Why Read - In The Light Of What We Know
The novel was brought to my attention by a review in The New Yorker written by James Wood. The following response to this ambitious novel was written just after reading it in the winter of 2014. Most of what I wrote stands after a recent review of both the book and my comments. While it is not for everyone, its intellectual and structural artistry is worth the trip.
(NOTE: James Wood may be the most gifted literary critic of his generation and his review is every bit as brilliant as his subject. So often a review can spoil a book. This is just the opposite. Woods sets the book up and gives the reader the keys to unlock and appreciate it. If the book seems a bit much, read the review. Often the appetizer is preferable to the entrée anyway.)
Rahmam’s subject is the post-9/11 world and how that terrible moment seemed to knock the world ajar in ways we are only beginning to understand. The protagonist, a Bangladeshi polymath who clearly is the author himself, has within him all the contradictions, perceptions and fears of the fragmented world that we live in today. The novel often feels like an intellectual journey of “creative destruction”. It is littered with the insights of a brilliant mind trying to find real relationships in a world as connected as it is disconnected.
Zia Rahman believes that our rabbit hole of the Internet has made little difference when it comes to what we know about our world and ourselves. The familiarity of the world we inhabit, ranging from our most intimate relationships to the universe itself, may be a series of illusions put up by ourselves to cope with a reality that poses no answers, provides no certainty. Just as quantum mechanics has begun to turn everything upside down, forcing serious consideration of sci-fi like models of parallel and dual universes where there may exist multiple versions of ourselves, Rahman asserts that math is not solving problems the way it did in our school years. Rather, the highest level of math is proving that we cannot prove anything. If we cannot prove anything, then what can we rely on or believe in? If we cannot prove anything, then we can only rely on serious levels of faith as the secular world of knowledge spins off into the void of pure uncertainty. This is the great legacy of 9/11. That fateful day frames his novel just as the spinning looms of the textile mills lurks behind much of Dickens. Rahman’s international world of fractured relationships, flirtations with fanaticism, escapes into finance and math are all part of a 9/11 world reeling from the collision of two certainties and the awful uncertainty that rose from it.
The Twin Towers and the Pentagon both represent the certainty of American power and global supremacy – one in terms of dollars, the other in terms of arms. The plane that was heroically hijacked into the ground in Pennsylvania was aimed at the symbol of our political supremacy – the White House. As much as the world often reviled and resented American power, it relied on its presence, on it simply being there to step in and provide stability when nothing else could. That was what had happened throughout the 20th century as America won three World Wars and opened the world to Woodrow Wilson’s long sought dream of political democracy and economic free trade. Some took this evolution of Pax Americana and its final triumph over communism as the end of history as we know it. Such a supreme conceit could not last – and it didn’t. On one beautiful September morning, a force of equal certainty stripped the emperor of his clothes, returning all of us to the turbulent reality of history. That certain force was the fanatical faith of the terrorist, willing to commit suicide and slaughter innocents because of the very fever pitch of his certainty in an afterlife. The underlying vulnerabilities of the secular certainties of the American Empire were exposed by the purest of certainties – faith.
We missed all the warnings about 9/11 because its reality was just over the horizon, beyond our capacity to fully imagine or know. Everything that is “new” exists just beyond that horizon: the quantum mechanics that makes everything (I mean everything) relative and the artificial intelligence that will change our very roles as humans. As Rahman’s title suggests, we know very little – particularly about what might be about to happen. Each new President is told that his Presidency will be shaped by the unforeseen event. Does this not apply to our lives? The fact that this is so hard to live with can be seen in the emergence of organized, dangerous fanaticism in all the major religions of the world. ISIS chopping the heads of non-believers is a remarkable testament to man’s desire to be certain. Buddhist terrorists, an oxymoron at so many levels, trying to plunge Sri Lanka into another civil war is yet another testament. American protestant missionaries filling the heads of East Africans with mumbo-jumbo about homosexuals and why they should be jailed, beaten and killed is a little closer to home. The fact is that the world, from Fox News to Opus Dei, is one marbled with attempts to wrest ourselves away from the vulnerabilities of uncertainty – from the reality of our ignorance. Today, in 2020, Americans and much of the world are living with a populist desire for certainty so fierce that facts don’t matter and truth is malleable.
Unexpectedly, Rahman offers the reader the half-full glass. His book suggests we can handle and, indeed, even thrive in a world of relative insignificance and ignorance. The despair of the fanatical alternatives is the fear of the emptying glass – an Islamic world encircled by change, a Christian fundamentalist world with rainbows of diversity, an Orthodox Jewish world that might have to share being among the chosen. These worlds are all half empty glasses that can only be affirmed by reaction, violence and intolerance. In Rahman’s world, the hero is confused and does not try to deny the confusion. His characters see the half-full glass from within this awareness. There is no grand idea in our world. Rahman leaves us with no clear road map. He suggests, rather, that the alternative to resisting the confusion, to not embracing the disharmony of modern life, is not unlike that fateful and deceptively clear September morning where the conceit that we “could see forever” was laid to rest.
