>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Mark Dimunation: Welcome everybody to Thursday at 3:00
and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division,
part of the Rare Book Forum.
Some of you are familiar faces but leave it to Peter to draw
in a whole new crowd as well.
It shouldn't surprise any of you that you know, Peter Zilahy;
he's going to be speaking about time.
I met Peter when he first arrived as a Kluge Scholar two years ago?
Yes. At that time I was working in the reading room and at the desk
in the reference section, which is a grand theater seat for the division
but also you're kind of a prime target.
So, Peter came by and as often as those of you
who know Peter will know a short conversation with Peter turns
into endless story after story and it became kind of this moment
that I would look forward to when he would walk in the reading room.
We would go over everything from panslovic backgrounds to any number
of issues with books to his current work; so it's been a real pleasure
to have him associated with the division all these years.
Today he's going to be speaking on in essence perception
or how we relay our perception of time and timelessness.
I won't say more because he, as you know,
if you know him will have a very unique take on the subject matter;
so please welcome Peter, and it's all yours.
[ Applause ]
>> Peter Zilahy: Mark thank you very much for the introduction.
It's strange how memory works
because I remember our first encounter.
You were the one who was telling the stories, endless stories.
So the title is Time and Timelessness,
everything you always wanted to know about time, but you were afraid
to ask, the brackets naturally refer to the Q & A at the end.
So, because of the camera I will mostly read
because I wouldn't like to make a mistake.
So my last talk at the Library of Congress was on visual thinking
with lots of images and visual aids.
So, this time I decided to keep it more personal due
to the subject matter, that is time and timelessness,
and also because of furniture in this room.
Look at that amazing piece there, if you are getting bored,
just admire it and it can pass your time in perfect visual harmony.
If you don't see that table at the end, you should really check
that out that's an amazing collector's item.
And so I should call this work in progress,
but that would already mean taking a side in the debate
that is literally as old as time.
So there's another lecture at 4:00 at the Kluge Center,
so no hard feelings for those who will have to go.
I just wanted to inform the rest of the people
that if anybody leaves the room before the fat lady sings,
it's not because she's bombing.
As you can see Thursday's are popular for lectures and talks,
and Thursday are also popular in literature.
There are novels whose plots take place in a single day.
Mrs. Dalloway takes place on a Wednesday in June 1923,
perhaps because Thursday had already been taken by James Joyce's Ulysses,
also in June exactly 113 years ago.
The books that you can see on the table there
and perhaps holding your hands later were written by me.
And as you will see are full of images as opposed to my lecture.
They play the theme of childhood and dictatorship.
One of them looks like a children's dictionary and it's
about among other things,
a childhood span behind the Iron Curtain.
The idea was that everybody was treated like children
by the regime, not just me.
But my parents and teachers as well, so a children's dictionary seemed
to be the ideal form to write about the era.
I'll give you a short example.
"Bath time was during the news.
Every now and then mother would look in to see if I was all right.
Dad was watching TV in the living room.
To protect me from the lies they had to know the details.
I could hear mother sighing, what a mess I was making
on flooding the apartment.
I dived down.
Under the water I heard a voice telling me what had happened
in the world that day.
A landslide killed 150 people in Bangladesh, a revolution broke
out in West Africa, a new kindergarten
and Olympic swimming pool were opened,
and MTK beat Ferencvaros two to one.
I had no idea who was sending the messages or why,
but clearly they had plans for me
because they also told me what the weather was going to be like.
The following day I could distinguish several voices
in the tub which pointed towards an organization.
This manner of communication seemed logical.
I couldn't send them messages because you can't talk under water,
and they could only get in touch with me without my parents
and teachers knowing during my bath time.
I didn't understand why it was important for the organization
that I should have detailed information on the latest war games
in Poland, or which Transdanubian towns were being granted city
status, but I knew that if I paid attention sooner
or later I'd be given a sign.
My life gained a deeper meaning under water
when one Sunday mother was washing my hair
and unsuspecting she pushed my head into the water;
a pleasant female voice whispered in my ear
that the harvest had been flattened by hail.
I knew immediately what was expected of me
and to be honest I had no objections.
To make a big mess.
