I’ve been working on adding some new practices to my daily schedule. A key thing I added in December – even before the Solstice, much less the official New Year – was to spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading every morning.
The original purpose was to give myself a reason to sit quietly for a few minutes before checking my blood pressure – which I’m keeping a close eye on – but it quickly evolved into something I really wanted to do. And that was probably because of the book I started with: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.
I stumbled on that book in a used bookstore in Sebastopol (the one in California, not Crimea) last summer and bought it on impulse. When I started doing the reading back in December, I pulled it out with a couple of other books on much the same impulse, and quickly fell into it.
Rovelli is a physicist, and the book is about the understanding of time by physicists, and yet that doesn’t begin to completely describe it, not to mention that it doesn’t tell anyone what a joy it is to read.
Rovelli is a lyrical writer and a gentle one. He can make statements that might be controversial without issuing a challenge. While I’m reading the English translation of this book (it was translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), I am quite sure the beautiful and gentle writing is all Rovelli and was there in the Italian original. Rovelli does speak English (and likely several other languages, given the different scientists with whom he has worked), so I imagine he has some idea of what his words should look like when translated.
In doing this reading, I began to keep something of a commonplace book in which I wrote down quotations from the book or, occasionally, my own reaction.
Here are some of quotes that struck me:
Nothing is valid always and everywhere.
[T]he world is nothing but change.
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.
We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping.
I could go on, but perhaps that is enough to entice others to read this book.
After I finished The Order of Time, which is a relatively short book divided into short chapters very suited to my reading practice, I started in on a collection of Rovelli’s essays called There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness.
These are essays and occasional book reviews that appeared in newspapers. They were translated into English by the same translators of the other book and are also beautifully and gently written. Reading essays is also very conducive to doing a bit of reading every day.
One thing in particular that Rovelli does that I particularly appreciate is to take some bit of information and interpret it in a different way than is generally done.
For example, he writes about Newton’s study of alchemy, which is often considered something of an embarrassment given the man’s stature as a scientist.
Rather than criticize Newton for this work, Rovelli instead points out that while Newton did a lot of study of alchemy, he never published any of that work. And Newton, he points out, was not shy about putting his work out there.
Rovelli is of the opinion that Newton was looking closely at alchemy – which was still a respected practice in his day – in an effort to figure out if it worked. Because he could never make it work in the same way that he did other things, he never published his results.
That makes sense to me. Rovelli also says of Newton:
[T]he genius of Newton lay precisely in his being aware of these limits: the limits of what he did not know.
Rovelli does not just confine himself to physics. He writes, for example:
Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that create new ways of thinking in the world, in order to understand it better.
I will leave you with one final quotation from Rovelli, one that explains why I am passionately reading so many books by people like him who bring substance and depth to their thinking – an urge that seems in direct contrast to the rampant stupidity going on in the United States right now, but also one that recognizes how much knowledge is out there, and how much is possible if we build on it:
New ideas do not just fall from the sky.
They are born from a deep immersion in contemporary knowledge. From making that knowledge intensely your own, to the point where you are living immersed in it. … Until there, where we least expected it, we discover a gap, a fissure, a way through. Something that nobody had noticed before …
He is discussing scientists, but I’m reading it as a writer.