The Idiot

by Elif Batuman

Could it be true, what Nabokov said—that the abstract calculations had come first, and only later turned out to describe reality? Hadn’t the Greeks come up with the ellipse from doing solid geometry, from slicing up imaginary cones, and then centuries later, the ellipse turned out to describe the exact shape of planetary orbits? Hadn’t ancient people invented trigonometry, centuries before anyone knew that sound waves were shaped like sine waves? Fibonacci came up with the Fibonacci sequence just from adding up numbers, and then its ratio turned out to be encoded in the seed spirals on a sunflower. What if math turned out to explain how everything worked—not just physics but everything? Could that be what Ivan was studying?

“Is there smoke in the house? If it’s not suffocating, I will stay indoors; if it proves too much, I’ll leave. Always remember—the door is open.” That’s what Epictetus said about suicide.

Was it because Balzac’s novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see? But the fact that the email had been written specifically to me, in response to things I had said, made it literally a conversation, in the way that Balzac’s novels—written for a general audience, ultimately in order to turn a profit for the printing industry—were not; and so wasn’t what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human?

but which to me seemed, like nearly everything he said, pregnant with the unspeakable sadness of the world.

“It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,”