When disjointed pieces of the past, of the present, of the general, and of the personal, fall into fractal symmetry, pulsing and spinning in the abstract, and emerge a colourful rangoli, words cease to be able to describe this intimated experience of joy.
I have been about a year at self-studying German, and am delighted and jolted by every reference of the language that I encounter. Adjacently, but perhaps not orthogonally, I am a heavy consumer of political and philosophical texts, the prominent authors of which often have German speaking origins.
The book I most recently picked up is a collection of essays on quantum mechanics, so imagine my surprise when the Preface mentions David Foster Wallace as a thinker on the concept of infinity. I had just finished an engrossing essay collection by DFW on such esoteric topics that I recommended it to those I do not usually give book recommendations.
Then, the very first essay quotes Wittgenstein in relations to infinity — one of my Christmas reads had been an exposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus within the social and cultural context of Vienna on the precipice of World War I. I had been verbally transported to la bell époque, to the same locales that I had visited not long ago in a golden autumn, the only distance between instances of my self an endless chasm laid out by time.
Funnily, Kurt Gödel, the main subject of this first essay, didn’t believe in time anyway.
I first came across Gödel’s name in a Perimeter Institute public lecture when I was in high school. I can only vaguely recall the lecture subject as perhaps quantum cryptography, but I vividly remember the excitement with which the speaker expounded Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and the boundaries of mathematics. I can still hear the passion in her voice and the feel the inspiration of youth. Incidentally, I now live not too far from the Perimeter Institute and very much look forward to returning to the lecture series.
Returning to the first pages of this first essay — Gödel was a godlike name even in his contemporary sphere, and a Princeton philosopher recounts an amusing anecdote in which Richard Rorty spots Gödel at the grocery store and stands there in a daze of this heavenly descent.
Rorty is an analytics-turned-political philosopher whose writing on liberalism I very much enjoy and often revisit and quote. However, I did not expect his name to crop up in a physics essay collection.
At this point, I looked up from the printed page and gazed across blue lake waters, and drew a sharp breath. I could almost see a rangoli design furiously willing itself into existence. I first saw rangolis, a courtyard full of them, when visiting an orphanage in souther Indian. The ground was covered with beautiful geometries of coloured sand, and children smiled proudly. Some images become embedded in the mind, never to fade away.
Carl Sagan’s concluding paragraphs of Pale Blue Dot are ever so quotable:
The pioneering psychologist William James called religion a ‘feeling of being at home in the Universe’. Our tendency has been […] to pretend that the Universe is how we wish our home would be, rather than to revise our notion of what’s homey so it embraces the Universe. If, in considering James’ definition, we mean the real universe, then we have no true religion yet.
Die Weltanschauung is the German word for a personal conception of the universe and life, and it is with this term that I shall conclude this remembrance of things past and present. I have never felt more at home or more alive, than in this very moment.