The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The novel ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark has been on my bookshelf at home for many years. I bought it and read it when I was a student. I suppose I did so because I heard friends of mine who were studying English (including Ali Smith – see here for my relations with her) praising it. I do not know how much I liked it at the time. Now, for reasons not worth relating here, I took it off the shelf and opened it. I started reading a little and then could not stop until I had finished it. I had the strange impression that I liked the book much better and laughed a lot more than than the first time. Is this true or is it just my memory failing with increasing age? Now I am considering the possibility that among all novels by Scottish writers it is the one I like the best. What are other possible contenders for this role? The one which occurs to me is ‘Lanark’ by Alasdair Gray. I read it with admiration as a student. In a way Gray is to Glasgow as Joyce is to Dublin although I would not think of regarding Gray as being on the same level as Joyce. I once met Gray personally. The Aberdeen University Creative Writing Group invited him and Jim Kelman (who years later won the Booker Prize) to Aberdeen to give a reading. They came on the train from Glasgow and presumably consumed alcohol continuously during the whole journey. At any rate they were both very drunk when they arrived, whereby Gray appeared a bit less intoxicated than Kelman. I had no particular interest in Kelman; Gray was the one who interested me. I cannot remember much about our conversation, except that he pronounced ‘Proust’ incorrectly. I am not sure if that was ignorance or provocation. It was probably the latter. I have not read Lanark again since then and I think my copy did not survive my moves since then. I do not know what my impression would be if I started reading Lanark again but my intuition tells me that it would not captivate me like Miss Jean Brodie. This is because of the way I have changed over the past almost forty years.

As the title suggests the novel ‘The prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ is dominated by one character. She is strong and fascinating but it is wise to be cautious of having too much admiration for her. This is made clear at the latest by her professed admiration for Mussolini. (The novel is set in the years leading up to the Second World War.) She is a teacher at a private school, her pupils being girls of under the age of twelve. A group of these girls from one year come together to form ‘the Brodie set’. They are brought together not by any similarities between them but by their bond to Jean Brodie. This also keeps them together for the rest of their time at school. She is regarded by most of the teachers at the conventional school as too progressive and the headmistress is keen to find a reason to get rid of her. Eventually she succeeds in doing so. I cannot see Jean Brodie as a model for a teacher. She hatches out schemes to allow her pupils to avoid the work they should be doing and to listen to the stories she tells them. She has very definite ideas, for instance as to the relative importance of subjects: art first, philosophy second, science third. My ordering would be: science first, art second, philosophy third. The book is often very funny but I think there is also a lot in it which is very serious. Apart from the content, the use of language is very impressive. I enjoyed trying to imagine what it means for a jersey to be ‘a dark forbidding green’. There is even a little mathematics, although that is a subject which Jean Brodie has little liking for. Concerning the conflict of Miss Brodie with the Kerr sisters we read, ‘Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides’. For me this is one of those few books which is able to bring some movement into my usual routine. I watched a documentary about Muriel Spark herself, which is also very interesting. Maybe I will soon read another of her novels. ‘Aiding and Abetting’ has also found its way from my distant past onto my bookshelf but I am not sure it will be the next one I read.

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Advances in the treatment of lung cancer

