By Jennifer Szalai
NEW YORK: Chances are, if you have ever heard the story of Solomon Shereshevsky, you haven’t forgotten it. Shereshevsky’s powers of memory were so remarkable that in 1929 he gave up his job as a journalist in Moscow and joined the circus. He could recite lists of numbers, poems in foreign languages, even strings of random syllables that were called out to him from the audience. His world was abundant in particulars, brimming with imagery and sensations. When asked to share his understanding of the number 87, he said he envisioned it as “a fat woman and a man twirling his moustache.”
But his extraordinary gift was also a terrible affliction. Shereshevsky couldn’t generalize from the barrage of specific inputs he experienced. Communicating with others was exhausting. Forgetting something wasn’t a matter of passively letting it slip away into oblivion; he had to actively destroy it in his mind. If each and every thing you encounter is charged with a singular meaning, gathering those bits together into a coherent picture becomes impossible. In contrast to memorisation, remembrance requires the slight blur of abstraction. As William Egginton writes in “The Rigor of Angels,” a “perfect memory” can begin to resemble “total forgetting.”
Shereshevsky makes only a cameo appearance in Egginton’s mind-expanding book, but his plight opens up a portal into thinking about space and time and our place in both. Challenging, ambitious, yet also elegantly written, “The Rigor of Angels” explores nothing less than “the ultimate nature of reality” through the life and work of three figures: the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges; the German theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg; and the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Egginton, a literary scholar at Johns Hopkins, brings these three very different men together in one book because they all shared something unusual. They resisted the temptation to presume that there was a reality, out there, that was completely independent of our attempts to know it.
The formidable creativity of their work was, as Egginton puts it, a matter of “letting go” of what we assume must be real. This turns out to be exceedingly difficult to do. Even Albert Einstein, whose name is synonymous with genius, had trouble doing it. In 1915, he did let go — though only up to a point. His theory of relativity required him “to disregard what everyone knew about space and time in favor of what the data were telling him,” Egginton writes. But Einstein’s own calculations were telling him that the universe was either shrinking or expanding, and so he inserted a cosmological constant to maintain the fiction that the universe (which is expanding) remained a constant size.
In the 1920s, Einstein sparred with Heisenberg over quantum mechanics — which unsettled what physicists at the time took to be “the ultimate nature of reality.” Einstein’s theories of relativity could explain the workings of the universe at the grand, cosmological scale, but Heisenberg found something very different at the subatomic level. Egginton describes how the “smooth continuity of matter’s movement” is replaced by “violent quantum fluctuations.” Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was especially offensive to Einstein; Einstein refused to accept that particles like electrons would follow a distinct path only once they were observed.