Volume 48, Number 15 · October 4, 2001
Fathers and Sons
By John Banville
The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914
by J.W. Burrow
Yale University Press, 271 pp., $29.95
Throughout his life Einstein worried about the striking and, to him, suspicious manner in which observed reality conforms to the laws of mathematics. Why, he wondered, should the natural world be amenable to man-made rules? Could it be that we can grasp only that stratum of reality that is measurable by our limited methods? In a similar fashion, time, that most mysterious and intangible phenomenon, can appear to be man's own invention. Although time does not fit itself with mathematical docility within the divisions we impose on mere duration, nevertheless it is remarkable how epochs that are bounded by arbitrary demarcations—a battle and a peace, a revolution and a restoration, the death of a monarch and the birth of a tyrant—in retrospect take on unique and specific characteristics. Even such categories as decades can seem to dictate abrupt switches of direction: in our own lifetime we look back and wonder how, for instance, the high Sixties could suddenly collapse into the low Seventies, or, peering further back, how so much beastliness could be packed so neatly into the decade of the 1930s.
Review, 3724 words
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