I enjoy going to meetings of the Mainzer Medizinische Gesellschaft [Mainz Medical Society] but they have have been in digital form for a long time now due to the pandemic. Recently I attended one of these (digital) events on the subject of the development of the treatment of lung cancer. There was a talk by Roland Buhl about general aspects of the treatment of lung cancer and one by Eric Roessner on surgery in lung cancer. Before going further I want to say something about my own relation to cancer. When I was a schoolchild my mother got cancer. In Orkney, where we lived, there was no specialist care available and for that reason my mother spent a lot of time in the nearest larger hospital, Foresterhill in Aberdeen. During my first year as a student in Aberdeen there was an extended period where I visited my mother in hospital once a week. I was not intellectually engaged in this issue and I do not even know what type of cancer my mother had. I seem to remember that at one point her spleen was removed, which suggests to me that it was a cancer of the immune system, lymphoma or leukemia. After some months my mother had reached the point where no useful further therapy was possible. She returned to Orkney and died a few months later. I must admit that at that time I was also not very emotionally involved and that I was not a big help to my mother in those troubled times for her. While I was a student I was friends with two other students, Lynn Drever and Sheila Noble. At one time I frequently heard them talking about a book called the ‘The Women’s Room’ by Marilyn French. I was curious to find out more but they did not seem keen to talk about the book. After the end of my studies I read the book myself. It is a feminist book and I think a good and interesting one. The reason I mention Marilyn French here is another good and interesting book she wrote. It is called ‘A Season in Hell’, which is a translation of the Rimbaud title ‘Une saison en enfer’. In the book she gives a vivid inside view of her own fight with a cancer of the oesophagus. After very aggressive treatments she was eventually cured of her cancer but the side effects had caused extensive damage to her body (collapse of the spine, kidney failure etc.). Parallel to the story of her own illness she portrays that of a friend who had lung cancer and died from it quite quickly. This book gave me essential insights into what cancer means, objectively and subjectively, and what lung cancer means. My own most intensive contact with cancer was in 2013 when my wife was diagnosed with colon cancer. I do not want to give any details here except the essential fact that she was cured by an operation and that the disease has shown no signs of returning. Motivated by this history I recently did something which I would probably otherwise not have done, namely to have a coloscopy. I believe that this is really a valuable examination for identifying and preventing colon cancer and that it was my responsibility to do it, although I was anxious about how it would be. In fact I found the examination and the preparations for it less unpleasant than I expected and it was nice to have a positive result. It is also nice to know that according to present recommendations I only need to repeat the examination ten years from now. A few years ago in the month of November my then secretary got a persistent cough. After some time she went to the doctor and was very soon diagnosed with lung cancer. She only survived until February. I attended a small meeting organised by her family in her memory and there I learned some more details of the way her disease progressed.

Now let me come back to the lectures. The first important message is nothing new: most cases of lung cancer are caused by smoking. Incidentally, the secretary I mentioned above smoked a lot when she was young but gave up smoking very many years ago. The message is: if you smoke then from the point of view of lung cancer it is good to stop. However it may not be enough. In the first lecture it was emphasized that the first step these days when treating lung cancer is to do a genetic analysis to look for particular mutations since this can help to decide what treatments have a chance of success. In the case of the secretary the doctors did look for mutations but unfortunately she belonged to the majority where there were no mutations which would have been favourable for her prognosis under a suitable treatment. In the most favourable cases there are possibilities available such as targeted therapies (e.g. kinase inhibitors) and immunotherapies. These lectures are intended to be kept understandable for a general audience and accordingly the speaker did not provide many details. This means that since I have spent time on these things in the past I did not learn very much from that lecture. The contents of the second lecture, on surgical techniques, were quite unfamiliar to me. The main theme was minimally invasive surgery which is used in about 30% of operations for lung cancer in Germany. It is rather restricted to specialized centres due to the special expertise and sophisticated technical equipment required. It was explained how a small potential tumour in the lung can be examined and removed. In general the tumour will be found by imaging techniques and the big problem in a operation is to find it physically. We saw a film where an anaesthetised patient is lying on an operating table while the huge arms of a mobile imaging device do a kind of dance around them. The whole thing looks very futuristic. After this dance the device knows where the tumour is. It then computes the path to be taken by a needle to reach the tumour from outside. A laser projects a red point on the skin where the needle is to be inserted. The surgeon puts the point of the needle there and then rotates it until another red point coincides with the other end. This fixes the correct direction and he can then insert the needle. At the end of the needle there is a microsurgical device which can be steered from a computer. Of course there is also a camera which provides a picture of the situation on the computer screen. The movements of the surgeon’s hands are translated into movements of the device at the end of the needle. These are scaled but also subject to noise filtering. In other words, if the surgeon’s hands shake the computer will filter it out. There is also a further refinement of this where a robot arm connected to the imagining device automatically inserts the needle in the right way. The result of all this technology is that, for instance, a single small metastasis in the lung can be removed very effectively. One of the most interesting things the surgeon said concerned the effects of the pandemic. One effect has been that people have been more reluctant to go to the doctor and that it has taken longer than it otherwise would have for lung cancer patients to go into hospital. The concrete effect of this on the work of the surgeon is that he sees that the tumours he has to treat are on average in a more advanced state than they were than before the pandemic. Putting this together with other facts leads to the following stark conclusion which it is worth to state clearly, even if it is sufficiently well known to anyone who is wiling to listen. The reluctance of people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 has led to a considerable increase in the number of people dying of cancer.

