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A Doubter's Almanac

Book by Ethan Canin · 2 quotes · Feeling, Mortal Risks, Plane

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A Doubter's Almanac Quotes

“...Yet I somehow knew enough about him--because I somehow also knew enough about myself--to understand that his uncompleted thoughts were the lifeblood of his being. That was why I stayed away from those boxes. His thoughts were the ship on whose prow he stationed himself while the ice-strewn seas leaped and dived below. They were matters of calculatedly outrageous assumption, elephantine diligence, missilelike prophecy, and an unending, unruly wager regarding their eventual worth; they were going to be attacked with branching, incremental logic, andmet after months of toil--if not after years of it--by either the maniacal astonishment of discovery or by the shame-tipped dart of folly. The fact of all of this was like genetic information inside me. I knew it even as a teenager. I knew it even as a teenager on a substituted, entactogenic amphetamine. I had probably known it as a child. And I knew equally well that the risk of the toil he now began performing every day upstairs in his new office, despite the apparent risklessness of his quotidian life, might at any time overwhelm him, even more so in his fragile state. I knew that these mortal risks were hidden away each evening, that they were held at bay till the following afternoon by the cardboard tops that he placed over his boxes. I understood, even at the age I was then, and even in my newly altered condition, that the work was to be hallowed.”

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Book:A Doubter's Almanac
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“A plane in mathematics is not merely a flat surface but a flat surface of infinite thinness and size. Trivial? Not to us. When I say plane, I'm not thinking of a tabletop or sheet of glass or a piece of paper. You might point to any one of these objects; but all of them are precisely that: objects. They exist in the world. And because they do, they are defined by their breadth and reach. To a mathematician, a tabletop is no more a plane than a slice of rum cake is. In the world we know, in fact, the only thing that can actually be called a plane--or a portion of one, anyhow--is a shadow. You see? Words fail us. Even the world fails us. Are there not a thousand forms of sorrow? Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child's future? What about the melancholy of music? Is it the same as the melancholy of a summer dusk? Is the loss I was feeling for my father the same I would have felt for a man better-fit to the world who might have thrown a baseball with me or taken me out in the mornings to fish? Both we call grief. I don't think we have words for our feeling any more than we have words for our thoughts. I don't even believe that we actually do the things we call thinking and feeling. We do something, but it is only out of crudeness that we call it thinking; and when we do the other thing, we call it feeling. But I can tell you, if you asked Archimedes ... or Brahmagupta ... or Hilbert ... when they'd first known that they'd solved their great problem, I suspect they'd all say they had a feeling.”

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Book:A Doubter's Almanac
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