Anathem is one of the most profound books I've read. I think about it often. It's quite divisive though -- I've stopped recommending it after friends HATED it (and probably didn't finish it).
I only recommend it when I feel like I really know someone is going to be dorky about it in the same way I am dorky about it. It's not for everyone. But if it's for you, it's really for you.
I never read Szilard's bio so I have a certain ignorance about this but that part about the conditions at the border being radically different the day after he passed through doesn't sound right. By that I mean it only makes sense if he he made a conscious decision to return to the border From Vienna in order to witness the conditions himself and I can't see him making that choice if he was scared enough to flee Germany in a rush to begin with. It sounds more like one of those things that a thoughtful person would make up after the fact in order to point to it and say, "See? My fears Were justified,..." and it seems supported by the fact that Szilard himself admits to a certain level of deviousness when he says that he traveled first class in order to come into contact with as few people as possible. Understand that I'm not slamming Szilard for his conduct at that critical time: hell, any normal person would do whatever it took to get out of what was developing in Germany then; but there are just certain small unsettling aspects about Szilards life that seem to have been made up post facto in order to support his story.
You're forgetting that he could easily have read about it in any of a number of newspapers. It's been well documented that Germany's borders became difficult to cross.
I'm aware that he Might have read about it in the newspapers but given that this took place in the 1930s when news traveled FAR more slowly than it does now in the internet age, it would be highly unlikly that he would have read such a detailed description of border activities the very next day in Austrian papers. It would be a mistake to assume that news traveled as fast Then as it does now on the internet, given that a reporter would have had to witness the event, write up a few paragraphs about what he had seen, then telephone or telegraph what he had written to the editorial office of the paper that he worked for who who then spend a small amount of time casting around for Some confirmation of what the reporter had withessed(remember that Szilard would have been too intelligent to waste his time with sensationalist tabloids and probably spent most of his time reading reputable papers that could be counted on to publish the facts and not speculation), after which the editorial staff would take the rough article and polish it for public consumption. Once that was done the finished article would be sent to the presses where several hours would be spent setting the type(depending on the article length of course) after which several more hours when sent printing a few thousand editions to make the street venders and shops that sold the paper. There IS of course the chance that a paper could have done all this and made it for publication the next day but the detail in Szilards description implys a rather lengthy article which would have required a bit more prep work. Beyond just the practical issues in getting a well written article into a newspaper back then there was also the fact that there was a substantial portion of the population in Austria that was at Least sympathetic if not outright supportive of the Nazis and their ideology, and many of Them were in positions of influence or in postions squarely in the public eye. Many of those would either deny the excesses taking place at the border or at least claim that in most instances the measures taken by German officials were justified on the grounds of security.
I think you're overthinking this. (To put it mildly.)
Szilard did not write about this *the next day*. These are recollections published decades after the fact.
In any case, if he did learn about this from reading newspapers, those stories could also have been referring to events days (or even weeks) previously, regardless of when he read them. For that matter, one could say the same about personal communications.
"I left Germany a few days after the Reichstag fire. How quickly things move you can see from this: I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. The train was empty. The same train on the next day was over-crowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people. This is all that it takes.”
The above quote are Szilards actual words and no where does he mention reading about later events at the border in papers or magazines much later after the fact. Indeed, Including the line " The same train on the next day,...." so soon after mentioning his own experience at the border implies that he he intended that statement to have an urgency about it that would imply first hand knowledge as a witness, and the statment "You just have to be,...." implies that the time bewteen his crossing the border and when he became aware of what happened later was of Very short duration. Your point is correct on strictly techical grounds but it really only makes sense if Szilard spent his lifetime writing in a stark, technically correct way: in fact he was often given to using metaphor, allusion, etc even when writing such precise documents as patents that he intended to apply for. Heck the above quote was formulated entirly to give the sense of urgency and speed, which isn't something that you would do if what you were writing about included two acts that were days if not weeks apart,..
Why the heck would he require allusion to describe such an event? And why are you having such difficulty understanding that a person can write about events decades after the fact while instilling a sense of urgency in the narrative?
He could well have learned about the situation at the border the next day over a matter of weeks, whether through newspaper accounts or even personal communication. That this narrative would stick with him long after the fact should not be surprising: He's describing having narrowly escaped with his life.
I havn't thought about this since reading the book in the late '70s but the quality of slowed perception(mentioned in footnote 2)was actually given to the Steve Austin character in the book "Cyborg" by Martain Caiden when he was rebuilt. The idea was that it gave Austin the ability to analyse a situation and then formulate a response faster than he otherwise would be able to. It wasn't explained how That actually worked and I can't recall an episode of the TV series where it actually played a part(maybe someone out there could sorrect me on that?).
