, and to deal with that. 

 

There are, in my view, three central occurrences in the book, all interconnected. The first, and the one which runs from beginning to end, is Jack’s existential crisis - a midlife crisis that manifests in a near-crippling fear of death, rather than, say a new sports car or mistress.

 

The second, which is the most external, is a railway accident which releases a plume of toxic chemicals. The family has to evacuate, and Jack is exposed to the toxin when he refuels the car. 

 

The third is the question of what is causing the personality and memory changes to Babette, Jack’s wife. (Probably wife? Or just partner? The book hedges a bit.) What is going on with her? 

 

The book covers a decent bit of intellectual ground, from a satire of academia to a look at domestic life in a very blended family. (Jack and Babette have a combined seven children from previous marriages, four of which live with them.) There is also plenty of musing on mortality, fear of death, religion and its absence, media sensationalism, and a lot more. 

 

I should probably warn about spoilers here, even if spoiling a 40-year-old book is a bit difficult. 

 

The ending is pretty crazy, somewhat unexpected, although in retrospect, there are specific moments that set the ending up. 

 

While covering the entire breadth of our book club discussion is impossible - as usual, we had a great conversation about the book and its themes - I’ll try to at least cover the stuff I saw in it. If you live in the Bakersfield area and are looking for a club to join, check us out on Facebook and drop us a line. We welcome thoughtful people who love books, although not everyone finishes the books we discuss. It’s okay. Come and hang out and eat. 

 

One of the first things I noticed early in the book, after a little smile at the ubiquitous station wagons - this was, after all, even before minivans, let alone SUVs and crossovers - was the way the book assumes the normalcy of middle-aged people who are neither skinny nor movie-star beautiful, and also assumes that they still find each other sexually desirable. 

 

Neither Jack nor Babette is going to end up on a magazine cover….except in their professional capacities perhaps. But that’s okay, and the way the book handles sex (mostly non-graphically) is pleasantly normal. (I’d also add that nothing in this book would come close to winning a Bad Sex Writing award. And the reason is that DeLillo isn’t writing his fantasies, just normal human experience.) 

 

The first intimation of Jack’s fear of death comes in one of Jack’s lectures on Hitler. 

 

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”

 

There are moments in the book of real humor, often unexpected. One of them comes during a subplot where a pair of elderly siblings who Babette reads to get lost at a mall. They are eventually found, no thanks to the psychic the police consult. (She does inadvertently lead them to a handgun and heroin, though.) The fun of this is a certain line at the end of the chapter. 

 

The police had consulted Adele T. on a number of occasions and she had led them to two bludgeoned bodies, a Syrian in a refrigerator, and a cache of marked bills totalling six hundred thousand dollars, although in each instance, the report concluded, the police had been looking for something else.

 

 Any time the faculty hang out in the lounge and talk is a recipe for comedy. I thought this particular one, at the expense of my native state, was pretty good.

 

“The flow is constant,” Alfonse said. “Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

 

There is another cultural comment that is actually quite perceptive and prescient. It is definitely a thing, particularly in MAGA circles, to treat cities with fear and loathing for everything from the myth of out-of-control crime to cultural diversity. 

 

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns. 

 

In many ways, that too is something that fundamentalist religion inculcates: the idea of the purity of the small town (which is bullshit on a stick - small town politics are the worst) and the inherent sinfulness of the city. Later in the book, after the toxic disaster, Jack follows up on the idea. 

 

But over a period of time it became possible to interpret such things as signs of a deep-reaching isolation we were beginning to feel. There was no large city with a vaster torment we might use to see our own dilemma in some soothing perspective. No large city to blame for our sense of victimization. No city to hate and fear. No megacenter to absorb our woe, to distract us from our unremitting sense of time - time as the agent of our particular ruin, our chromosome breaks, hysterically multiplying tissue.

 

I do believe this is a factor in why MAGA is the way it is. Their own sense of decay, the way that urbanization has hollowed out so many small towns, the cultural stagnation of white middle America, is projected onto the city. Without that, they would have to stare into the void. 

 

There is another hilarious passage where Babette reads the tabloid headlines. One of them seems like it could be a real one from the Trump Era - substitute him for the Japanese. 

 

“A Japanese consortium will buy Air Force One and turn it into a luxury flying condominium with midair refueling privileges and air-to-surface missile capability.” 

 

So many of the scenes in this book are weird one-offs that serve the themes, but not necessarily the plot. For example, the one where Jack and his weird professor buddy Murray (who is obsessed with Elvis) who have evacuated and are hanging around at the evacuation center, and having existential discussions. They run across a group of prostitute - hey, everyone has to evacuate - and a bizarre conversation happens, where they try to proposition Murray, who really just wants to talk philosophy. Afterward, Jack is curious. 

