literature and science are just two of the ways in which we build our sense of the world literature is like like an older crazy sister of science because it's it's disorganized it can it can it is not tied down to any set idea of the truth so it can consider anything and in that sense it has a freedom that science can't aspire to literature can look at i think of literature as as being a science that doesn't really care about experiment it doesn't have to be you can consider the wildest ideas you know and you
can play with theories that have been that are wrong otherwise that are delirious that are insane science has to necessarily prune back like the branches of the tree of thought you know and see which ones correspond to objective reality is is nothing like that and it is it is there comes science is great source of power is that it is it has a very strict relationship to reality and from that we have achieved wonders while literature has no power no importance at all and because of that it is very precious because we can think about
anything we can play with ideas that contradict self-evident meanings in the world and that is a great source of beauty of inspiration it's a great source of fun too you can you can really think about anything as a writer and you don't get that freedom if you're a philosopher or if you're a scientist we can be haphazard and wrong and we can be playful in ways that you can't get away with if you're doing science or if you're doing philosophy or if you're trying to be serious or important or or to change the world or
or be successful so it's like a habit of shadows we're like cockroaches you know as soon as someone turns on the light but there's so much to be found in underneath things no i think that's where we feel most comfortable i think when you use a phrase like objective reality does exist you're you're taking so much for granted now it's such a load reality is a loaded term and it's something best left to others literature deals with imagination and imagination derangement delirium that's really where that's where our strengths lie we shouldn't worry too much about
reality as writers and and i think when literature has got gotten bogged down in that you know when we play the real game we're just reflecting back an image of the world that we already know that we already possessed and we inhabit so we end up writing sort of the literary equivalent of a sitcom something that just feels like an impoverished view of reality but when you not necessarily give up on realism but when you let in other perspectives um i think we're actually mirroring lived experience in a better way because it's so loaded right
you're never just looking at a flower you're looking at a flower and you have an emotional tone and you have you're contaminated by your other senses memory is biting at you it's it's very hard to give any measure of what it feels like to be alive from moment to moment it's not realist i think that our experience of the world is not realist at all it's hallucinatory that's kind of what literature should mirror beauty is a criterium in itself i i don't think you can give too much importance to it because i think it's the
most important thing there is i i think that truth is completely secondary and um in that sense you know this whole beauty truth and i forgot the other one from the greeks just give me beauty and that i think that's enough it's it it's not just a human thing no it is a it is something in which the entire world is caught up i think life and beauty are just um so completely intertwined we don't realize it we don't we don't understand that it is something that was here before us no we're just kind of
interacting with with some of its versions and uh it's not just in the flowers right it's also beneath the ground it's in the dirt it's kind of everywhere i think it's it's um it's the universe being in love with itself and it's great to be a part of that the universe has its sense of beauty that is gonna it exceeds us it far exceeds us there's this wonderful part of a a comic book by alan moore where there's a man who's he's sitting in on mars and um he's just looking at the scale the the
scale of the mountains the depths of the gorges and there's not a single life form on the planet and and there's still beauty there's beauty and empty space there's beauty in in nothingness uh i think that if i think i think we're aware of that all the time because we live in in really we really we live in impoverished spaces we inhabit impoverished spaces when when we're sitting inside our living rooms there is a certain complexity to the natural environments that we developed in as a species that is missing and it's it's something that is
very hard to mimic and that i think that in our modern world we're we're trying to create something that has at least some part of the beauty that we can find in the natural world and that's why things are getting more and more complex and loaded i think we're just trying to copy what surrounds us i think epiphanies are one of the mechanisms by which our the front and the back part of our brains communicate and work together it's it's such a it's such a common experience to to feel that that you're in control of
your of your brain of your thought processes that you're kind of driving the car and you're not at all and epiphanies are some are like the sudden invasion of that now these this dark knowledge which kind of jumps into the world through an epiphany is something that to me is is quite wondrous you can't explain it away if you ask the person who suffered an epiphany they don't really have good answers for it you have to you have to rely on mechanisms that are older right and that we've kind of lost but to me epiphanies
are these sudden jumps in awareness in our knowledge of the world and ourselves that that is just fascinating it's just it's something that that i've always lived for personally to the point where it becomes like a bit of a joke because how many epiphanies can you have you're gonna have a ton of them you can have a lot but the first ones you don't forget you're taken over by something it's it's it's really and if they're big enough and then they come at the right circumstances and at the right point of your life it can
really change the direction that you're going so i think that that's also one of the reasons why so many people avoid them you know because the lives that we have are so we've built them through decades of mistakes and you know trial and error and for someone to reach down or to reach from below and target you really hard it's it's off-putting it's very hard to deal with but there is a certain type of knowledge that i think you can only have access to by way of an epiphany and it doesn't play a big role