There's another take on roots that i think is apropos: The notion of being "rooted to the spot" -- of not acting in a timely fashion when suddenly faced with danger, or some happenstance requiring an immediate response. Immediate being relative, of course; whether stepping back out of the way of an onrushing vehicle, or snatching up one's suitcases and making for the train station.
... it sounds as if Szilard actually had little to lose. He had already pre-positioned his thoughts just like his suitcases. He says he sought to have a lifestyle in which he was "able to move at a moment’s notice". He says this was a result of World War One. It sounds as if he had gone through at least one 'emergency' that required immediate flight during those earlier times.
Also he could perhaps return if the situation improved; if it had been a mistake. If that was important to him He would have had time to consider this within the calculations regarding taking flight. Szilard was also obviously an extremely intelligent person. Felt that he could rely on his decisions. This entire subject, is as usual for your writings, very interesting. You mentioned your Boy Scout tra[ning. Although limited, you were instructed and practiced for a response under distress and immediacy. this of course is the advantage of drills Public service information etc. Even a little training goes a long way in an emergency. I also appreciate how you mentioned all of the stories and popular culture regarding heroism . Perhaps this simply comes down to a voice in your head saying that you must do something, that you must move forward, that you must help . On the core subject of nuclear war, it suddenly strikes me that the third option between fight or flight should probably be considered 'hide'. This ironically is a direct correlation with basic civil defense actions. Just make sure you hide somewhere with enough reinforced concrete and food and water for two weeks.
He did have some "roots" to lose — he tried, and failed, to convince his parents to leave Hungary, for example. But I agree that he appears to have had one foot out the door. Supposedly he stayed that way his whole life, always with suitcases packed. I think it is an interesting mindset. Living life in that way can't be great, psychologically, and must get in the way of relationships of all sorts. Heck, you couldn't even invest in a dog if that's how you approached life.
And, yeah, this is one of the (several) reasons I am interested in Civil Defense as a topic — this question about the value of preparation and "thinking the unthinkable." Not because I think that it would work the way the planners assumed it would (many of the plans were, in their own way, deeply ignorant or dishonest about the actual conditions that would occur, full of ludicrous assumptions, usually about how society would behave), but because it does help us think about the potential realities of something like nuclear war, and they are quite different from the popular imaginations of them.
As example, let's imagine that the window washer man died upon hitting the pavement. Or perhaps he died shortly thereafter because nobody with your Boy Scout background was available to know what to do. Whether that is a dangerous situation would seem to depend on a larger context.
What happens next to the man in this story?
Does his dead body become a rotting slab of meat in the ground? Is the story over? Is everything the man ever wanted now lost? If yes, then his fall can certainly be called a dangerous situation.
Does the dead man leave his body and go on to some gloriously wonderful after life as described by many religions and those who have had near death experiences? In this case the word "dangerous" is harder to apply to the situation. Is it dangerous if something unexpected happens and then we get everything we ever wanted, more than we could have ever imagined?
I don't know the answer of course, and tend to doubt that anyone does. But it interests me to observe that we often seem to assume that we do know the answer, and the language we use to describe such situations tends to reflect that.
To me, such reflections seem very relevant both to the enterprise of science, and to our relationship with nuclear weapons and other such threats.
In two emergencies I experienced, I see a tendency in myself to interpret sudden dangerous events in terms of other experiences. At work in an office building in Arlington, Virginia, I felt the building shake. Recalling what we had been told to do on Sep. 11, 2001, I said I was going down the stairwell and out of the building. Someone from the West Coast said to stay in the building because it was an earthquake. He was right, but I said that the last time I felt our building shake, it was from the explosion of an airliner flown into the Pentagon, so I went outside. This spring, walking along a street in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, I saw a car go up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. To me, this was unremarkable. I've seen it too many times. But when the car rolled back into the street and across it and up onto the sidewalk on my side, I suspected that the car was not under control. I was right. The driver either had had a seizure or (what I think was the case) was high. I called 9-1-1, talked to the uncommunicative driver (who climbed out an open window of the car and lay down on the ground) and waited till the police got there. So in both cases I interpreted unusual, dangerous events in terms of my own experience; in the second event, once the situation progressed beyond what I was used to, I recognized it as an emergency.
Anathem is one of the most profound books I've read. I think about it often. It's quite divisive though -- I've stopped recommending it after friends HATED it (and probably didn't finish it).