From that day on I sabotaged the development
of our people's democracy like a busy honeybee.
Earthquake, power failures and gas explosions marked my way.
I would figure out the location of military objectives on the basis
of intelligence I received in the bath tub.
When a factory or a power plant was inaugurated I would be there doing
what I had to do.
Comecon fiddled at repairs behind the Iron Curtain, little suspecting
that some, that a stone was being thrown inside the glass house."
In the opening of Either or, Kierkegaard,
the Danish Philosopher talks about the brazen bull
which is both an instrument of torture and music.
Filary is the tyrant of a Greek city/state more
than 2,000 years ago had this device for his pleasures.
The bronze bull was heated from below
and the victim was slowly roasted while his screams came
through as music with the help of various pipe
and some clever engineering.
This actually happened.
There are no recordings of the musical quality
because as you know recording devices are rather modern form
of torture and the brazen bull is ancient.
What is a poet Kierkegaard asks, an unhappy person
who conceals profound anguish in his heart with whose lips are so foreign
that his cries sound like beautiful music.
And the crowd goes, "Sing again,
me and you suffering torture your soul".
Music and torture was never far from each other as well illustrated
by the British Heavy Metal band Iron Maiden that was named
after a torture device of similar sorts.
Only that device never actually existed, but was completely made up.
They do look amazing, so you can still find Iron Maiden
in torture museums around the world, if that's where you hang out.
Fictional torture device sounds like a collection of bad poetry
or a novel that is literally crime scene, we've all been there.
By the way bad poetry causes dementia.
Even if you're not listening just sitting nearby,
it's like secondary smoke and you get lung cancer.
Just Google it.
Anyway this is a perfect place to make a statement, be it philosophy,
literature or science there are only good books and bad books.
Good books connect the world;
bad books make money and/or cause dementia.
Play to [Inaudible] Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche wrote some great literary works.
Even Wittgenstein had some amazing one liners.
At the same time a lot of good literature turned
out to contain great philosophical or scientific insights.
Those [Inaudible] not only influenced Kafka a great deal
but Einstein as well.
You must look at the bigger picture,
which is also why I'm not showing small images this time.
Coherence plays back in the long run.
So, to be fair Kierkegaard writes
that he would rather be a swineherd understood by his pigs
than a poet misunderstood by people.
So if you are a poet you just need to find the place where your screams
in pain are appreciated as beautiful music or start a blog.
This - that's enough of my go to humor.
Dictatorship have great audiences,
and not just because people cannot leave but also
because everything has a double meaning.
To read between the lines is key to survival
but also a creative process that's much more entertaining
for an informed crowd than any form of [Inaudible].
Your expectations define the reading.
Sometimes you cannot see the forest from the metaphors.
To be informed does not necessarily mean
to have enough information, but to be given clues.
Clues for reading a state of affairs that makes sense,
or seem to make sense and makes your life more meaningful or seem
to make your life more meaningful meaning is
in the eye of the beholder.
When I, as a child growing
up in a dictatorship everything had a political meaning.
Books could sell ten times more copies than today
for the underlying meaning.
This has disappeared for decades, perhaps it's coming back now
but for a long time politics was not
that interesting for a general audience.
Though a few months ago I read some stats that I did not double check,
but apparently Breitbart had more hits than Pornhub,
which means that with successful marketing politics could reach
out for more people than we expected.
We should really stop this.
Censorship can also be a source of success.
Back in the day when I was a young poet one oven guard magazine
published a few of my teenage works.
The issue had a strange cover that became a scandal.
It had a caricature of the Hungarian court of arms going back more
than 1,000 years, but instead of the two angels holding the shield,
they portrayed two horny devils masturbating.
This has of course, freaked out a few conservative members
of the parliament and the leader
of the farmers party was waving the magazine in front of the parliament
in live coverage asking for the copies to be smashed immediately.
But because of the scandal and the free advertisement,
they sold five times more copies than ever
and a lot more people could read my poems.
Moving on.
Not only dictatorship have great audiences,
but dictatorships are not necessarily bad for literature.
Bad for the individual, but not bad for the quality of the art.
In fact, most great works of literature that we know
of were written in some form of tyranny.
