`Compellingly Beautiful'

My nightstand is even more crowded than usual with books, one of which is a professional obligation. As a result, blogging will remain consistent but probably briefer and more episodic for at least several days. I have been rereading Roger Scruton’s invaluable Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction, the revised edition from 2002. Scruton’s style is nearly as stripped-down as Spinoza’s:

“The free man is the one conscious of the necessities that compel him. Spinoza devotes many pages to describing the mental condition of such a person. He avoids hatred, envy, contempt, and other negative emotions; he is unaffected by fear, hope, and superstition; he is secure in the knowledge that virtue is power, power is freedom, and freedom is happiness. `A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’”

By Spinoza’s exacting standards, I remain a slave, especially when it comes to thoughts of death. Scruton again:

“Spinoza’s mother tongue was Spanish; he was a master of Hebrew and had an effective command of Portuguese and Dutch – perhaps also of French. However, none of those languages contained the wealth of scientific and philosophical argument that was contained in Latin, which language therefore became, for Spinoza, both the primary vehicle of his thought, and the symbol of his intellectual quest. In choosing the universal language of our culture, Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute -- `be cautious’ – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.”

In contrast to the enviably concise Scruton – his Spinoza book, including glossary and index, totals 124 pages -- Roger Penrose’s prose resembles the conversation of an immensely learned but charmingly scatter-brained professor, dense with diagrams, equations and anecdotes. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe tips the scales at 1,099 pages and some four or five pounds. When it comes to mathematics, I’m strictly a dilettante. I enjoy reading about math rather than in it, and my practical knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond balancing the checkbook. I like reading the biographies of mathematicians -- for instance, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth, by Paul Hoffman, and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, by Rebecca Goldstein.

Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. His latest book is admirable for its intellectual, Diderot-like hubris. It is self-consciously intended as a summa of all human knowledge of the universe. He proclaims the unchallenged rightness of Einstein’s general theory of relativity but calls for a thoroughgoing reexamination of quantum theory. The book is often witty and digressive, at once technical and highly personal. The book is designed to accommodate both well-educated specialists and non-mathematicians like me. I feel no guilt about prudently skimming and skipping. Among Penrose’s highest terms of praise are “beautiful” and “elegant,” as in these passages:

“…many of the ideas perceived to have achieved a major advance in physical theory will also be viewed as compellingly beautiful. There is the undoubted beauty of Euclidean geometry, which formed the basis of the first profoundly accurate physical theory, namely the theory of space formulated by the ancient Greeks. A millennium and a half later came the extraordinary elegance of Newtonian dynamics, with its deep and beautiful underlying symplectic geometry structure…”

This reminds me of Nabokov’s statement to an interviewer, giving the lie to those who would arbitrarily segregate the two most important human endeavors:

“I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.”