Whenever parts of a system interfere or cooperate with each other, there are nonlinear interactions taking place. Most of everyday life is spectacularly nonlinear; if you listen to your two favorite songs at the same time, you won’t get double the pleasure. The same goes for consuming alcohol and drugs, where the interaction effects can be deadly. By contrast, peanut butter and jelly are better together. They don’t just add up—they synergize.
Nonlinearity is responsible for the richness of the world, for its beauty and complexity and, often, its inscrutability. For example, all of biology is nonlinear; so is sociology. That’s why the soft sciences are hard—and the last to be mathematized. Because of nonlinearity, there’s nothing soft about them.
[…]
Sofia Kovalevskaya helped us understand how different the world appears when we finally face up to nonlinearity. She realized that nonlinearity places limits on human hubris. When a system is nonlinear, its behavior can be impossible to forecast with formulas, even though that behavior is completely determined. In other words, determinism does not imply predictability. It took the motion of a top—a child’s plaything—to make us more humble about what we can ever hope to know.
—
Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers
(2019)
She watched him, not unkindly. She smiled. Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?
[...]
That night in the garden here at my father's house Gustavo said to me that those who have suffered great pain of injury or loss are joined to one another with bonds of a special authority and so it has proved to be. The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
--
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
(1992)
Galileo conceded that the study of pendulums “may appear to many exceedingly arid,” although it was anything but that, as later work showed.
In mathematics, pendulums stimulated the development of calculus through the riddles
they posed. In physics and engineering, pendulums became paradigms of
oscillation. Like the line in William Blake’s poem about seeing the world in a
grain of sand, physicists and engineers learned to see the world in a pendulum’s
swing. The same mathematics applied wherever oscillations occurred. The
worrisome movements of a footbridge, the bouncing of a car with mushy shock
absorbers, the thumping of a washing machine with an unbalanced load, the fluttering
of venetian blinds in a gentle breeze, the rumbling of the earth in the
aftershock of an earthquake, the sixty-cycle hum of fluorescent lights—every field
of science and technology today has its own version of to-and-fro motion, of rhythmic
return. The pendulum is the granddaddy of them all. Its patterns are universal.
Arid is not the right word for them.
—
Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers
(2019)
Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word, that is to say, a word that may be used by the Spanish classics or a word used in the slums of Buenos Aires, I mean, a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out, and I use a common word. I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all of the words should look the same way. If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word. One should be able to read smoothly in it even if you’re writing metaphysics or philosophy or whatever.
—
Jorge Luis Borges, The Paris Review
interview (1966)
When I became a writer, I went to Los Angeles many times to work on magazine pieces and books. On those visits, I had been to and from the beach, and up and down the canyons, and in and out of the valley, and back and forth to the mountains, but I never gave downtown Los Angeles a second thought, assuming it was just a glassy landscape of office buildings that hollowed out by five o’clock every night. I pictured Los Angeles as a radiant doughnut, rimmed by milky ocean and bristling mountains, with a big hole in the middle.
—
Susan Orlean, The Library Book
(2018)
After school, I kept reading and rearranging the words I’d written, trying to understand what the words meant for my understanding of violence. For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.
—
Kiese Laymon, Heavy
(2018)
I'll never forget this. I walked into the press room to find a stack of press releases from Robert Moses announcing that a "study" of the bridge, an obvious first step toward its construction, would begin immediately—with the participation of the state. And now, when I went back to the same officials who had assured me they were firmly against the bridge, I found there had been a change in their position. They were now firmly for it.
I remember I drove home that night, and all the way down from Albany to our house on Long Island—it was 163 miles—I kept thinking, Everything you've been doing is bullshit. Underlying every one of my stories was the traditional belief that you're in a democracy and the power in a democracy comes from being elected. Yet here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he's had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power.
And, thinking about it later, I realized: and neither does anybody else.
—
Robert A. Caro, Working (2019)
It happens that a man sometimes sees such a thing in a dream, and afterwards he dwells on this dream all his life, reality is lost to him forever, and he is decidedly good for nothing anymore. Her name was Ulinka.
—
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
(1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)
There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, even a child would not make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it, like the road leading to a magnificent dwelling meant for a king’s mansions! Broader and more splendid than all the other roads it is, lit by the sun and illumined all night by lamps, yet people have flowed past it in the blind darkness. So many times already, though guided by a sense come down from heaven, they have managed to waver and go astray, have managed in broad daylight to get again into an impassable wilderness, have managed again to blow a blinding fog into each other’s eyes, and, dragging themselves after marsh-lights, have managed finally to reach the abyss, only to ask one another in horror: where is the way out, where is the path? The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.
—
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
(1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)
In short, it was all just right, as neither nature nor art can contrive, but as only occurs when they join together, when, after the heaped-up, often senseless, labors of men, nature makes a finishing pass with her chisel, lightening the heavy masses, removing the crude-feeling regularity and indigent gaps through which the bare, undisguised plan peeps out, and imparts a wondrous warmth to all that was created in coldly measured cleanness and neatness.
—
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
(1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)
