Review
A New Yorker best book of the year • A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
“A joint biography of three figures who called attention…to the problems and paradoxes that emerge when we try to extend our ordinary way of seeing the world beyond the human scale…. Lucid and well-written…. An impressive work of scholarship.”
—The New York Review of Books
“[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written. . . . This is a book about the tiniest of things—the position of an electron, an instant of change. It is also about the biggest of things—the cosmos, infinity, the possibility of free will. Egginton works through ideas by grounding them in his characters’ lives. . . . The beauty of this book is that Egginton encourages us to recognize all of these complicated truths as part of our reality, even if the ‘ultimate nature’ of that reality will remain forever elusive. We are finite beings whose perspective will always be limited; but those limits are also what give rise to possibility. When we choose what to observe, we insert our freedom to choose into nature. As Egginton writes, ‘We are, and ever will be, active participants in the universe we discover.’”
—The New York Times
“The Rigor of Angels—the title is taken from a phrase in a Borges story— is a remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced. The richness of the book cannot be fully acknowledged in the space of a review. Mr. Egginton advances a great many knotty arguments and propositions, but he is never less than exciting, provocative, and illuminating.”
—John Banville, The Wall Street Journal
“In this sprightly intellectual history, Egginton explores the lives of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the physicist Werner Heisenberg in order to plumb some of the most profound questions of physics and philosophy: the limits of knowledge, the structure of space and time, free will.”
—The New Yorker
“This is intellectual history of the highest order, an acrobatic feat that examines how the lives of Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, and Immanuel Kant all show the falsity of what we assume is fixed reality. What a poet, physicist, and philosopher can teach us about life and its uncertainties is told in exhilarating detail, and William Egginton makes his insights accessible even to readers who are none of the above. Love, quantum mechanics, and free will have never been dealt with so engagingly. Do not let that previous sentence scare you. The Rigor of Angels is immensely rewarding.”
—Air Mail
“Fresh and illuminating. . . . What Egginton brings to these analogies is a vivid style, a mind well stocked with examples and an eagle eye for reason’s illusions, as irresistible and as deceptive as the optical variety. . . . Makes for con brio reading.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Ambitious . . . part ode to those who have caught glimpses of that elemental coherence we call truth and part elegy for our destiny as creatures doomed to glimpses only. . . . Egginton traces the invisible threads of revelation between Zeno’s thought experiments and Kant’s cathedrals of logic, between Dante’s cosmogony and the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, between Plotinus and Heisenberg, in order to illuminate and celebrate how that collaborative tapestry of thought has shaped ‘our conceptions of beauty, science, and what we owe to each other in the brief time given to us in this universe’. . . . Egginton pulls back the curtain of perception.”
—Maria Popova, The Marginalian
“Is space and time continuous or discrete? Does free will exist? Is the universe finite or infinite? What would it mean to have perfect memory, perfect knowledge? . . . Masterful.”
—The Colorado Sun
“Heady but accessible. . . . Bracing. . . . Egginton has a gift for distillation, and his admirable book helps us understand what’s at stake in some of the knottiest intellectual puzzles of the last three centuries.”
—World Literature Today
“The Rigor of Angels is a book of tremendous intelligence and beauty. William Egginton makes the paradoxes of physics, metaphysics, and literature intelligible by showing how these paradoxes shape the limits of the visible world and the possibilities of the invisible one. His writing reminds us that the best humanist inquiry unites the arts and the sciences in the patient pursuit of the truth.”
—Merve Emre, Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and contributing writer at The New Yorker
“A fascinating reflection!”
—Carlo Rovelli, New York Times best-selling author of Anaximander and the Birth of Science and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
“Humans are ambitious folk; we want to be able to know everything. But the world repeatedly confounds us with limitations on what can be known, and inescapable mediators between ourselves and the truth. William Egginton draws compelling connections between Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg, three of our most audacious theorists of limitation. We are left marveling at how much we are nevertheless able to capture of that elusive quarry called reality.”
—Sean Carroll, New York Times best-selling author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion
“Physicists attempt to explain reality, poets provide our emotional response to it, and philosophers try to establish cerebral connections. All of these endeavors are plagued with uncertainty. Werner Heisenberg, Jorge Luis Borges, and Immanuel Kant struggled with this uncertainty throughout their entire lives. Egginton takes us on an illuminating journey through the fascinating labyrinth created by their intertwined intellectual paths.”
—Mario Livio, author of The Golden Ratio and Galileo and the Science Deniers
“This book brilliantly weaves together the core ideas of three of the greatest minds of Western literature, philosophy, and physics into a soul-searching narrative. Egginton masterfully illuminates the paradox of being human, of being caught between the search for the order behind things and the magic of the transcendent, of knowing that we are playthings in the hands of time, as our lives continually fork as we make choices and we become one self while imagining countless others.”
—Marcelo Gleiser, author of The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future
“Poetry, science, philosophy—for the ancients, these intellectual-artistic pursuits taught us what it is to be human: how to transcend our current station, how to grow and flourish, how to remain humble in the face of mystery and failure. Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels is a stark reminder of what each of us can achieve if we only remember what remarkable beings we are.”
—John Kaag, author of Hiking with Nietzsche
“Egginton, a humanities scholar, presents this overview with panache and a keen sense of story, making the more complex scientific theories accessible and entertaining. . . . Egginton further draws on the work of a range of thinkers that includes Boethius, Dante, and Einstein while illuminating the subjects of free will, memory, the nature of time, and the multiverse in this accessible, thought-provoking work.”