Since democratic governments are pretty new,
in fact Greek democracy only happened in a few cities
for a short period of time and it was widely regarded
as a bad idea for a long time.
But every coin has two sides.
Kierkegaard also wrote the tyrant dies and his rule is over,
the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Phalaris apparently was overthrown by his people and tortured to death
in his favorite musical instrument
so his slaves could all hear his swan song from the brazen bull,
play things with the Gods, very Greek idea.
It's everywhere in Plato and the Greek tragedies and in spite
of what you may have heard
in history class more overwhelming majority
of the Greek population lived in some sort of tyranny.
Now in a good old 20th century dictatorship history is cut off
from the past and people are forced into living in an eternal present.
My country was cut off from the network that it used
to be part of for a millennia.
The two sides of the coin, the 20th century were either the fake
enthusiasm of totalitarian regimes like Stalinism and fascism
and pretending that everything is happening right now,
like never before, or the version I grew up in
where you had the impression that nothing is happening
and nothing is ever going to change.
When I was a kid most people including the most educated
seriously believed that the division of Cold War Europe and the rest
of the world will remain like that forever.
I was one who didn't.
I studied history and I learned that things change.
I thought the Wall will come down some day and I wanted
to see it before that happens.
So, I went to all the nearby countries in the former Soviet block
to see the end and participate in the protest that changed the system.
I saw the euphoria.
The moment when people all of a sudden started to believe
that finally they can take their lives in their own hands.
It was a carnival in many cities,
especially in Berlin, Prague and Belgrade.
Here's a paragraph from my book.
In Belgrade, time is measured in faces.
After a week I began to recognize people in the crowd.
In a years' time I would recognize everyone.
Anyone who has a face also has time.
Watches are worn as ornaments, the hands enclosing an arbitrary angle
that matches the wearer's mood.
It's not possible for me to be late if I stay on the street.
The time for the demonstration can be read from the faces.
You look at someone and you know: it's time.
Neither of you will get there on the agreed time,
but you meet somewhere else where you wouldn't have met
if you had gone to where you were supposed to meet.
Belgrade had escaped side real time.
People look one another in the eye.
They are whirling
on the merry-go-round in a shower of confetti.
A chain reaction of faces in a triggered explosion.
Belgrade faces are incendiary, quick to flare up.
It is impossible to become invisible.
The Belgrade are not faceless.
Out of any two faces, one is always you.
The way we look at time is deeply rooted in our habits and lifestyle.
We observe changes and we call it time.
We had very different observation behind the Iron Curtain
and what behind means is already a viewpoint.
You were behind from our perspective.
This could be a source of many thought experiments.
Just take Vietnam for example; it took me decades of my adult years
to realize that if you have lost Vietnam, then they must have won.
Then who are we?
Then of course nobody really looked at it that way
and you don't see many blockbusters
from the Vietcong perspective either.
If they were to do it, they should start
by imagining how time was passing in those rabbit holes.
Can we step out of our box and think of time beyond our own experience,
are we always going to be late.
Timelessness smartly is also based on your experiences.
So your timelessness and my timelessness may never sit
at the same table or the same universe for one.
Timelessness seems to be a state and you have all the time in the world,
which does not make sense, if you consider time as rhythm.
Experiencing time can also add to our sensation
in seeing another country or another continent is profoundly alien.
When I was 13 years old my parents drove me and my brother
to Western Europe one summer holiday.
We had never been to the West before,
passing Austria, we didn't even blink.
It didn't feel that much different.
But when we arrived to Germany we saw American soldiers with tattoos
and big motor bikes just like in an Oliver Stone movie.
I'm not kidding, we got genuinely scared and we wanted to go home.
The west felt cold and cruel.
We wanted to go back to our safe little communist dictatorship.
Luckily my dad didn't approve.
On the two sides of the Iron Curtain people had very different views
in time.
In America it seems nobody has time.
Everybody is busy.
You buy your time.
We had a completely different idea.
We had a lot of time on our hands.
You could learn Japanese or Swahili, higher math or whatever.
You had time, but you did not have things as opposed to the other side
that had a lot of things to play with but no time to do so.
