Chapter 33 — The Pen
Rufus describes how a certain aspect of a book’s structure can be a good metaphor for life and the world around us.
Followed by Chapter 33 —— The Pen, in which Saskia wrestles with duplication from time travel.
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Hello Friends,
Today I’d like to talk a little about how the structure of a book can be a good metaphor for life and the world around us.
Specifically: a big question is raised——in the parlance of fiction, this usually involves an inciting incident——but then we get sidetracked on related smaller questions, that, assuming the author is doing her job, all speak to some aspect of the main conundrum.
It might be that our attention is just too fragmented to, in general, launch a frontal assault on the problem at hand. Or, more charitably, perhaps it’s that it helps us to see different sides of whatever we’re wrestling with. That it is through what the different lenses’ reveal, that we manage to understand a coherent whole.
Even a first year calculus course has the same structure: we’re going to learn about slopes and areas and the interplay between the two. And then, in our quest to understand these ideas we stumble upon the idea of infinitesimals and limits and it becomes through those concepts that we rigorously make sense of the central concepts under consideration.
Resolving contradictions that bubble to the surface is also an important part of getting to a deeper understanding. A favorite mathematical text that illustrates this (and is also a bit of a window into iteration in mathematics) is the philosopher Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery. Lakatos’ book starts with an intuitive proof of Euler characteristic for polyhedra——the, at first blush mind-blowing observation that says: if you count up the faces, edges and vertices (the later two being the meeting lines between faces, and the meeting points between edges, respectively) on a solid three dimensional object then the number of vertices, minus the number of edges, plus the number of faces is always 2. For instance, a cube has 8 vertices, 12 edges and 6 faces; and:
8 - 12 + 6 = 2
Unfortunately, Lakatos then notes that although this holds for a dodecahedron, square and triangular pyramids, and icosahedron to name just a few polyhedra, it is not true if your solid has a hole in it, a la a donut. Happily, this quasi-counterexample opens the door to a whole branch of mathematics called topology (Wassily’s area of expertise for those paying attention). The important thing for our purposes is that it is by prodding and pressure testing what was just observed that Lakatos gets to an even deeper understanding of the world.
True for mathematics, true for literature, true for life.
The only caveat that I feel I must add is that occasionally, along the way, we tend to get lost and confused. Today’s chapter might be one of those for The Curve of Time, and I wanted to acknowledge that before we get started. If you’re head is spinning at some point in the next few minutes, bear with it. We won’t make sense of everything today, but today’s chapter is merely an unlighted tunnel through which we are passing.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter thirty three in which Saskia finds all manner of surprises in her hotel room in Dallas.
— 33 —
The Pen
Saskia was happily surprised by her hotel room. There was a living room—kitchenette area, and two internal doors, one for a bathroom, the other a bedroom. Without giving it much thought, Saskia began winding time backwards and retired to the bedroom. Entering the room, she found——
Her backpack, already sitting on the dresser.
It stopped her in her tracks. Almost jolted her back into the normal flow of time, but she maintained enough concentration. There were now two copies of her backpack——the one on the dresser and its double on her back. It made no sense. Had she somehow duplicated a physical object in the world? Did that mean there was another copy of herself, rolling back through time without her backpack? She’d brought other stuff back with her before; her clothes for one thing.
She crossed and un-zippered the top of the second bag. Peeling the flap back, she recognized the contents: a perfect copy of those in the bag on her shoulder. There was no way to reason through what had happened. She needed to experiment. Wait, she was already in an experiment; slipping backwards through time with her own backpack. The bag on her shoulder felt heavy and her eyes naturally fell back on the dresser, but, of course, the top surface was already taken. Saskia glanced about the room. There was the bed or the floor. Perhaps there was enough room for two bags on the——
The top of the dresser was clear. No bag there. Nor on the floor beside it.
Saskia spun about. The bag had disappeared——
But another Saskia was standing across the room. Her double shook her head: “no”.
Then Saskia noticed the bag on her double’s shoulder. Her double couldn’t possibly have retrieved the bag from the dresser without Saskia noticing. Wait, there was a third Saskia behind her double. But the third Saskia was facing away from her, and her movement played out in reverse. What was more, she, also, had a backpack on her back.
“That’s yours,” her double clarified, apparently reading Saskia’s mind and referencing the backpack over Saskia’s second double’s shoulder. Then, Saskia’s double touched the strap over her own shoulder. “This too. I’m you.” She indicated the dresser. “The other bag is gone. Even back in the future.”
Saskia closed her eyes and shook her head in a tremble. But the effort to shake the nonsense free was futile.