 

“It’s none of my business,” I said, “but what is it she’s willing to do with you for twenty-five dollars?”

“The Heimlich maneuver.”

 

More poignant is Jack’s observation of his kids sleeping after the evacuation. 

 

A random tumble of heads and dangled limbs. In those soft warm faces was a quality of trust so absolute and pure that I did not want to think it might be misplaced. There must be something, somewhere, large and grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining radiance and implicit belief. It was cosmic in nature, full of yearnings and reachings. It spoke of vast distances, awesome but subtle forces.

 

I had mentioned prescient passages. There is a scene in the supermarket immediately after everyone returns from the evacuation. The old people seem to be in a frenzy, a panic, a loss of coherence. Jack notes why - and remember, this was written before Faux News. 

 

When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death. 

 

Later, as Babette’s class for old people gets expanded beyond how to stand and walk to include eating and drinking, she notes another trait of human nature. 

 

“Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced. Don’t lie down after eating a heavy meal. Don’t drink liquor on an empty stomach. If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating. The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn’t grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I’m the closest they could find, that’s all.”

 

And therein lies in large part why my parents embraced the false prophets they did. That reassurance by someone who claims to be an authority that the ways they did things as a child are the only right ways possible. 

 

Eventually, [SPOILER ALERT] Babette comes clean about what is ailing her. Like Jack, she is terrified of death. And, to treat it, she is trading sex for an experimental drug that is supposed to block the chemical receptors in the brain that cause fear of death. 

 

This leads into another hilarious passage where Babette and Jack have this competition trying to claim their fear of death is worse. 

 

It should be no surprise that neither of them act out constructively from this revelation. 

 

Jack starts down a path that will lead to a violent (if bizarre) conclusion. He is incited towards his attempted murder of Babette’s drug dealer and lover by three events. The first comes from Babette, who unconsciously projects her fear of death onto inciting Jack to violence. 

 

“You’re a man, Jack. We all know about men and their insane rage. This is something men are very good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal rage. When people are good at something, it’s only natural that they look for a chance to do this thing. If I were good at it, I would do it. It happens I’m not. So instead of going into homicidal rages, I read to the blind. In other words I know my limits. I am willing to settle for less.”

 

Jack has no idea of doing anything of the sort before this. But it plants the seed. Next, his father-in-law gives him a gun. Because everyone needs a gun in case of burglars, right? Finally, Murray, again talking philosophy, opines that the cure for fear of death is to kill someone. That way, they die, you live, fear of death conquered. 

 

You can guess that this doesn’t end entirely well, although the ending is perhaps a lot more ironic and anticlimactic than anything. 

 

A few more bits are worth mentioning. There is the scene where Jack takes his son Heinrich and Heinrich’s friend Orest (who wants to set the record for time in a cage with venomous snakes - perhaps his way of dealing with fear of death) out to eat. 

 

I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. He went at it silently and purposefully, loading up, centering himself, appearing to grow more self-important with each clump of starch that slid over his tongue. 

 

As the book nears its conclusion, Jack’s paranoia about his exposure to the toxin grows more and more hysterical. His doctors say ominous things, but he still feels fine, and in fact may well have nothing wrong with him for decades, if ever. I like his line here:

 

“All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There’s something artificial about my death. It’s shallow, unfulfilling. I don’t belong to the earth or sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone.”

 

Right at the end, as Jack receives treatment at a hospital run by German nuns, he discovers that none of them believe in an afterlife. They are all pretending to believe. Why? As one of them explains:

 

“Our pretence is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe.” 

 

I want to end this post with a bit of my own thoughts. 

 

In the end, I ultimately do not entirely understand Jack and Babette, although I very much see them as typically American. Ironically, as both my wife (longtime ICU nurse) and I have observed, those people who are the most religious seem the most terrified of death. And this isn’t limited to Christians or even monotheists. 

 

One could have an interesting discussion as to whether religion causes fear of death, or whether people terrified of death are drawn to religion. But in any case, it is weird to me that those who most strongly believe in an afterlife and claim to believe in a loving deity are the ones who are the worst about clinging to life well beyond any reasonable situation. As in, full treatment of a person in their 90s with terminal cancer, because “God is going to do a miracle and heal them.” (Spoiler: God didn’t.) 

 

At this time in my life, I am agnostic about the afterlife. I am not alone in this, even within the confines of those of us who consider ourselves Christians or religious people in general. 

