How the Universe Got Its Spots

I first picked up Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots in 2003 at the NASA museum in Florida, coming home from taking our three-year-old son to see family and visiting Disney.  It was an impulsive purchase.  While I loved watching Carl Sagan’s Nova as a kid and enjoyed my physics classes in high school, I did not have any thoughts about astrophysics, cosmology, black holes, or space in general.  In 2003, I was a literature and film geek, a budding videographer, and a stay-at-home dad.

Levin’s book scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had, stretched a muscle I didn’t know had cramped up, and opened a door in my mind that had been entirely forgotten behind the clutter that had accumulated over the years.

In the 15 years between 2003 and 2018, I had thought of this book often, the science, the story of Levin’s life in 1999 and 2000, and her beautiful prose.  I had recommended it to many others, leant it to friends, and eventually loaned it to someone who never returned it.  But still it lingered for me.  I finally ordered another copy for myself for Christmas this last year and reread it in its entirety.

The book is every bit as amazing as I remember it being.

It’s structured as a series of letters-slash-diary-entries that Levin addresses to her mother.  In them, she fills her mother in on the movement of her life as a young theoretical astrophysicist in academia and gives her a basic overview of the science and work that she is focused on.  Her current work (in the book) seeks to determine the shape of our universe or discover the ways that its shape can be discerned.  To get there, she walks through the work of the giants on whose shoulders she stands.  In the end, the reader gets a quick but substantial summary of the foundational elements and theories of astrophysics.  Levin does all of this concisely, clearly, and entertainingly.

According to the blurbs on the book’s cover, Levin is a talented scientist.  I have to take their word on that.  What I can witness for myself is that she is a talented writer.  How the Universe Got Its Spots is beautifully written.  Whether she’s talking about her personal life or scientific theories, she is warm and insightful, elegant and evocative.  There is wonder and excitement in her tone, and a genuine love for her subject, even against the backdrop of the sorrows and strains of her personal life.  There were many passages I lingered over and reread for the sheer pleasure of her language and cleverness.

The book covers concepts of infinity, theories of gravity, special relativity, general relativity, quantum theory, the big bang, black holes, dimensional theories, topology, and even touches upon string and chaos theories.  As an introduction to these topics, this book could not be more ideal, and I would (and have) recommend it to everyone with even a passing interest or idle curiosity.

One of the things that makes physics so fascinating is that nearly all their theories feel like metaphors for life, things like every action has an opposite and equal reaction.  Levin takes full advantage of this feature by mixing biography and science, moving back and forth between her lived life and the subject of the moment.  The two naturally fit together so that the story of these two years in her life coexist comfortably with the 400-year history of modern physics.

One of my favorite aspects of the book, as a literary geek, is the way the truth and fiction hold hands like good friends and sometime lovers.  Levin makes it clear at several points in the book that the diary entries and letters are being written in hindsight, even though they are written in the present tense.  For example, at one point, she is at a conference in Moscow, which she placed in February of 2000.  She includes a footnote observing that the conference was actually in October of 1999.  She says in that footnote, “Honestly, I’ve gotten the date wrong.”  Honestly, I’m lying.  But of course it’s the truth too, which is how art works, right?  Sometimes you have to tell a fiction to better capture the truth of the experience.  This is of course at odds with the demands of science to be rigorously factual and honest.  So Levin gets her lies and her honesty, her fiction and her truth to all elevate each other so that science and art become one.  And she makes it look effortless the whole while.

The Lottery, or, the Adventures of James Harris

The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris is a unique collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson.  Published in 1949, this collection is the only collection of her short stories that were published in her lifetime.  I do not know to what extent she had a hand in determining which stories to include and in what order, but I like to think this was entirely by her design.

