Louis’s Comments (group member since Jun 15, 2011)

Louis’s comments from the Q&A with Louis Jones group.

Gabriele, thank you for the expression "random on purpose," which I plan to adopt. It just about nails the feeling I was going for. That fish hangs out there like a metaphor of something but one can't say exactly what. I like that about it. It evades the mechanical.

Anyway, you ask probing questions. I think Bodie's and Lotta's motives for scaling that hill are mixed. If you asked them, they'd say, like teenagers, inarticulately, "'Cause it's cool." Which might sum it up well. I think they want To Have Done It. Even though they're experimenting with a new contempt for society's bad values, they do still have some of the same idols before them. So it's not exactly logical, in their romance-drugged minds. Mostly, also, they want to be together and have an adventure.

I'm so fantastically glad that you felt Bodie had "rattled" the lonely arrogant man but that "in a way it was positive in the end." I guess my random-on-purpose technique is evoking just the responses I'd have hoped for. My own belief is that we'll never know whether Bodie was a fundamentalist Christian with an unshakeable faith; what we do know is that Bodie is Mark Perdue's personal hallucination (or nightmare?) of such a creature. And it brings Mark to a hint of "faith." Which is all he needs. Now, this would have to be a faith conscionable to a scientific man. But that idea that some law existed (the beauty of numbers) before matter existed is as close a brush with theism as a rational scientist can come. Mark isn't a systematic philosopher. Most of the book is about how he, and all of us, misunderstand everything, absolutely everything. But he's toying with this basic understanding of a theism, in the end.

Anyway, thanks for all your provocative questions.

Yes, Blythe is definitely an intelligent listener for him, coming along at the right time. Somebody outside his life he can talk to. But, for most of the book, I think the reader knows that Blythe is not really flirting, that Mark is indulging his vanity in the idea of sexual possibility, all the while congratulating himself on his fidelity. "The People Around Him" is one more category of the multitude of things he totally misunderstands. And I think the reader knows, too, that it would be a bad idea for everybody, to make a go at a superficial sexual encounter. When he does, at the end, act on his fantastic miscalculation, I guess I mean it to be an instance of how, though we humans have no idea of the reasons or consequences of our actions, or of events, somehow we're caught up by a basket of circumstances, and saved perhaps by a benign society or benign biological framework. I really like the "Mister Magoo" comparison Blythe makes: Mister Magoo, in the cartoon, steps blindly off cliffs and onto swinging wrecking balls, landing luckily, always happy, always misunderstanding.

Particles and Luck was a rather metaphysical book, I thought; about the communication or non-communication of "matter" and "spirit." As is physics. In this case, I think in the lapse of fifteen years, I've been reaching new feelings about "consciousness" -- and so indeed has the field of physics. Hard-headed physicists are sounding more mystical and subjective as the years go on, when they're not strictly immersed in calculation and experiment. So I guess I wanted to see what that same personality -- Mark Perdue's -- would make of these new feelings. It's a bit of an "existentialist" book, now that I think of it -- like Sartre's "Nausea" even -- with its focus on darkness and its zen mistrust of human thought-burble. Mark isn't the young man he was; the Mark Purdue of twenty years ago had a certain swagger and egotism; he's a humbler man now, and feels he's lost his mojo. Nevertheless he's as irritable as ever.

The questions about the book, as they've been phrased, seem to ask the author to take a position on issues I'm not totally sure an author should. Some questions are best left to readers, it seems to me. Or, rather, the author's point of view isn't really relevant.

The book seems to have no firm view of the ethics of abortion. It's unclear whether this abortion was justified or even immoral, given everybody's regrets about it.

Why do the kids want to touch the Hollywood sign? And is it possible to make the climb as described in the story?

In the previous book, Particles and Luck, Mark is tempted to cheat on his wife. As he is in this book. Is he actually unfaithful in his heart?

Science question. Is it true that physicists would say numbers existed by themselves abstractly, before there was anything to be numbered?

Exactly how smart is Mark Perdue? He seems to have all these sharp insights, but most of the time be totally wrong about a lot of obvious things.

I do hope a few people make an appearance, at this sparse picnic. It seems improbable that enough people, already, will have read the book, or care enough about it, to make up a lively discussion.

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