Behind the Iron Curtain you could visit your friends at 2:00 a.m.,
no problem, just knock on the door.
You did not have to call, anyway few people had phones.
And the reason for this was that you're equally unimportant.
When you are unimportant you have all the time in the world.
The idea of a job behind the Iron Curtain was that you were there
with the intention of getting nothing done, which is both cruel
and bad work could be a problem, when nothing becomes nothing.
It's safe.
And not being safe in a dictatorship can be quite different
from what may scare you in these parts.
When I traveled more and I saw that in the west everybody is so busy,
even the cleaning lady is busy for weeks ahead you kind of have
to make an appointment you're your children if you wanted to see them.
It was culture shock, but it was really about time.
You may call it culture or jet lag.
If you ever had children you know that time changes around a baby.
As if you have entered a different time zone.
You don't know how long at night or a day is to a child,
Joan Berger argues in Fortunate Man.
It may be that subjectively a childhood is much longer
than the rest of a lifetime.
There is no dedicated sensory organ that detects time,
it again might suggest that the passing
of time is a psychological phenomenon.
Time ticks fast or slow depending on their age, emotional state,
whether we are in pain or in love, or just bored.
As a child we learn time by playing.
Just like lion cubs learn to kill, we learn to kill time.
How we deal with time reflects on us.
In New York we are watching the ball drop on Time Square,
counting backwards and forwards.
The idea of living in the past or in the future, but unable to live
in the moment, unable to exist without references,
without measuring or time constantly
but also measuring our importance in comparison to others.
That's what we do waiting for a moment.
And by waiting together it feels more real.
We're afraid to miss it.
We're afraid of falling out of time, of not existing,
of not having a life, so we try to prove our existence by being busy.
Facebook is a perfect way to avoid the presence,
by being constantly present.
A perfect distraction with a measure of likes.
Another aspect I should perhaps mention here,
still talking about the point of view is the role
of humor in a dictatorship.
We watch television and we saw very serious,
very boring people telling lies.
Then we went on to the pub and then we heard jokes that were true.
You could only tell the truth as a joke,
otherwise you could get arrested.
I still do not trust people who are always serious, they lie.
A lack of movement seems to be pretty absurd if you're able to look
at it from a distance, absurdity was a daily bread
of the communist regime.
Absurd humor thrive behind the Iron Curtain together
with absurd theater.
When life is absurd normality can seem unnatural even revolutionary.
The riot police breaking through the fog come marching
down the embankment, the static perhaps too blatant but authentic.
Some people start to run but most stand transfixed as if they're
at the shooting of a costume drama.
In the scene many men in armor are marching in formation,
the clanking of the shields and the thud of the boots parting in an air
of heightened solemnity to the troop.
The movements are not robot-like but loose after having to stand
around helplessly for so long, they feel a sense of liberation.
They're fired by the will to fight.
They approach with steps neither hasting or leisurely
but rather homely like someone going out to check the mail
who knows full well that it won't run away,
a steaming hot breakfast is waiting for him.
It's just gone out for a moment, accept has spotted something
in the grass, some large object, a forgotten bowl or pair of sunglasses
and he proceeds to kick it to the side with his leg.
In the Communist dictatorship nobody is important individually
and money is not worth much so you can only create value by sacrifice.
Human sacrifice is crucial to the regime.
What's wrong with a little human sacrifice compared
to eternity dictators would say.
In a university in which everything is laid out eternally
and unchanging, innovation is impossible.
Time is an illusion according
to the ancient Greek Philosopher Parmenides.
And a deeper reality is eternal and unchanging.
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead
of me, that signifies nothing.
For us, believing physicist the distinction between past, present
and future is only a stubbornly, persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein wrote this a month before his own death,
about the death of his lifelong friend Michele Besso.
For Einstein the past and the future exist eternally,
time does not flow, it just is.
In fact, all physical theory so far devised, Etonian mechanics,
Einstein's two theories of relativity,
even quantum mechanics are time symmetric.
No era of time is indicated.
There is no physical reasons why a smashed plate might not
rejoin itself.
This is hard science, not fiction,
or gene sequences are 95% identical to those of yeast.