The 25 short stories are divided into four groups, and each group is preceded with an excerpt from Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphatus.  That’s not a made up name or title, but a real book published posthumously in 1681 about witchcraft.  In the quote preceding the first group of stories, the author describes the witches partying down with the Devil in one of their rituals.  This focus on witches and Devils runs throughout the collection, especially given the alternate title of “The Adventures of James Harris.”  Jims and Mr. Harris’s appear throughout the various stories collected here.  He first appears as a named figure in the second story, “The Daemon Lover,” which follows a young woman who is stood up by her fiancé, the man who proposed to her yesterday.  She searches the area for him and believes that she has tracked him down to an apartment where he appears to be shacked up with another woman.  Only no one answers the door when she knocks, and she returns regularly to try to find him but never does.  Does Jim Harris exist?  Is he fucking with the young woman, or is she delusional in some way?  It’s a fantastic story, but Shirley Jackson doesn’t care to answer that question.  So Jim is a kind of phantom, and you could describe him as devilish. 

The epilogue for the collection of short stories is an excerpt from a translation of Child Ballad No. 243, the ballad titled “James Harris, The Daemon Lover.”  In the ballad, James Harris is a man who lures a married woman and mother away from her family with the promise of riches, but once he has her, he reveals that he is the devil and that he is taking her to hell with him.  So the theme of devilry and witches runs throughout the stories, even though there is nothing resembling a witch in any of the tales.

Jackson’s stories are almost all about modern young women and their own spaces, living their lives.  It is of course not the women accused of witchcraft who called themselves witches in the 17^th century, but the men like Joseph Glanvil.  These are women being women in women’s spaces, the kind of thing that makes some men uncomfortable and accusatory.  What exactly is Shirley Jackson saying, I don’t know, but I would love to read the analysis that connects all the threads that are dangling loose in my head right now.  Unfortunately there appears to have been little scholarly work done with regards to this text.

Prior to reading this collection, I had not read any of Shirley Jackson’s short stories except for “The Lottery,” and I read that so long ago that my only memory was that the winner of the lottery got stoned (spoilers!).  I was expecting, then, dystopic tales and possibly even science fiction, but this collection could not be farther from that description.  I was surprised upon rereading “The Lottery” to find that there was nothing science fiction-y about it.  It only seemed that way to my young mind because “village” sounded so quaint and otherworldly, I suppose.

No, these stories are all about New England in the 1940s, and they feel like it.  They are tales that present situations fraught with danger, but the worst things you imagine are not where the story goes.  Jackson is concerned with the mundane rather than the magnificent.  For example, “The Tooth,” one of the final stories in the collection begins with a woman boarding an overnight bus from New Hampshire to New York, where she expects to have her tooth pulled in the morning.  Suffering from a terrible toothache, she boards the bus after popping codeine and drinking plenty of whisky.  Oh, and sleeping pills.  Good night!  How many things can go wrong there?!  And, while they do not go well for our protagonist, she does not end up raped, killed, or abandoned on the side of the road. The threat is certainly present, but Jackson is interested in things other than the sensational.

She spends much of her stories recounting character’s actions in pretty minute detail.  Her writing is clear and strong, and stays away from poetic phrases or extended similes and metaphors.  She keeps you grounded in the moment to moment actions of her subject and does not meditate on things beyond that.  The meaning to be pulled from the stories is in the action of the drama itself, not in its presentation.  There were several stories that were utterly captivating, and there were a handful that simply left me scratching my head.  Every time I felt like I figured her and her writing out, along would come a story that would dumbfound me.  “The Dummy,” for example.  What the hell was that story saying?  Or “Come Dance with me in Ireland.”  Or “A Fine Old Firm.”  But even the headscratchers ere beautifully brought to life.  

It was tempting at times while reading one story or another to think that Jackson just didn’t know how to build to a climax or seize upon a moment of tension in the narrative.  But it is clear that Jackson can do exactly those things when she wants to, which means that these stories that don’t do those things do exactly what she wants them to.  Often her protagonists are stuck in socially awkward situations and we read on to see how, if at all, they extricate themselves.  Will there be a moment of confrontation?  More often than not there isn’t. The protagonist often yields to the opposing force in a moment of quiet defeat or setback. These quiet moments seem to be the things that most captivate Jackson’s imagination, and I must say, I very much enjoyed her approach.

This is not a collection to be rushed through. Each story wants to be lingered over and compared to the others in its group.  What are they saying?  How are they reflecting one another?  What, if anything, do they add up to?  I don’t have solid answers, but I have feelings tingling around in my guts, and I like the echoes of my unanswered questions.