 

Many have expressed this doubt - or better yet, the impossibility of knowing. Qohelet says in Ecclesiastes, “All go to one place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal descends into the earth?”

 

Hamlet describes death as “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns…” 

 

Rabelais calls the afterlife “The great perhaps.” 

 

Whatever the case, whether something exists or not, we really cannot know with any certainty. 

 

What we do have is a life. Our life. What we do with it is at least partly our choice. 

 

I myself have chosen to live my life both as if this life is all I have, and with the knowledge that I may have to answer for my choices. 

 

I find, now that I have rejected the fear-based and control-based belief in Scary Evangelical Hell™ that those two things are essentially the same. 

 

To live a good life now, with the goal of furthering the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, based on love, equality, care, and the Fruit of the Spirit works for both those scenarios. 

 

As far as a fear of death? Other than the usual human determination to not do things that will kill you, I don’t really spend time fearing death. 

 

I haven’t, as so many people I know who have gone through this kind of existential mortality crisis, spent my life trying to find magic to extend life as long as possible. Rather, I have a bit of a “damn the torpedos” way of living (as my father-in-law put it.) I’ll go climb that mountain. I’ll play that concert. I’ll go camping with my kids. I’ll take that evening with my wife. In other words, I’ll live while I’m alive.

 

Carlo Rovelli, in his wonderful book, The Order of Time, puts it so eloquently. (Stay tuned for that review coming soon.) 

 

I would not wish to live as if I were immortal. I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me…I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest. The sister of sleep, Bach calls it.

 

That is pretty much my own feeling. I have lived. While there has been pain, suffering, and struggle, and things I would not have chosen for myself. There has also been great beauty, joy, love, and connection. I have had the opportunity to play the greatest music ever written. I have stood on top of mountains. I have experienced poetry, and flowers, and cats, and the love of my wife and children. I have lived. 

 

Really, the one fear that Rovelli mentions that is the most real is the fear of the absence of love. I wish to end my life knowing I loved and was loved. That, ultimately, is my goal, whether my atoms are absorbed by the universe or whether I find myself in the presence of the Divine. 

The Scarlet Pimpernel (Musical, Bakersfield College 2025)

Bakersfield College has, for a number of years, put on a musical every summer, complete with live orchestra. I am fully in favor of this excellent idea, had have done my best to go see the productions. 

 

This year is The Scarlet Pimpernel, in the musical version by Nan Knighton and Frank Wildhorn. I mention this because the first stage version of this story was also the original version of the story. Baroness Orczy and her husband, Montague Barstow, wrote the original, which enjoyed a long run in London back in 1903. 

 

In the wake of this success, Orczy adapted the stage play as a novel, which is how most of us first experienced this classic. Okay, other than, perhaps, the Looney Tunes spoof, with Daffy as the “Scarlet Pumpernickel,” which has little to do with the original story. 

 

You can check out my post on the novel, which the kids and I listened to as an audiobook over a decade ago. 

 

The Scarlet Pimpernel may not have been the first adventure story where the hero had a secret identity. That honor may well go to The Count of Monte Cristo. But this story is definitely the first true forerunner to the comic book hero - and specifically to Batman. 

 

A wealthy man assumes a secret identity, relying on his wealth, skills, and brains to outwit the nefarious villains? That works for both. 

 

But Bruce Wayne is an amateur compared with Percy Blakeney. Totally boring. Percy would never approve of those dowdy duds. 

 

Blakeney, in both the book and this musical, leans hard into his identity of a fop, an overdressed, effeminate, twee British aristocrat without a single brain cell. 

 

Nobody could possibly suspect that he is really the Scarlet Pimpernel, the fearless and dashing leader of a band of fellow fops who are saving innocent victims from the guillotine during the Terror. 

 

While the musical does a decent job of setting the proper stage, I think it helps (for both the book and the musical) to have the background history in mind. 

 

The French Revolution overthrew the Monarchy, and established a fledgling democracy, the First Republic. 

 

Unfortunately, this government was undermined from without (conservatives across Europe threatened and goaded France into an ill-advised declaration of war against England) and within - as always when there is instability, the worst people see opportunities to seize power. 

 

The new constitution was suspended, and Ropespierre and his goons initiated the Terror, when tens of thousands were executed, mostly on the pretense that they were a threat to the nation. In reality, the bloodlust fed on itself, and by the end was mostly a settling of personal grudges, where neighbor denounced neighbor, and justice and morality ceased to even pretend to be factors in the bloodletting. 