The difference between yeast
and the human being is largely a matter of organization.
We share 50% of our genetic code with a banana.
The same goes for a book, content is one thing, but it's a matter
of how you organize your material.
Please do not understand me too quickly.
Andrew Sjeed (ph) wrote, There is a reason why we think slowly.
To also think fast, they do not think.
They are hoarding information.
Your scientists have discovered that the brains of people
with high IQ's tend to be highly integrated
in neuropath connecting distant brain regions.
Why less intelligent people's brain build simpler, shorter routes.
But no one knows why some brains construct much longer range
connections than others.
Perhaps it has to do with the bigger picture or a bigger illusion.
I guess it's time for a little Kafka.
I'm going to give you three quick quotes;
the meaning of life is that it stops.
I am free and that is why I'm lost.
I am a cage in search of a bird.
Reading Kafka time and space seems
to be very different from your own world.
It can never get from A to B, and it's hard to tell whether it's
because of temporal or spatial relations.
Another quote, the first sign of the beginning
of understanding is the wish to die.
That's kind of the definition of time according
to Kafka in my interpretation.
There is an infinite amount of hope in this universe, but not for us
and that's the definition of space.
I would like to point out if needed that this humor
and if it doesn't sound funny, you still have a lot of time.
We are dying, that's what we do and we need a sense
of humor for the journey.
So let's talk about death and time.
There are two kinds of literature in this respect.
Here it is hard to refrain from the joke that there are two kinds
of people in the world, those how say that there are two kinds
of people in the world and those who say there aren't.
So there are two kinds of literature.
One that says "I'm going to die".
It's a scream but all we hear is just beautiful music of course,
that's the domain of poetry.
And the other kind says "Hey we are all going
to die" this could be a novel going on for 1,000 pages or a play
by Shakespeare where you have all the characters laid out in the end.
With every work of art we create a specific form of time for
or against death depending on your disposition.
But before it starts to get way too serious here's a bit
for comic relief.
The time is measured by death, in this case not necessarily your own.
For those who may not know the names in the next paragraph,
they're all communist dictators and bad, bad people.
My bumpy road to sexual maturity was paved
with the death of communist dictators.
My first sexual experience coincided with the death of [Inaudible].
I was bitten by a girl called Diana in nursery school.
My voice broke when Tito died and I first came and Brezhnev went.
For three days there was nothing but classical music on the radio,
which I thought was over doing it; some schools even closed.
Then for a long time, nothing.
As an experiment I took a girl to the movies,
but the film was too good and I got cramps in my hand.
Events accelerated in high school.
It was only a couple of months between the first kiss
and the first frantic fumbling following Andropov,
Cherenkov also checked out.
A couple more weeks and it was [Inaudible] turn,
but I'd rather not go into that.
I first found out about the G spot when [Inaudible] was executed.
[Inaudible] cast new light on my broadening horizons,
luckily the charges were dropped.
Fidel, this I wrote a long time before.
Still waiting.
Our expectations define time, more than the orbit of suns and planets.
If you can look death right in the eye,
if you have no trouble going gently into the good night,
if you take away the fear and horror of death,
what would you write about?
What would you do if you had all the time in the world?
What would even the word "do" mean?
Time for a little [Inaudible].
The devil appears in Ivan Karamazov (ph)
in an old fashioned clothe wearing a huge golden ring and no watch.
For the devil time is relative
or at least not measured in an earthly manner.
In the theory of relativity time is not independent
of space, but united with it.
Einstein was reported to have remarked that he learned more
from Dostoyevsky than from other scientists.
Dostoyevsky work is a quest for a cosmic order
that would not ignore the sufferings of individuals.
But Einstein attempts to find harmony in the universe
on the large scale that would not ignore action on the nano level.
He was known for his fierce resistance to new theories
and quantum mechanics that would imply
that microscopic processes are random.
Einstein's famous remark "God does not play, dies" is an analogy
to Ivan Karmoslov's rejection to any harmony built onto the suffering
of a child, for this would imply that God plays
with the fates of individuals.
And that would be as mentioned earlier a very Greek idea indeed.
Dostoyevsky's clock was ticking in a more Judao Christian manner.
