When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

From the window of that office, as orderly as the interior of a temple, there is a view of Mount Daimonji, where once a year, during the O-Bon festival, the monks burn a giant kanji in the form of a man with outstretched arms—大—a sign which means enormous/tall/monumental, and is used to express extreme

KANJI

admitted to having felt “oppressed” by Grothendieck’s overwhelming technical superiority. Frustrated by his incapacity to rival Grothendieck’s vertiginous output of groundbreaking ideas, Thom abandoned pure mathematics to develop catastrophe theory, a mathematical treatment that describes seven ways in which any dynamic system—be it a river, a tectonic fault or the fragile mind of a human being—can suddenly lose its equilibrium and collapse, falling into disorder and chaos.

Catastrophe theory

became obsessed by ecology, the military-industrial complex and nuclear proliferation. To his wife’s despair, he founded a commune at home, where vagabonds, professors, hippies, pacifists, thieves, nuns and prostitutes dwelt side by side. He became intolerant of all the comforts of bourgeois life; he tore up the carpets from the floors of his house, considering them superfluous adornments, and began to make his own clothing: sandals from recycled tires, trousers sewn from old burlap sacks. He stopped using his bed, instead sleeping on a door he had torn from its hinges. He only felt at ease among the poor, the young and the marginalized. The stateless, those without a homeland.

Solidarity with marginlized