 

(This pattern would later repeat itself in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Mao’s China.) 

 

The story takes place during this time, when so many were being denounced and murdered. In fact, that first scene is all about an ill-fated denunciation, where Marguerite denounces a family, not realizing they will be killed. (In the book, there is a more nuanced explanation of her motivations - the family had her brother beaten for showing romantic interest in the daughter of the family.) 

 

In light of this, it makes sense that Percy isn’t merely taking the side of the rich people in the revolution - he is protecting people from senseless violence. 

 

I won’t get into the specifics of the plot much more than that. I did want to note that if you have read the book, you will see some significant differences in the musical. 

 

The first half follows the book fairly closely. The main change is that Margarite’s brother Armand comes with her to England, and, rather than being an older brother and surrogate parent, he is portrayed as a younger brother - a mere child. 

 

It is in the second half that the play is much different than the book. Whereas the book has a series of encounters between the hero and the villain, in more one-on-one situations, with the hero single-handedly triumphing by his wits; the musical has an open confrontation, a duel, and a triumph of the entire league of gentlemen (and a woman) carrying out a successful plot. 

 

Which ending you prefer may vary, but there is no doubt that in terms of getting actors on the stage in the second act, the musical version is more successful. 

 

Which is, of course, a lot of the point. With a cast of over 30 actors, and more than 300 individual costumes, putting people on stage is much of the fun. 

 

Between me and my wife, we know a number of people involved in this production, including on the costume end, so we did keep a close eye on the details. I also care about the musical side, and it was great to have a real orchestra (if a bit light on the number of strings) to add that real sparkle. 

 

I really can’t think of any weak points in the show. The orchestra sounded great, the singers were excellent, the leads were riveting, and the costumes were over-the-top fun. 

 

This may be the first lead role I have seen Nathan Armendariz in, but he was hilarious as Percy/Scarlet Pimpernel. He has a great voice too. Elana Baker-Hart had a number of songs, and the more emotionally complex role as Marguerite, and she too was excellent. Rounding out the central trio was Adrian Francies as Citizen Chauvelin, the villain. I can’t remember seeing him on stage, but his might have been the best voice of them all. Professional level performances from all three. 

The Scarlet Pimpernel and his merry band of fops 

My favorite moment was before the Prince’s ball, with the show-stopping tune, “The Creation of Man” - which has some of the most hilarious lyrics in the repertoire. I link one off YouTube, but BC’s is a lot better, actually. Definitely better body language, shimmering, and general fabulousness. Seriously, you have to see it yourself. 

 Just one of the many costume sets

This show runs this upcoming weekend, Thursday through Sunday. While there were still tickets available at the door when we went on opening night, later dates might sell out. You can get tickets online at the event page.

 

I mean really. No wonder Chauvelin looks so unhappy. 

That hat is so....unflattering.  

The last several years, Bakersfield College has really upped their game, with a number of excellent shows, and creative programming. You won’t regret the modest cost of a ticket, and these local kids deserve our support.  

 

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

Source of book: I own this

 

I have enjoyed reading Oliver Sacks over the years. (See list at the bottom of the post.)

 

Sacks was a neurologist who eventually became a writer. He was that rare combination of a brilliant practicing doctor and an effective and compelling writer. 

An Anthropologist on Mars consists of seven case studies of particular people with brain issues and how they affected their lives. It was written 30 years ago, so there are some things that haven’t aged that well. Medicine has made some progress since then, and terminology has changed. This is most apparent in the two final chapters, about individuals on the autism spectrum. 

 

I mention this mostly to give some warning that Sacks’ understanding of autism at the time the book was written was less thorough than it is now. That said, because Sacks’ general approach to all the people he writes about is thoroughly empathetic and respectful, any errors are of excusable ignorance, not condescension or disrespect. 

 

As with all of Sacks’ books, he is able to include an incredible amount of science and medicine without losing the reader. His ability to explain complex neuroscience in understandable ways yet without oversimplifying, is amazing. 

 

Probably the best way to go through the book is one chapter at a time. 

 

Starting with the introduction, Sacks makes clear that this book is, more than anything, about human adaptation. 

 

For me, as a physician, nature’s richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life. 

 

He also mentions G. K. Chesterton’s famous character, Father Brown, as an inspiration for his approach. Rather than looking at people from the outside as specimens, he tries to get inside them, to see life from their perspective. And that is what he does in this book. 

 

In the first chapter, Sacks looks at an artist who was in a vehicle accident that led to a stroke, and caused him to lose his color vision. Or, more accurately, the part of his brain that processes and interprets color. 