in science but it does play a big role in writing i'm sure of it the epiphanies that happen in my book they're literary epiphanies that's not how science works especially not anymore there's really not that much space left for epiphanies right science is different it's it's like a it's a hive mind it's like a ants nest no the working parts are kind of dumb but they're doing something incredible between all of them right i think that's probably how science works but i'm not interested in that because i'm fascinated by singularities i'm fascinated by things that
kind of lie outside the regular order exceptions of all kinds one of the things that i like that i get angry about is this there's like a modern depreciation of the word genius like as if there were no as if everybody was the same and it's not like that it's not like that at all one of the great things about being human is how different we are and there are these outliers now there's men and women that really seem to come from another world and and they suffer for it too right that's why in my
book it's not just the epiphanic moment of triumph it's also the fall and the consequences because it is very dangerous to suddenly discover something new about the world it's very dangerous to suddenly discover something new about ourselves it is going a step beyond and you fall into this sort of really strange space right it's like colonizing new territory and it's dangerous but to me i think that's fascinating i think that were it not for these strange unique beings i don't know if we would have gotten very far we still need exceptionality i have lots of
favorite geniuses um the one i'm obsessed with right now is a hungarian mathematician he's called john von neumann but neumann was like he was described by his friend eugene wigner who was a noble laureate i became obsessed with von neumann because of this this phrase by eugene wigner who said you know like paul dirac was like my brother-in-law and i was friends with einstein and i i like had time with enrico fermi and all these people who were unbelievable but he said of john von neumann only he was truly awake and i thought what kind
of enlightenment is this right because it's not the type of enlightenment that we tend to think of you know a very i don't know spiritual guru buddha type figure this was a alcoholic womanizing mathematician it it had he he really was like a small childish god playing around with the world and his influence we're still feeling it we don't know but it's there it's like he built this world for us and he was upset exceptional in in every way and he was also pretty pathetic and childish and irresponsible they're not conscious geniuses they are otherworldly
they are driven by something that they don't understand and i think to me that is really why geniuses are so fascinating because the things that they do come from their unconscious and well we all have an unconscious right so i still have the belief that perhaps one day you know i'll get a have a better conversation with with my own head when we cease to understand the world is not about the dark side of science at all it's just that when you write i think that literature is one of the dark arts really so it's
not just you're not just shining a light and showing things that are new or spectacular you're also kind of putting a veil on things for things to be magical again you have to shroud them you have to kind of how do you show what is most important which is nothingness no on the void you have to put something on top of it you have to shroud it and that's what you do with words that's what you do with writing when we cease to understand the world is a book that is trying to talk about abysmal
matters now the black hole singularity the uncertainty principle the horrors of war the horrors of art and you do that by obfuscating i'm trying to show that there are things that are profoundly mysterious and still misunderstood a hundred years after they were discovered there is such a thing as the wave function in quantum mechanics where there is not a living soul no alive or dead who really comprehends what it seems to be saying about the world and we have to be reminded of that i think that we have to be reminded that we live in
a world that is bigger than us and it it can be terrifying but it's also awe-inspiring and we cannot survive without mysteries no if we explain away everything if we think that we have a proper understanding of ourselves and the world we're going to miss out on what's most important because mysteries are more important than truths the wonderful thing about the uncertainty principle is the road that leads up to it no we were trying to understand a reality at a level that was completely beyond us we didn't have the right language for it i don't
think we have the right mind for it no our minds have developed at a certain scale and yet through mathematics we can peer into things as much in the way that we use telescopes and microscopes to it is a tool that grants us access to realms of experience that that we don't have like the proper brain for so we suddenly got a glimpse into that world in in six months not only one equation to understand this this realm but two and they were completely opposed and it was a fundamental contradiction and they were created by
two men whose character were fundamentally different so we're kind of walking towards a deeper understanding and a truth that was up to that moment 1927 i believe or 1924 it was completely beyond us and suddenly it's there in front of us you know we're seeing like werner heisenberg said we're seeing into a beauty that nobody's nobody thought existed before and immediately we come up to a limit now which is the uncertainty principle is one of those iconic limits to human understanding i'm not going to go into the technicalities of it but what's what's fundamental to
me is that it points to a truth that to me is becoming more evident all the time that a deep search for truth will lead you to uncertainty it's like uncertainty is the highest form of wisdom that we can aspire to it is not security it is not power it is a humbling experience that's why it's at the heart of when we cease to understand the world because i think that writing should be at the same time it should give you access to the world and it should also darken it for you so that it
becomes mysterious again