—Booklist
About the Author
WILLIAM EGGINTON is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which explores the respective conceptions of reality in the thought of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg. He is co-author with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His next book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, will be published in 2024.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 UNFORGETTABLE
It was only midmorning on April 13, 1929, but Solomon Shereshevsky was already having a bad day. The journalist had just attended the daily editorial meeting of his Moscow newspaper when his section editor called him into his office. What was Shereshevsky playing at? his agitated superior asked him. Why did he just stare at the editor while he ran over the day’s stories? Was he too full of himself to take notes like all the other reporters?
Nonplussed, Shereshevsky explained that he didn’t need to take notes, because he remembered everything the editor said. Then he proceeded to recite the entire meeting back to him. Verbatim.
By that afternoon Shereshevsky found himself amid a gaggle of psychiatrists at the Academy of Communist Education, among whom was a young doctor, Alexander Luria. Luria took on the task of testing Shereshevsky’s memory, which he did by reading him increasingly long lists of random words and numbers and asking him to recall them. By the end of the day Luria had to admit that the capacity of Shereshevsky’s memory “had no distinct limits.” As Shereshevsky would later recount, until that day he had no idea his abilities were anything other than normal. When he returned to work, he delivered to his editor the verdict of the state’s psychiatric experts: his memory exceeded “the bounds of what was believed to be physically possible.” His editor promptly advised him to change careers. So Shereshevsky found a circus trainer to manage him and began booking shows around the country as a mnemonist.
Despite his natural talent, Shereshevsky had to work hard at his new career, and he developed techniques to push his capacity ever further. To be able to recite back the lists of numbers, random words, poems in foreign languages, and even nonsensical syllables that audience members would call out to him, he landed on the strategy of picturing them drawn on a chalkboard. When it came time to recall the lists, he would return to this mental chalkboard and simply read from it out loud. To his horror he soon discovered that the very indelibility of his memory could interfere with his performance. Closing his eyes and finding his way back to the board on which he had arranged the sounds and images, he might instead come upon the board from an earlier performance and read back that list. To counteract this danger, he found he had to mentally erase or otherwise destroy the writing on his mental board. In short, to remember better, he had to learn to forget.
This interference didn’t wane with time. Luria, who continued to study Shereshevsky for decades, discovered he could flawlessly recall lists Luria had used to test him fifteen years prior. In fact, Shereshevsky waged an almost constant war against the images and associations from the past that threatened to flood his every waking moment.
It wasn’t just memories that menaced his perception of the present. Shereshevsky suffered from synesthesia, sensory crossover. A sound of a certain pitch might produce a coppery taste on his tongue; numbers appeared as specific figures with rich, unchanging characteristics. For most of us, 87 is a number, say, of pages read or years lived; Shereshevsky saw it as “a fat woman and a man as individuals, not instances of a general system. He once exerted intense effort to memorize a vast table of numeric sequences, failing to notice that it followed a rule of such simplicity that a child could reproduce it ad infinitum, because each line simply started with a higher integer than the previous one.
For Luria it soon became clear that Shereshevsky’s remarkable ability came with an equal disability. He lived in a world of particulars, “rich in imagery, thematic elaboration, and effect,” but also “peculiarly lacking in one important feature: the capacity to convert encounters with the particular into instances of the general.” To understand the intended meaning of a normal sentence, Shereshevsky had to overcome his sensual experience of how a word sounded here and now; he had to forget his immersion in the present and connect to a different moment in space and time, an endeavor that would at times prove impossible.
In truth, he struggled mightily with the very aspect of language that makes it function in human communication and knowledge. Even our most common expressions contain words that we use figuratively, or that have different meanings in different situations. A nightmare for Shereshevsky. The simple act of “catching a cab” would present him with a barrage of possible interpretations to contend with. As he would later explain to Luria, the word ekipazh means “cab,” but it also means “the crew of a ship.” To understand the one meaning, he had to “picture for myself not just a driver in the cab but an entire staff manning it. That’s the only way I can make sense of it.” Living in a world of particulars, being constantly bathed in the immediate, makes communication a difficult affair. Language loses its ability to connect two disparate agents, to translate the experience of the one into the context of the other. But more than just a stumbling block for understanding what others were saying to him, in Shereshevsky’s world, as the neuroscientist Jerome Bruner would later put it, “elements and features can be isolated, but a ‘whole’ or meaningful picture cannot be put together.” Indeed, it seems that the more perfect Shereshevsky’s extraordinary memory, the less he had a coherent self who could remember.
For a brief time, Shereshevsky’s feats brought him fame and a sustainable existence. But even as stories of the man who couldn’t forget seeped into the outside world, life behind Stalin’s iron curtain was getting harder, especially for Jews like Luria and Shereshevsky. After the war, as Stalin consolidated his power through “anti-cosmopolitan” purges, Luria lost his position for a time and took to keeping a bag packed in case the authorities came for him in the night. Shereshevsky, who had refused to lend his talents to the secret police, found himself followed and harassed, his performances interrupted, and his career eventually ruined. Luria would regain his footing and become one of the preeminent neuropsychologists of the twentieth century, his analysis of Shereshevsky a profound influence for later scientists like Jerome Bruner and Oliver Sacks. Shereshevsky, for his part, learned another way of erasing or at least dampening the remembered and perceived sensorium that had become his prison house. He started drinking heavily and died in obscurity a few years later.