 

He retained the physical ability of his eyes to sense different wavelengths, and transmit the information to his brain. But the brain couldn’t understand color anymore, causing both a loss of all color, and significant discomfort in bright light. 

 

Sacks gets really deep into the science in each chapter, leading to a lot of fascinating passages. One that stood out in this chapter was his description of how early color film worked, and how a lot fewer colors are needed to create an entire spectrum than you would think. In fact, you can do nearly everything with just two. Why is that?

 

These demonstrations, overwhelming in their simplicity and impact, were color “illusions” in Goethe’s sense, but illusions that demonstrated a neurological truth - that colors are not “out there” in the world, nor (as classical theory held) an automatic correlate of wavelength, but, rather, are constructed by the brain.

 

We really do not know why we experience colors the way we do - it is one of the weirdest human experiences, if you think about it. Why are red, blue, and green, and the rest experienced in a vivid and, well, colored way? But many of our senses are like that. Hearing, for example - we hear frequency as pitch, and combinations as timbre and harmony. 

 

Another thing that gets mentioned is that in World War Two, people with severe red-green colorblindness were used as spotters because they saw through camouflage better than normal-sighted people. 

 

The next chapter is a truly bizarre story. “Greg,” a young man from New York City, turned hippie, embracing the Grateful Dead particularly. But he ended up rejecting the drug culture and instead joined a Krishna monastery. 

 

There, he pretty much disappeared from his family, and seemed well on his way to a particularly impressive degree of transcendendance. 

 

He was also slowly losing his vision. 

 

Eventually, his parents found him in a near catatonic state, got him medical attention, where it was discovered that a benign tumor had crushed significant parts of his brain. 

 

While the tumor was removed, much of his function never came back. 

 

A significant loss was the ability to remember things. Prior to the tumor, the memories remained intact in large part. But afterward, he couldn’t make new memories, except for his ability to learn new Grateful Dead songs, interestingly. He was perpetually stuck in the present. 

 

Sacks spent significant time with him, and details much of the experience in this chapter. 

 

One of the questions with patients with this particular damage is exactly what is there of “them” left? Is there anything deeper than the surface, the now, the moment? Sacks spent enough time to come to an interesting conclusion. 

 

Greg’s “frontal lobe” characteristics - his lightness, his quick-fire associations - were fun, but beyond this there shone through a basic decency and sensitivity and kindness. One felt that Greg, though damaged, still had a personality, an identity, a soul. 

 

This is in contrast to some other people with similar damage who became feral, unable to process normal human emotion. (The chapter discusses a number of cases, some from the previous century.) 

 

The third chapter is all about a surgeon with Tourette’s Syndrome. 

 

I am not making that up. This was a real person, living and practicing in Canada. 

 

The chapter was fascinating for many reasons, not least of which was that this man was highly skilled at surgery, which seemed to, for the duration, mask his symptoms. Similarly, he could fly his small airplane with great skill, even with certain symptoms evident. 

 

Between Sacks’ skills at communicating with people, and the highly expressive intelligence of the surgeon, there is an incredible amount of inside information in this chapter. You really do get inside the head of the surgeon - how he experiences his own brain, thought process, physical movements, and so on.

 

What I was not at all expecting was that a certain amount of this actually felt familiar. While I do not have symptoms at the level of being diagnosed with Tourette’s, some of the brain things actually resonate for me. 

 

I have always had a highly active internal conversation going on. I talk to myself, as my wife can attest. I get certain phrases that repeat in my brain. I have a few minor tics. 

 

What I don’t have is the compulsions, or the difficulty in focusing on reading. 

 

So, I am kind of curious if this is part of the nature of my own neurodivergence. 

 

I might write about that someday in another post. I have known I was neurodivergent since I was a small child, but still haven’t found any recognized description of a particular kind to fit. 

 

I know I am a divergent thinker in general. I have a highly active interior life of the mind, as I noted. I seem to see the world differently than most people. I have never cared particularly about creating an image, and don’t worry about how people see me. Thus, I don’t care about fashion, or being cool. 

 

But I don’t fit the usual categories of neurodivergence. I flirt around the edges on a few of the autism spectrum traits, such as social awkwardness, but definitely do not fit others. (In fact, reading the two chapters on autism in this book made it clear that autism does not fit me much at all. For example, I am a good multitasker, I make and keep friends normally, and I make integrated connections really well - that perhaps is one of the strengths of this blog. There are some small overlaps in traits, and I get along well with people with autism generally.) I am definitely not ADHD - I concentrate quite well, either on a single task, or on multiple tasks at once, as required. 