Ivan also complains to Iesha that his mind is too three dimensional.
And he would need to think 4-D to understand divine harmony.
He's too down to earth and does not get time even in his dream;
the devil wears no watch, that kind of a 3D guy,
talking about revolution or space time.
And another quote, who has said to have been both a chronophiliac,
a lover of time and a chronophobiac someone who dreads
to loss of things and time.
Perhaps a good angle on this is that he was a lepidopterist,
a butterfly collector who collects miniature monuments of death.
The main character in Adda, his most complex novel claims I confess I do
not believe in time.
And then goes on about the highest enjoyment of timelessness
and ecstasy and behind the ecstasy a sense of oneness with sun and stone.
A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern.
Navaco's hero negates the future and so does proofs by the way
and embraces the past which equates with death
and conceive eternity as a work of art.
Space is comedy, time is tragedy.
And the suspicious hyphen between them, no he does not
like the idea of space time.
That would be of course tragic comedy.
In Adda, the core of the book,
the texture of time is revealed by the intervals.
Nothing prevents mankind as such from having no future at all.
Either by evolving into a novo [Inaudible]
which will enjoy other variety of being and dreaming,
beyond man's notion of time, or by evolving into a sub-human slime.
I wish to caress time.
I delight essentially in time and its stuff and spread in the fall
of its folds, in the very palpability of its [Inaudible].
Time is written, in [Inaudible] of warm, humid night.
Brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple,
these are faithful time keepers.
And reason corrects the feverish beat.
Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of time is written,
the great gap between the black beats, the tender interval,
the regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea
of measurement.
But in between something like two time lurks.
If my eye tells me something about space,
my ear tells me something about time.
I can listen to time only between stresses.
Listening not to time itself but to the [Inaudible] coursing
through my brain, space is the imposter.
Some critiques may say that this is pseudo-science
and pseudo philosophy, but there's also poetry and science.
[Inaudible] came up with a theory of cosmology selection
to explain the universe not going in -
to explain how the universe got going in time.
He reconceived the universe as if it were some kind of organism.
Everything in the universe is evolving at every scaling
to novelty according to Smolling.
He believes at the quantum level the deeper reality is time
and not space.
I think it likely that space would turn out to be an illusion,
Smolling remarks, a way to organize our impressions of things
on a large scale, but only a rough and emergent way
to see the world as a whole.
And now back to Kafka who writes, by believing passionately
in something we create it.
The non-existence is whatever we have not sufficiently desired,
so lack of existence is lack of desire.
There's a dream equality to the trial, the court itself is not real,
but reactions to the court are real.
The dreams are more or less real
than our daily life depends on the level of desire.
Kafka had dreamt the world that we call real today and we have
to face it on a daily basis.
If you visit the Kafka museum in Prague you will find
that the shop is bigger than the rest of the place.
There is Kafka on everything.
You can even buy Kafka underwear and if you know
that the very image had already been doctored by his publisher back
in the day you may say it's rather Kafka-esque.
Today we even call Kafka-esque stuff that was written before Kafka.
Reality is imprecise said the physicist Werner Heisenberg,
which is rather Kafka-esque coming from an [Inaudible] who was
in charge of Nazi atomic bomb project.
According to Kierkegaard the truth is a trap,
you cannot get it without it getting you.
Newsbore once said that quantum mechanics only makes sense
if you change the meaning of the word understand.
>> Peter Zilahy: Einstein said that the problem
of the now were seriously.
He explained that the experience
of the now means nothing special for man.
Something essentially different from the past and the future
but that this important difference does not
and cannot occur within physics.
That this experience cannot be grasped by science seen
to him a matter of painful, but inevitable regret.
Physical theories do not privilege now.
Physics tells us that everything that will ever happen
in the universe has already happened.
Dostoyevsky writes [Inaudible] last night
in which each moment stretches into eternity.
And now one paragraph, and I know -
I was a virgin but it didn't bother me.
I didn't have a clue.
The world was black and white.
You could watch it on TV.
It's still in front of me, extra time in the whole Argentina final,
the link up of the bother [Inaudible] the death of the king.
