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Reading Diaries #4

Team Luna

Updated: Oct 25, 2024

(Oct 24, 2024)


Elizabeth and her German Garden, by Elizabeth von Arnim (1898)


A charming book about a woman and her garden. The woman in question is an aristocratic German lady, a wife and a mother who's expected to be interested in the pleasures of society, and to care about running her home, managing the servants, keeping a good table, and other such pursuits suitable for a woman in her position. But Elizabeth doesn't care about any of that.


When the book opens, she's in her country home, overseeing repairs to the house which has not been lived in for years, and has fallen into neglect. She's living there with only her maid and the housekeeper, ignoring the workmen and spending all her time in the overgrown garden which is enchanting to her in every way.


Soon her husband and her children join her, and she's forced to care a little bit more about what happens inside the house as well.


Elizabeth doesn't know anything about gardening, but she's trying to learn. She reads a few books, but they can't teach her what experience can, so she learns most often from her own mistakes. Unfortunately, she is prevented by her position from doing any actual digging or planting. and is limited to instructing the gardener who never quite does as he's told.


He, along with everyone else, doesn't understand why she cares so much about the garden. It's not the sort of thing that aristocratic ladies are supposed to care about. But Elizabeth chafes against the expectations of who she's supposed to be and what she's supposed to do by virtue of her gender and her position.


A thinly veiled fictionalisation of the author's own life, the novel is written in the form of a journal, and is full of thoughts, observations and commentary that are candid, things that the narrator would perhaps hesitate to say out loud to someone else. This makes the narrative that much more engaging. She writes about her annoyance at casual callers, her wonder at the fact that people crave company as much as they do, that they are sorry for her being stuck in the country, when she is perfectly happy. She writes about the little things in her life that bring her joy - the view from her window, a sunny day, the tea roses which have just bloomed, her bright yellow and white library.


Elizabeth's journal begins in May and ends in January, so it gives an account of nine months of the narrator's life. The second half of the book takes place in winter, so there's not much about gardening in it, and she writes about her house guests over the winter, their quirks and foibles, and the pleasures and stresses of being a host. This part of the book doesn't quite have the sparkle of the first half, but it is still worth reading. 



When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West (2020)


This was an unusual and engrossing read. As I began, I had to confirm that this was indeed ‘fiction’, because what I was reading did not seem like it. I then read the author’s note and understood that this was “a work of fiction based on real events”.


In five stories that loop and bend toward each other, the author reimagines pivotal moments in the world of science, and the brilliance as well as ethical implications of some of these groundbreaking achievements.


We read about Fritz Haber, the German scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918 for devising a method to pull ammonia from nitrogen in the air, for use as fertiliser, thus helping to prevent famine and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. However, Haber was also responsible for the military use of chlorine gas that was used to horrific effect in WW1. He felt no particular guilt about this (his wife killed herself when he refused to stop enabling this monstrous use of his work) .


Then there is Karl Schwarzchild, a physicist who worked out the solutions to Einstein’s equations of general relativity while in the trenches of the First World War, and in this process proved the existence of black holes. A concept that shook the world of physics but terrified Schwarzchild enough for him to abandon his work. The idea of a "fundamentally unknowable” spot in the universe filled him with dread, He wondered if the concept of the singularity could potentially happen with humankind - could a concentration of will among enough people unleash a similar unspeakable horror upon the world? He wrote to a friend: “We have reached the highest point of civilisation. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.”


We read about mathematicians Alexander Grothendieck, a colossus in the field of mathematics in the mid part of the 20th century, and Shinichi Mochizuki who created much excitement in 2012 when he published a 500 page article that contained a proof of the abc conjecture (one of the most important conjectures in number theory which is a + b = c). A proof that no one was able to comprehend, then and to this day. 


The titular story focuses on names from the world of physics that even those of us who are non-science folk would have heard of - Erwin Schrödinger  and Werner Karl Heisenberg, who spent the better part of their careers at odds with each other. Schrodinger’s wave equation that describes the energy and position of the electron in space and time - a fundamental equation in quantum physics - was met with furious opposition from Heisenberg who maintained that methods from classical physics could not be used to explain the quantum world. Heisenberg developed his Uncertainty Principle - which states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot be measured simultaneously. When Hesienberg and his mentor Niels Bohr presented their vision of quantum mechanics at a conference in 1927, Einstein who was present, could not bear it. To move from cause and effect to probabilities was to him a fundamental break from what physics was. He spent the rest of his life trying to arrive at a grand unified theory of physics and to restore objectivity and the order of natural laws. He failed.


It was comforting to me to read somewhere that no one fully understands quantum theory. That’s good, I’m not alone then. But what's important is that it works, and that it is at the heart of most of the significant advances in modern technology. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has never been disproved.


The common narrative thread among the five stories is also the internal turmoil that these scientists faced, their struggles, their obsessions almost to the point of madness, their isolation, their moral dilemmas. Together, they serve as a cautionary tale, about the limits of human understanding.


It is bit strange to not always know what is real and what is Labatut's imagination. But overall, an enlightening and satisfying read. 


“The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.” (Alexander Grothendieck)

©2022 by Luna Books. 

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