 

As I said, nothing really quite fits. But I am definitely some sort of neurodivergent. And some of the descriptions of experiencing one’s own brain from this chapter did resonate with me. 

 

I’ll talk a bit more about this regarding the autism chapters. 

 

Next up is another fascinating chapter, about a man whose eyesight was partially restored, but with unexpected results. 

 

Apparently, this isn’t uncommon. People who go blind at a young age often do not develop the brain connections for interpretation of what they see, and thus regaining sight can be a curse, not a blessing. 

 

I didn’t write down any quotes here, but will say that, like the first chapter, there is a remarkable amount of deep diving into the neuroscience of sight. 

 

The next chapter is about a painter, Franco Magnani, whose photographic memory of his hometown, and ability to recreate it practically stone for stone in his paintings, despite not visiting for decades, was legendary. 

 

The chapter explores the questions of memory and of obsession. Sacks theory is that Magnani experienced some form of psychic seizure, which historically has been associated with both mental illness and divine inspiration. Dostoevsky is another artist who may well have had this syndrome. 

 

Norman Geschwind spoke about the possible role of temporal lobe epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s life and writings, and by the early seventies had become convinced that a number of patients with TLE showed a peculiar intensification (but also narrowing) of emotional life, “an increased concern with philosophical, religious and cosmic matters.” 

 

That passage also triggered something in me. My mother has epilepsy, controlled by medication, but still something that affects her brain. And a certain amount of what is described above sounds a lot like the way she has changed over time. 

 

When I was young, she had a far broader intellectual life, introducing me to literature that still inspires me. Over time, however, she became intensely focused on increasingly narrow interests. Primarily “alternative medicine” pseudoscience, and the religious equivalent. I wonder if she has continued to have TLE that doesn’t manifest as physical seizures, and has been in part a cause of the changes in her. 

 

Also interesting in this regard is the way that Magnani had, as Sacks describes it, a relationship with his mother that was “a sort of pre-Oedipal, almost symbiotic intimacy and closeness.” He was her favorite child, and after her death, he seems to have transferred that to his wife Ruth. He literally couldn’t paint in the period between his mother’s death and the start of his relationship with his wife. 

 

This reminds me a bit of the thoroughly enmeshed relationship of my mother and my sister, her favorite child. They cannot function without each other. 

 

A final interesting note is this one, about the way that Magnani’s art is an idealized childhood, not the complicated reality that Magnani knows his actual childhood was.

 

But all this is edited out in his art, where a paradisiacal simplicity prevails. One finds the belief in a happy childhood “even in people who have undergone cruel experiences as children,” Schachel writes. “The myth of happy childhood takes the place of the lost memory of the actual…experience.”

 

As I have reprocessed my own childhood in light of my later rejection by my parents, I have had to look at this. After all, much of my childhood was indeed happy and good. But that doesn’t negate the bad things I experienced, the authoritarian parenting, the abusive theology, the emotional blackmail. 

 

I took a lot more notes on the final two chapters, about autism, than the others combined. One reason for this might be that autism runs strongly in my wife’s family - her dad’s side. 

 

Another might be that for some reason, I have always tended to be friends with people on the autism spectrum - in fact, I still have friends dating back to my childhood. A few years ago, I noticed that this has been a pattern my entire life. I attract people with autism somehow. And honestly, these are really good people who are a valued part of my life. (Which is one reason I am so furious at RFK Jr. and others who are dismissive and disrespectful of neurodivergent people, claiming they will never have fulfilling lives.) 

 

The two chapters explore different parts of the spectrum. The first, about prodigies, is all about people who have a singular skill and focus that goes along with deficits in other areas. The second is all about Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous person with autism of the 1990s. And, I will say, Temple Grandin is a gas. Throughout that entire chapter, she is delightful and eccentric and fun and unexpected. Which, come to think of it, is a good description of many people with autism that I know. 

 

First, let’s start with this truth that Sacks states clearly, the truth that antivaxxers reject, the truth that far too many people who find the existence of neurodivergent people inconvenient reject. 

 

Autism, clearly, is a condition that has always existed, affecting occasional individuals in every period and culture. It has always attracted in the popular mind an amazed, fearful, or bewildered attention (and perhaps engendered mythical or archetypal figures - the alien, the changeling, the child bewitched). 

 

Yes, autism has existed since humans did. It exists in every culture, at every time in history. It is nothing new. We just understand it better. And we now understand that it is a spectrum, not a single presentation. 