The age of innocence

In a previous post I talked about my search for authors to read who are new to me. Now, following one suggestion there, I have read ‘The age of innocence’ by Edith Wharton. I did appreciate the book a lot. What are the reasons? The ‘psychological subtlety’ I mentioned in my previous post is also very much present in the novel. The society portrayed in the book is that of a small group of rich and elitist people in the New York of the late nineteenth century. In that group people tend to avoid talking about the things which are really important to them. This means that they have to be good at communicating without words. The novel is very successful in presenting the resulting non-verbal communication. Another aspect of the book I appreciate is the use of language. There are often phrases for which I felt the necessity to pause and savour them. The book is also rich in humour and irony.

What are the main themes of the novel? One is a certain society. We see a small number of people who are very rich, know each other well and are very resistent to letting anyone else into their circle. In some ways it is similar to the aristocracy in Europe at that time except that it lacks the long historical tradition and the codification of its rules. It consists mainly of people without special talents or great intelligence. In this society people are known because they are known and because certain other people in the same circle accept them. It reminds me a bit of the ‘celebrities’ of the present day who have similar characteristics including in many cases a lack of any obvious talent other than self-presentation. The main difference is that there are more chances to enter the circle of the celebrities. The two main characters in the book, Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, are exceptions to the general rule. The Countess Olenska, as she is usually referred to in the book, comes from the small society described there but married a Polish count. She left him due to his bad treatment of her and came back to New York. What this treatment was is never really specified. In fact, it is not only the characters in the book who do not say openly what they mean. The author also presents many things in a way which is more suggestive than specific. The case of what really happened between the Countess Olenska and her husband is a good example but there are many more. In a way I found it a little frustrating to feel that I was waiting for information which never came. On the other hand I find that this allusive style has its own attraction. For me the Countess Olenska, who often ignores the strict rules of the society she is living in and is clearly highly intelligent and thoughtful, is the most attractive character in the novel. Newland Archer is the central character in the book in the sense that the story is told from his point of view, although in the third person. In his own way he questions the standards of the society around him. He often has impulses to act in a positive way but seems incapable of following them. He marries May Welland, a cousin of the Countess Olenska, who is the ideal partner for him in terms of her social standing and physical appearance. May is extremely conventional and not very intelligent. Her husband soon sees her as stupid, although in the end she has enough cunning to trick him and, in a sense, triumph over her clever cousin. There is a great deal of erotic tension between Archer and the Countess but, in the abstract and not only the literal sense, the orgasm never comes. May is treated cruelly in the text. Although it happens without any further comment the fact that she is given a painting of sheep as a present is a good example.

The two main characters are very different but in a way they mirror each other. I wonder to what extent the Countess Olenska is an image of the author and to what extent Newland Archer might be a better one. For me the most interesting aspect of the novel is what it has to say about love. I found the ending, whose content I will not reveal here, striking.

After I finished this post I remembered a question which I had asked myself and forgotten. This concerns the question of the relation of Marcel Proust, an author I much admire, to Edith Wharton. After all they did live in the same place at the same time. A short search led me to the following interesting answer.

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Looking for a good read

In the recent past my reading has mostly been limited to mathematics and other scientific subjects. I have harldly found time to read literature. I have also tended to read only authors I already knew I liked. A few weeks ago I was in a second hand book shop and tried to do something against these tendencies. One of the things I did was to buy a book called ’50 Great Short Stories’ edited by Milton Crane. My motivation was less a desire to read short stories than to get to know authors I might like to read more of. Of course it was clear to me that reading a short story by an author may not give a very useful impression of what a novel by that author might be like. I was disappointed to find that there were few of the short stories in the book I liked very much. Those I did not appreciate much included ones by a number of authors who have written books I like very much, for instance E. M. Forster, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. I long time ago I was keen on Aldous Huxley and read most of his books. This collection contains a short story by him ‘The Gioconda Smile’, which I am sure I had read before. I was not very enthusiastic about it this time but at least I did find it good. In the end there were only two stories in the collection which were by authors I had not previously read and which I liked enough so as to want to read more. The first is ‘The Other Two’ by Edith Wharton and I found the psychological subtlety of the writing attractive. I read a little about the author, who I found out has often been compared with Henry James. My superficial reading on this subject indicates to me that Wharton might have some of those qualities of James which I like while lacking some of those I dislike. Thus I am now motivated to read more of Wharton. The other story which made a very positive impression on me was ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor. I find it difficult to pin down what it was that I liked so much about it. In fact I think both aspects of the form and content were involved. I think a part of it was the impression of reading ‘something very different’. Here again I want to read more.