The following are a series of quotations from the novel, which, I hope, capture its seductive zeitgeist.
“Everyone knows in the intimacy of his self, if not his reason, that when the soul is under siege reason is not up to the fight.” (269)
“But mathematics is different … mathematics education is accretive … and you can’t understand anything at all if your basic algebra is poor.” (257)
“It’s the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It’s when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved.” (246)
“His personal tragedy was the tragedy of all men, that they cannot shake off the lives that might have been, the unlived lives that follow them.” (245)
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
from Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art
(239)
“It is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for hard times.”
from Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt
(237)
“A splendid subject (math), an education in thinking, without the encumbrance of thinking.” (235)
“in order to catch even a fleeting glimpse of the world, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.” (196)
“Religious conversion, said my friend, is an act of destruction. Turning to God can save your life, but, in the process, it can annihilate your soul.” (180)
“Love that is earned or deserved is always suspect; the greatest observation on which Christianity is founded is that the greatest love cannot be earned or deserved.” (167)
“ … it’s worth a thought that anger is no less God-given than love. That’s the appeal of Catholicism. They have a calculating honesty, the Catholics, marshaling the base resources, far from denying them; the Anglicans with their carrot cakes, their village fetes, raffles for the new church roof, and teas with the vicar – they have no respect for anger.” (165)
“People can’t beat the unexpected, they won’t let it stand and they’ll change their memories to make what was unexpected now expected. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, men abhor a vacuum in history, the discontinuity wrought by the unexpected, and they’ll go back and fill it out, go back and try to figure out how it happened, try to identify what we didn’t see before, that to which we were once blind but now can see.” (119)
“Jonathon Dimbleby: ‘Your Grace, there is a great upsurge of the urge in people for certainty. Their charge is that you offer them not that kind of certainty but doubt.’
The Archbishop: ‘Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?”
(From a talk show during the Thatcher years)
“… the English Garden, a large park in the center of Munich, was so-called because it was organized along the principles that some parks of Europe were known as the English style, disorganized, unkempt, and overgrown, rather like the areas of Hampstead Heath, I suppose. Standing in front of the villa in Tuscany, I remembered the corollary my friend had added: Apparently, this kind of natural disorder requires a lot of work – more than any other kind of garden.” (345)
“I was trying to understand her because … well, because understanding is what we set so much store in, understanding others, ourselves, understanding the world; because of that, but also because understanding is a mode of control, it subdues the unruliness of people in one’s head, it brings order and confers control where it is most sought, in that theater of the mind in which the avatars of people we know stand as actors resisting direction.” (347)
“If metaphors increase our understanding, they do so only because they take us back to a familiar vantage, which is to say that a metaphor cannot bring anything nearer. Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.” (290)
“ … hyperbole perhaps, but only if hyperbole means the beating heart taking charge of tired words.” (98)
“Knowledge, and especially disagreeable knowledge, cannot by any art be totally excluded from those who do not seek it. Wisdom, said Aeschylus long ago, comes to men whether they will or no. The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall; and it is surely truer prudence to move out furniture betimes into the open air than to stay indoors until our tenement tumbles about our ears. It is and it must be in the long run be better for man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them.” (82)
“We did walk together once, up the road we came on, up around the house and to the top of the hill, and when we came over the crest, the view opened onto a wide vista of a deep valley carved from the earth leading west to a dwindling sun. I read somewhere of a particular view found in paintings across cultures and across time. It is apparently a universal aesthetic, and it consists of a valley, of hills directing eyes to the center, of trees and shrubbery of varying colors of green, and a path, either explicit or implicit in the contours of the land, that winds through the valley to an expanse of water in the near distance, a lake. Evolutionary biologists have speculated that a view with such elements is ubiquitous in our art because it was engrained in the psyche during man’s formative evolutionary period, for it is the view of a land that is hospitable to human habitation, a welcome sight to humans in search of new beginnings. Nature maketh man to lie down in green pastures and leadeth him beside the still waters. And it was the very view from the hill that Emily and I stood on. Behind us was a church, its walls crumbling, its paintwork mottled by moss and rain, because in the end the earth takes back all God’s work. Beside it, under the evening sky, and on the incline that made the act unfamiliar and new, Emily and I made love, and it was every bit as romantic and tender and urgent as any two human beings have ever willed.” (346)
IN THE LIGHT OF WHAT WE KNOW
Zia Haider Rahman
497 pp.
2014