 

All this talk about increasing autism rates is baloney. We previously categorized so-called “high functioning” individuals as simply eccentric, rather than understanding them to be neurodivergent, having a different brain operating system than neurotypical people. 

 

The particular focus of the chapter is on “Stephen,” a young boy with an unusual ability to draw - mostly buildings - with adult-level sophistication and detail. Stephen is also autistic. Again, Sacks shows his amazing ability to connect with people in his conversations and interaction with Stephen. It’s quite interesting to see him get into Stephen’s head effectively. 

 

Although, as I said, the book doesn’t include the last 30 years of increased knowledge, it does hint in some of the directions that things would go. For example, Sacks notes:

 

Stephen, it was clear, had a very limited ability to imagine others’ states of mind.

 

But Sacks also understands that this is not a lack of empathy at all - Stephen shows kindness, and concern for others’ pain. He just struggles to translate the full spectrum of human emotions in interactions with others. 

 

That said, Sacks also notes that individuals with autism are often impressive in their ability to learn the skills necessary. Adaptation, as he says in the introduction. The brain finds work-arounds, and things improve with age. I too have noticed this. It happens at different rates and to different degrees, and as Grandin notes, a person with autism may never feel “natural” or “comfortable” with it, but the adaptation occurs. 

 

This also raises the point that this adaptation needs to go both ways. Normies need to learn to adapt to existing with neurodivergent people as well. 

 

Another passage in this chapter is interesting. Sacks’ impressions here are based on many hours of conversation with Stephen, not just instinct. 

 

As Stephen watched all this intently, I thought of the thousands of images he must be registering, constructing - all of which he could convey in vivid pictures and vignettes, but none of them, I suspected, synthesized into any general impression in his mind. I had the feeling that the whole visible world flowed through Stephen like a river, without making sense, without being appropriated, without becoming part of him in the least. That though he might retain everything he saw, in a sense, it was retained as something external, unintegrated, never built on, connected, revised, never influencing or influenced by anything else. 

 

To be clear, this is only one way autism can manifest, and many people with autism can in fact integrate a lot better. Including Temple Grandin. But there is also a degree to which autism does sometimes seem to make sorting more difficult, or at least different. 

 

For me, the integration of everything is how I naturally think. Readers of this blog will note that I draw many associations into my posts, seeing connections where others do not. That is my particular tendency in thinking and learning, more as a connected building rather than a focused accumulation of specific facts. 

 

Finally, we reach the last chapter. The first thing I want to note is that the two early researchers on autism are mentioned quite a bit. These days, Austrian Hans Asperger has gotten most of the press, since his name was once used for “higher functioning” autism. Deservedly, his reputation has plummeted due to his collaboration with the Nazi regime during World War Two. The extent to which this collaboration went is unclear, other than that, like most people of his time and place, he went along with things rather than protest and risk his position. 

 

That said, the other guy who simultaneously came up with “autism” as the label for the syndrome, Leo Kanner, was far worse. While Asperger believed that there were positive and compensating features of autism, “a particular originality of thought and experience,” Kanner considered autism to be pure negative. 

 

Despite the negatives for both men, though, the detail of their careful work is still the gold standard for our modern understanding of autism. So, yeah, complicated. 

 

Sacks, of course, does get the causes of autism right, unlike the “alternative medicine” and antivax crowd today. 

 

It is probably mostly genetic - Sacks states that it is biological, and in many cases genetic. That’s why it can run in families. 

 

However, he does note as well that there are some rare cases of it being acquired. For example, metabolic disorders like PKU, if not treated, can lead to late development of autism. 

 

The one that I didn’t know, but that is one that really needs to be publicized is the fact that babies who are infected with Rubella (aka German Measles) are significantly more likely to develop autism. 

 

So, if that wasn’t clear enough, it is the ANTIVAXXERS themselves who will be creating preventable autism, because of their false belief that the MMR vaccine (the “R” is for Rubella) is the cause of autism. I just can’t even with people like that. And with Andrew Wakefield, who I sincerely hope will experience cosmic justice for his greedy fabrications. 

 

Next up is from a footnote, and it is one of the few areas where I have some connection to autistic traits. 

 

Authentic memories from the second (perhaps even the first) year of life, though not available to “normals,” may be recalled, with veridical detail, by autistic people.

 

While I do not have super-detailed memories from my extreme youth, I actually do have vivid, if brief, memories of specific events when I was age two, from riding in a U Haul when we moved to Montana, to a little bridge on the dirt road we lived on there, to red ants in the basement, to the installation of a wood stove and chimney. Yes, I could probably today pick out the exact sort of materials used. 