I didn't know who Elvis was,
but my dad was [Inaudible] The gas explosion
in [Inaudible] the volcanic clouds over Mt. St. Helen's,
the Hungarians space flight
and the Rubik Cube world championship in Budapest.
Sports were exciting in black and white.
During a boxing match you had to count the number
of strips on the guys socks.
I even remember how many strips my first date had,
not sure about the color of the eyes.
I see her in black and white.
After the first kiss my parents bought a colored TV and it turned
out that the Dutch are orange, the Italians are blue
and there are green and red devils.
Only the Germans remain black and white
as if they were being punished.
The country was split into two as well, almost felt sorry for them.
What we think and what we know about the universe has changed
through centuries and change the same way in the future.
Today people believe in space ship
and that's what they expect appearing in the sky,
and not Zeus appearing as an eagle.
Science has historically taken the physical world to be
out there separate from us and it's not surprising
that it has not succeeded in describing consciousness.
The outside world cannot be separated
from the experience we have of it.
Consciousness appears to be a construction like virtual reality.
It's an illusion but no less real for that.
There is still a real world
but the two natures hidden behind the illusion,
what we call real is the illusion we most believe in.
Ludwig Wittgenstein while he was a professor at Cambridge
at Trinity College once wondered in front
of his students why do people say it was natural to say the sun revolved
around the earth, for which one student answered,
"Because it looked like that".
To which Wittgenstein replies, "And how would it look
if it was the other way around"?
All right.
I can cut it short, do we have five minutes?
Okay, I do a little more reading.
When my grandfather was the same age as me,
[Inaudible] showed the heir apparent,
fait brought the failed student and the future emperor together.
The meeting brought immortality to both and death,
they did not know each other
and possibly they exchanged a look, how do you do.
The princette and the prince, the prince and the pauper.
One thing is certain they both heard the shots.
Since then in the depths of parks [Inaudible] prince
of statues are shooting are France Ferdinand statues.
The trench warfare of [Inaudible] Prince of Streets
with France Ferdinand avenues.
You can't battle over memorial plaques, museums, medals, films,
in Sarajevo they took down the statue of the crown prince,
his death which gave millions a cause to die
for was the crowning achievement of his life.
The first world war began as a feud.
When my grandfather was the same age as me,
his fate crossed that of another.
Both men were called up as volunteers
into the imperial and royal army.
Both were sent to the southern front
and during the Russian offensive, both to Galicia.
Both distinguished themselves, [Inaudible]
and his company captured an 18 member strong Russian union,
while during a surprise attack my grandfather received 21 shell
fragments and a bunch of medals.
When they wanted to amputate his leg he pulled a gun on the surgeon
and ordered him out of the operating room.
Within a year they were both taken prisoner and both loss consciousness
in the middle of hand to hand combat.
They wake up in hospital
and in their fevers they both haunted by an earlier trauma.
My grandfather thinks they want to amputate his leg,
while JB accuses the saint hanging above his bed
of trying to steal his clothes.
After several failed attempts of fleeing,
the revolution catches up with them in Russia.
[Inaudible] is caught by the Bolsheviks and is enlisted
in the international brigade.
While lying next to his Russian wife he suddenly realizes the meaning
of historical inevitability.
I hate to think what might have happened had my grandfather ended
up in the hands of the Bolsheviks.
In the hospital where they're lives ended before the century had come
to an end.
The century in which everything was stood on its head.
Tito's leg is amputated and somebody steals my grandfather's clothes.
The little differences are crucial
as in our everyday moves, as in genocide.
Kane and Abel, Serbs and Croats, Shiites and [Inaudible],
the more similar you are the more you look at the differences.
What bothers us is the similarity without union.
Our main problem is not that we are too different,
but that we are too similar.
We are all limited similarly.
It is our limitations that connects us,
and what connects us also separates us.
So going back to the banana,
it is all about how we organize our limitations.
In politics and science and in the arts as well.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> Peter Zilahy: Just before the Q & A I would like to mention
that there's a - apart from the million quotes that I used
in this book, I also used a very nice book of a friend of mind
for the science parts, Christopher Potter, How to Make a Human Being;
I just wanted to make this acknowledgement.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
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