“You should check for yourself,” the second Saskia suggested.
“But ...” Saskia’s eyes swung to the third Saskia across the room, the one moving in reverse——reverse of her own motion, presumably forward in time.
“She’s you too. But she’s moving forward in time, so, to us, she looks like she’s moving in reverse.”
That made sense. There was a logic to what she was seeing: if she went to check on the original missing backpack and then came back, there would be three of her here. She’d seen that sort of thing before, heading back to that first afternoon in her backyard. But what of the backpack on the dresser?
It was strange that she’d seen this before——the duplication of her clothes, for instance——and it hadn’t bothered her, but the backpack felt different. Was it just the extra one that had been sitting on the dresser? Was that still back in her future? “Go see for yourself,” her double repeated her earlier suggestion, as if she’d just read Saskia’s mind again. No, she knew Saskia’s mind.
Saskia saw her third self start walking backwards towards her. There was no point fighting it, and Saskia submitted to what was clearly fated. As she slowed time to a stop her double’s motion sped up, and her second double——the third her——continued backing her way. When she stopped time altogether both doubles momentarily disappeared. Then, when she realigned with the normal flow, her double reappeared and she was now her second double, her third self. She crossed the room as she’d seen herself do earlier, and when she turned about, she saw her double, and briefly her original self.
But her original self disappeared into thin air. It was unclear where she’d gone, but gone she was. As was the backpack that should now be sitting on the dresser. She kept rolling time forward. Well past when the backpack should definitely have reappeared, but it never did. Every once in a while she looked over at her double slipping back in time, and her double just shook her head.
Eventually, she turned time around again and became her double. As she wound time backwards, she glanced once in a while over at her forward flowing self. At some point her original self reappeared near the dresser, reversing through the world. Saskia passed back through the conversation she’d just had with her original self, only taking the other side this time; clairvoyance was still impossible, but it was easy to recall something that happened to you a couple of minutes ago.
Then, her original self disappeared as that her turned her path forward again through time. She was alone again, just the last her——all three Saskia’s combined into one——slipping backwards through time.
For a long while, she considered whether to risk putting the backpack atop the dresser again. Eventually, though, curiosity got the better of her and she decided she had to test it. Thinking only got you so far, after all.
She did, however, have the presence of mind to run the test on a less consequential item than her entire backpack. She pulled a pen from her backpack and slung the bag back over her shoulder.
Suddenly, she again saw two more copies of herself. One double was slipping the same way she was, the other reversing——well, flowing forward in time, if you took a more absolutist perspective. Her absolute—forward—flowing self stepped backwards, towards the dresser and put down a pen (though it looked more like she’d un—picked—it—up). Saskia then noticed the pen was also in the hand of her third self, the one also slipping backwards through time.
The pen was in two locations at once——no, three, Saskia realized: the dresser top, in the hand of her third double, and looking down at her own hand, she found the third.
Still slipping backwards in time, Saskia crossed to the dresser. She held out her own hand to compare the pen sitting there with that which she was holding. Abruptly the pen on the dresser disappeared. Saskia looked up and found her doubles gone too. Instinctually, she put her own pen where the other pen had been, and looking back up: her doubles were both back. She glanced back down at the pen. It sat there a moment, and then it disappeared.
Saskia looked up and realized her double, the one slipping forward in time, was just as intrigued by the dresser’s now empty surface. Her other double, the one also slipping backwards in time, held up the pen, as if to demonstrate where the magic trick ultimately ended.
Saskia looked between the other two women, and then slowed her flight back through time. She needed to re-witness what she’d just now seen. Bringing the world to a standstill, she briefly found herself alone. Then she realized: she’d become the her traveling forward through time.
She approached the dresser again. Abruptly, the pen materialized on the lacquered surface. She watched as the her she’d been——just moments back along her own life curve——reached out and . . . then the her she’d been briefly disappeared. When she reappeared, she was holding the pen. And yet the pen was still there, atop the dresser.
It was hard to fathom what was happening, but at least she felt sure of her next few actions, in a way she’d never before felt so sure of what she was about to do: she reached out to the pen and picked it up (aka un-put-it-down). Again, she turned her flow through time back around, and, when the writing implement had once again disappeared from the atop the dresser, she held the pen in her own hand aloft. She continued slipping backwards through time, leaving her other two selves in the future. As she kept flowing backwards, she was left desperately noodling on what she had just witnessed, and what it meant.
The one thing that seemed sure, was that if she wanted to bring the backpack back with her, she’d have to keep carrying it.