I only recommend it when I feel like I really know someone is going to be dorky about it in the same way I am dorky about it. It's not for everyone. But if it's for you, it's really for you.
I never read Szilard's bio so I have a certain ignorance about this but that part about the conditions at the border being radically different the day after he passed through doesn't sound right. By that I mean it only makes sense if he he made a conscious decision to return to the border From Vienna in order to witness the conditions himself and I can't see him making that choice if he was scared enough to flee Germany in a rush to begin with. It sounds more like one of those things that a thoughtful person would make up after the fact in order to point to it and say, "See? My fears Were justified,..." and it seems supported by the fact that Szilard himself admits to a certain level of deviousness when he says that he traveled first class in order to come into contact with as few people as possible. Understand that I'm not slamming Szilard for his conduct at that critical time: hell, any normal person would do whatever it took to get out of what was developing in Germany then; but there are just certain small unsettling aspects about Szilards life that seem to have been made up post facto in order to support his story.
You're forgetting that he could easily have read about it in any of a number of newspapers. It's been well documented that Germany's borders became difficult to cross.
I'm aware that he Might have read about it in the newspapers but given that this took place in the 1930s when news traveled FAR more slowly than it does now in the internet age, it would be highly unlikly that he would have read such a detailed description of border activities the very next day in Austrian papers. It would be a mistake to assume that news traveled as fast Then as it does now on the internet, given that a reporter would have had to witness the event, write up a few paragraphs about what he had seen, then telephone or telegraph what he had written to the editorial office of the paper that he worked for who who then spend a small amount of time casting around for Some confirmation of what the reporter had withessed(remember that Szilard would have been too intelligent to waste his time with sensationalist tabloids and probably spent most of his time reading reputable papers that could be counted on to publish the facts and not speculation), after which the editorial staff would take the rough article and polish it for public consumption. Once that was done the finished article would be sent to the presses where several hours would be spent setting the type(depending on the article length of course) after which several more hours when sent printing a few thousand editions to make the street venders and shops that sold the paper. There IS of course the chance that a paper could have done all this and made it for publication the next day but the detail in Szilards description implys a rather lengthy article which would have required a bit more prep work. Beyond just the practical issues in getting a well written article into a newspaper back then there was also the fact that there was a substantial portion of the population in Austria that was at Least sympathetic if not outright supportive of the Nazis and their ideology, and many of Them were in positions of influence or in postions squarely in the public eye. Many of those would either deny the excesses taking place at the border or at least claim that in most instances the measures taken by German officials were justified on the grounds of security.
I think you're overthinking this. (To put it mildly.)
Szilard did not write about this *the next day*. These are recollections published decades after the fact.
In any case, if he did learn about this from reading newspapers, those stories could also have been referring to events days (or even weeks) previously, regardless of when he read them. For that matter, one could say the same about personal communications.
"I left Germany a few days after the Reichstag fire. How quickly things move you can see from this: I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. The train was empty. The same train on the next day was over-crowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people. This is all that it takes.”
The above quote are Szilards actual words and no where does he mention reading about later events at the border in papers or magazines much later after the fact. Indeed, Including the line " The same train on the next day,...." so soon after mentioning his own experience at the border implies that he he intended that statement to have an urgency about it that would imply first hand knowledge as a witness, and the statment "You just have to be,...." implies that the time bewteen his crossing the border and when he became aware of what happened later was of Very short duration. Your point is correct on strictly techical grounds but it really only makes sense if Szilard spent his lifetime writing in a stark, technically correct way: in fact he was often given to using metaphor, allusion, etc even when writing such precise documents as patents that he intended to apply for. Heck the above quote was formulated entirly to give the sense of urgency and speed, which isn't something that you would do if what you were writing about included two acts that were days if not weeks apart,..
Why the heck would he require allusion to describe such an event? And why are you having such difficulty understanding that a person can write about events decades after the fact while instilling a sense of urgency in the narrative?
He could well have learned about the situation at the border the next day over a matter of weeks, whether through newspaper accounts or even personal communication. That this narrative would stick with him long after the fact should not be surprising: He's describing having narrowly escaped with his life.
I havn't thought about this since reading the book in the late '70s but the quality of slowed perception(mentioned in footnote 2)was actually given to the Steve Austin character in the book "Cyborg" by Martain Caiden when he was rebuilt. The idea was that it gave Austin the ability to analyse a situation and then formulate a response faster than he otherwise would be able to. It wasn't explained how That actually worked and I can't recall an episode of the TV series where it actually played a part(maybe someone out there could sorrect me on that?).