The other book I bought on that day was a collection of writings of Jean Paul, ‘Die wunderbare Gesellschaft in der Neujahrsnacht’. Unfortunately I found it completely inaccessible for me and I only read a small part of it.

Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci and The Vaccine

 

I have just read the book ‘The Vaccine’ by Joe Miller, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci. More precisely, I read the German version which is called ‘Projekt Lightspeed’ but I am assuming that the contents are not too different. The quality of the language in the version I read is high and I conclude from this that it is likely that both the quality of the language in the original and the quality of the translation are high. Miller is a journalist while Şahin and Türeci are the main protagonists of the story told in the book. It is the story of how the husband and wife team of researchers developed the BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19, a story which I found more gripping than fictional thrillers. The geographical centre of the story is Mainz. Şahin and Türeci live there and the headquarters of BioNTech, the company they founded, is also there. In fact when I moved to Mainz in 2013 I lived just a couple of hundred metres from what is now the area occupied by the BioNTech. Since I was interested in biotechnology the building was interesting for me. My first encounter with Şahin was a public lecture he gave about cancer immunotherapy in February 2015 and which I wrote about here. I heard him again in a keynote talk he gave at a conference at EMBL about cancer immunotherapy in February 2017. I was interested to hear his talk but it seems that it did not catch my attention since I did not mention it in the account I wrote of that meeting. One of the last lectures I attended live before the pandemic made such things impossible was at the university medical centre here in Mainz on 13th February 2020. Şahin was the chairman. The speaker was Melanie Brinkmann and the subject the persistence of herpes viruses in the host. I did not detect any trace of the theme COVID-19 in the meeting that day except for the fact that the speaker complained that she was getting asked so many questions on that subject on a daily basis. Later on she attained some public prominence in Germany in the discussion of measures against the pandemic. The book is less about the science of the subject than about the human story involved. I have no doubt that the scientific content is correct but it is not very deep. That is not the main subject of the book.

I now come to the story itself. Şahin and Türeci are both Germans whose parents came to Germany from Turkey. They studied medicine and they met during the practical part of their studies. They were both affected by seeing patients dying of cancer while medicine was helpless to prevent it. They decided they wanted to change the situation and have pursued that goal with remarkable consistency since then. They later came to the University of Mainz. They founded a biotechnology company called Ganymed producing monoclonal antibodies which was eventually sold for several hundred million Euros. They then went on to found BioNTech with the aim of using mRNA technology for cancer immunotherapy. An important role was played by money provided by the Strüngmann brothers. They had become billionaires through their company Hexal which sold generic drugs. They were relatively independent of the usual mechanisms of the financial markets and this was a big advantage for BioNTech. (A side remark: I learned from the book that the capital NT in the middle of the company name stands for ‘new technology’.) In early January 2020 Şahin foresaw the importance of COVID-19 and immediately began a project to apply the mRNA technology of BioNTech to develop a vaccine. The book is the story of many of the obstacles which he and Türeci had to overcome to attain this goal. In the US the vaccine is associated with the name Pfizer and it is important to mention at this point what the role of Pfizer was, namely to provide money and logistics. The main ideas came from Şahin and Türeci. Of course no important scientific development is due to one or two people alone and there are many contributions. In this case a central contribution came from Katalin Karikó.

