When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

The military physicians diagnosed him with pemphigus, a disease in which the body fails to recognize its own cells and attacks them violently.

He reminded Schwarzschild that the human soul was a greater mystery than any mathematical enigma, and that it was unwise to project the findings of physics into such far-flung realms as psychology.

His son took the last name of his mother, Johanna Grothendieck, a woman who wrote her entire life, though she never managed to publish her novels or poems.

Grothendieck’s seminar produced twelve volumes, more than twenty thousand pages that manage to bring together geometry, number theory, topology and complex analysis.

He was capable of sleeping at will, as many hours as he needed, then dedicating the whole of his energy to his work.

And yet today I say to you with absolute certainty that all things can exist in two ways, and that nothing is as solid as it appears;

“Sleep, eat, play cards. Sleep, eat, play cards. Is this a life?” he wrote in his diary. “I no longer ask myself when the war will be over. I ask whether it is at all possible for a thing such as this to end.”

What enraged Heisenberg was not the wave function—though who the hell knew what that thing was?—but

Did you know the first symptom of a psychological disturbance is the inability to contend with the future? If you consider that, you will realize how implausible it is that we are able to exert control over even an hour of our lives.