There's another take on roots that i think is apropos: The notion of being "rooted to the spot" -- of not acting in a timely fashion when suddenly faced with danger, or some happenstance requiring an immediate response. Immediate being relative, of course; whether stepping back out of the way of an onrushing vehicle, or snatching up one's suitcases and making for the train station.
A typo: "on day later"
... it sounds as if Szilard actually had little to lose. He had already pre-positioned his thoughts just like his suitcases. He says he sought to have a lifestyle in which he was "able to move at a moment’s notice". He says this was a result of World War One. It sounds as if he had gone through at least one 'emergency' that required immediate flight during those earlier times.
Also he could perhaps return if the situation improved; if it had been a mistake. If that was important to him He would have had time to consider this within the calculations regarding taking flight. Szilard was also obviously an extremely intelligent person. Felt that he could rely on his decisions. This entire subject, is as usual for your writings, very interesting. You mentioned your Boy Scout tra[ning. Although limited, you were instructed and practiced for a response under distress and immediacy. this of course is the advantage of drills Public service information etc. Even a little training goes a long way in an emergency. I also appreciate how you mentioned all of the stories and popular culture regarding heroism . Perhaps this simply comes down to a voice in your head saying that you must do something, that you must move forward, that you must help . On the core subject of nuclear war, it suddenly strikes me that the third option between fight or flight should probably be considered 'hide'. This ironically is a direct correlation with basic civil defense actions. Just make sure you hide somewhere with enough reinforced concrete and food and water for two weeks.
He did have some "roots" to lose — he tried, and failed, to convince his parents to leave Hungary, for example. But I agree that he appears to have had one foot out the door. Supposedly he stayed that way his whole life, always with suitcases packed. I think it is an interesting mindset. Living life in that way can't be great, psychologically, and must get in the way of relationships of all sorts. Heck, you couldn't even invest in a dog if that's how you approached life.
And, yeah, this is one of the (several) reasons I am interested in Civil Defense as a topic — this question about the value of preparation and "thinking the unthinkable." Not because I think that it would work the way the planners assumed it would (many of the plans were, in their own way, deeply ignorant or dishonest about the actual conditions that would occur, full of ludicrous assumptions, usually about how society would behave), but because it does help us think about the potential realities of something like nuclear war, and they are quite different from the popular imaginations of them.
Another angle to consider could be to ask...
What if there are no dangerous situations?
As example, let's imagine that the window washer man died upon hitting the pavement. Or perhaps he died shortly thereafter because nobody with your Boy Scout background was available to know what to do. Whether that is a dangerous situation would seem to depend on a larger context.
What happens next to the man in this story?
Does his dead body become a rotting slab of meat in the ground? Is the story over? Is everything the man ever wanted now lost? If yes, then his fall can certainly be called a dangerous situation.
Does the dead man leave his body and go on to some gloriously wonderful after life as described by many religions and those who have had near death experiences? In this case the word "dangerous" is harder to apply to the situation. Is it dangerous if something unexpected happens and then we get everything we ever wanted, more than we could have ever imagined?
I don't know the answer of course, and tend to doubt that anyone does. But it interests me to observe that we often seem to assume that we do know the answer, and the language we use to describe such situations tends to reflect that.
To me, such reflections seem very relevant both to the enterprise of science, and to our relationship with nuclear weapons and other such threats.
You gotta guess good too.
Two aphorisms in support of your final point:
* If you're failing to plan, you're planning to fail
* Plans are worthless; planning is priceless
In two emergencies I experienced, I see a tendency in myself to interpret sudden dangerous events in terms of other experiences. At work in an office building in Arlington, Virginia, I felt the building shake. Recalling what we had been told to do on Sep. 11, 2001, I said I was going down the stairwell and out of the building. Someone from the West Coast said to stay in the building because it was an earthquake. He was right, but I said that the last time I felt our building shake, it was from the explosion of an airliner flown into the Pentagon, so I went outside. This spring, walking along a street in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, I saw a car go up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street. To me, this was unremarkable. I've seen it too many times. But when the car rolled back into the street and across it and up onto the sidewalk on my side, I suspected that the car was not under control. I was right. The driver either had had a seizure or (what I think was the case) was high. I called 9-1-1, talked to the uncommunicative driver (who climbed out an open window of the car and lay down on the ground) and waited till the police got there. So in both cases I interpreted unusual, dangerous events in terms of my own experience; in the second event, once the situation progressed beyond what I was used to, I recognized it as an emergency.