 

So I guess I am sort of like that? I definitely have earlier memories than most people I know. 

 

Here is another one that I found interesting, regarding Temple Grandin.

 

In her ingenuousness and gullibility, Temple was at first a target for all sorts of tricks and exploitations; this sort of innocence or guilelessness, arising not from moral virtue but from failure to understand dissembling and pretense (“the dirty devices of the world” in Traherne’s phrase), is almost universal among the autistic. 

 

My own experience is different - I have never been particularly gullible, and actually have a highly functional bullshit detector, something my parents do not appreciate at all. But I loathe dissembling and pretense more than anything. I despise being lied to with a boiling passion. If you want to lose me as a friend faster than anything, just lie to me. 

 

Related: I will likely never participate in organized religion again. And I will never see my parents as actual Christ-followers ever again. They lied to me about what they actually believed, and then resented me for expecting them to honor the values they taught me. I can’t forgive that. 

 

So, I guess maybe that is one reason I get on so well with friends with autism? They don’t do bullshit, which is a real positive for me. Later, Sacks describes Grandin in terms of the positives.

 

Temple’s attitudes seem similar to this: she is very aware (if only intellectually, inferentially) of what she is missing in life, but equally (and directly) aware of her strengths too - her concentration, her intensity of thought, her single-mindedness, her tenacity; her incapacity for dissembling, her directness, her honesty. She suspects - and I, too, was coming more and more to suspect - that these strengths, the positive aspects of her autism, go with the negative ones. 

 

Again, I both see myself in some of these - I think intensely, although I don’t have the single-mindedness so much. I am a lousy liar, and tend to be very direct. And these are things I appreciate in my friends with autism. 

 

I agree with Grandin very much in that she thinks that the negative traits of autism are given far too much attention, at the expense of appreciating the positive ones. I would go so far as to say that a society with autism is a far better one than that without. Which is one reason why RFK Jr. and his ilk are misguided in trying to “cure” or “eliminate” autism. Instead, all of us need to learn how to better integrate everyone into our society. 

 

She [Grandin] thinks that she and other autistic people, though they unquestionably have great problems in some areas, may have extraordinary, and socially valuable, powers in others - provided that they are allowed to be themselves, autistic.

 

I very heartily agree.

 

[Side note here: a lot of what makes it harder for people with autism to fit into our current society is that our current society rewards certain personality traits at the expense of others. For example, extroversion is rewarded, introversion is punished. And, worst of all, sociopathic liars are rewarded, while truth tellers are punished.] 

 

Another Temple Grandin trait that I can recognize in myself, although at the level she does it, is the ability to think visually. At the very basic, testable level, I am excellent at rotating objects in three dimensions in my mind. And I can visualize complex mechanical things quite well. I realize this is not the way everyone thinks or experiences life. 

 

One that I did not recognize in myself was that Grandin said that she did not experience the sense of the sublime at seeing nature. “Pretty, yes. Sublime, I don’t know.” That’s an interesting experience. I would imagine it is not a universal trait of autism, but I have known people who felt that way.

 

In contrast, Grandin does feel transcendence in matters of morality. 

 

Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, for her, is clearly not just the law of the land but, in some far deeper sense, a divine or cosmic law, whose violation can have disastrous effects - seeming breakdowns in nature itself.

 

This trait too, is socially necessary, and the lack of it in certain subcultures is horrifying. I too have a strong sense of morality, something my parents have never really understood. Particularly since their view, the view that the authoritarian parenting guru charlatans instilled in them, is that morality is nothing more than unquestioning obedience to authority. That I might object to doing things their way on moral grounds, and that I might see their beliefs as immoral, remains disturbing to them. One reason we are estranged. But I was like this as a child too, having my own strong moral sense that often conflicted with their demands. I wasn’t rebellious. I just refused to subordinate my own morality to theirs. 

 

So, I guess in summary, while I don’t really fit with the traits of autism, I have some overlap in personality in ways that make me greatly appreciate the many positives of neurodivergence. 

 

The book is named after a line from Temple Grandin, who said that living among neurotypical humans felt like being an anthropologist on Mars, learning to interact with the aliens through observation and practice. 

 

Perhaps many of us, neurodivergent or not, have felt like this at one time or another. But also, like Grandin, have found our place anyway. 

 

Like all Sacks books, this one was a really fun and informative read. He really was a treasure, and his good will and thoughtfulness endure in his books. If you haven’t read him, I highly recommend it. 

***

The Oliver Sacks list:

 

Hallucinations

The Island of the Colorblind

Musicophilia