How does the BioNTech vaccine work? The central idea of an mRNA vaccine is as follows. The aim is to introduce certain proteins into the body which are similar to ones found in the virus. The immune response to these proteins will then also act against the virus. What is actually injected is mRNA and that is then translated into the desired proteins by the cellular machinery. To start with the sequences of relevant proteins must be identified and corresponding mRNA molecules produced in vitro based on a DNA template. The RNA does not only contain the code for the protein but also extra elements which influence the way in which it behaves or is treated within a cell. In addition it is coated with some lipids which protect it from degradation by certain enzymes and help it to enter cells. Karikó played a central role in the development of this lipid technology. After the RNA has been injected it has to get into cells. A good target cell type are the dendritic cells which take up material from their surroundings by macropinocytosis. They then produce proteins based on the RNA template, cut them up into small peptides and display these on their surface. They also move to the lymph nodes. There they can present the antigens to T cells, which get activated. For T cells to get activated a second signal is also necessary and it is fortunate that mRNA can provide such a signal – in the language of vaccines it shows a natural adjuvant activity. In many more popular accounts of the role of the immune system in the vaccination against COVID-19 antibodies are the central subject. In fact according to the book many vaccine developers are somewhat fixated on antibodies and underestimate the role of T cells. There Şahin had to do a lot of convincing. It is nevertheless the case that antibodies are very important in this story and there is one point which I do not understand. Antibodies are produced by B cells and in order to do so they must be activated by the antigen. For this to happen the antigen must be visible outside the cells. So how do proteins produced in dendritic cells get exported so that B cells can see them?

I admire Şahin and Türeci very much. This has two aspects. The first is their amazing achievement in producing the vaccine against COVID-19 in record time. However there is also another aspect which I find very important. It is related to what I have learned about these two people from the book and from other sources. It has to do with a human quality which I find very important and which I believe is not appreciated as it should be in our society. This is humility. In their work Şahin and Türeci have been extremely ambitious but it seems to me that in their private life they have remained humble and this makes them an example to be followed.

 

Lisa Eckhart and her novel Omama

Lisa Eckhart is a young Austrian known for a type of comedy which is called Kabarett in German-speaking countries. Characteristic features of this form of entertainment are black humour and political content. In her stage performances she likes to break taboos and flout political correctness. I first happened to see her on TV and I was immediately interested by her performance. Since then I saw her on stage in Mainz, shortly before COVID-19 made going to the theatre impossible for some time. I had also previously seen another Austrian proponent of the same type of performance who I appreciate a lot, Josef Hader, on stage in Mainz. Recently Eckhart published her first novel, ‘Omama’, and I now read it. In her stage performances there are some obstacles to understanding. The first is that her humour relies essentially on ambiguity. The second is that the whole thing goes very fast. The third is that she likes to mix in quite a lot of Austrian dialect. I thought that if there is some similarity between the contents of the novel and that of the performances it might help me to understand more. After all, a novel can be read at the speed the reader desires and it is possible to take time to investigate anything which is unclear. Recently there has been some public controversy in Germany around Eckhart. She has been accused of antisemitism, which I do not believe is justified. In August she was supposed to give a reading from her novel at a literature festival in Hamburg. Her invitation was withdrawn because the organisers were afraid that her appearance there might lead to violent protests by left-wing groups which the police would not be able to control. I find the fact that such a thing can happen a disgrace. What happened to free speech? Later the organisers renewed the invitation in a modified form but this time Eckhart refused, which I can understand. On Wednesday evening I went to read the last few pages of the book but before I got properly started I was called by my wife, who was watching TV. When I came into the living room I understood why she had called me since Lisa Eckhart was on the screen. She was participating in a program on the channel ARTE on the subject of decadence. The word decadence was one which had not gone through my mind for many years but it interested me a long time ago. At that time I read ‘A Rebours’ by Huysmans, ‘Le Soleil des Morts’ by Mauclair and, of course, ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’. Looking back it is hard to imagine how different my world was then, a fact that has less to do with a change in the world than with a change in myself. In any case, when I think about it, it is clear that we are now living in a period of decadence.

Let me finally come to the novel itself. It struck me as a curate’s egg. Parts of it are very good. There are passages where I appreciate the humour and I find the author’s use of language impressive. On a more global level I do not find the text attractive. It is the story of the narrator’s grandmother. (Here is a marginal note for the mathematical reader. Walter Rudin, known for his analysis textbooks, was born in Austria. In  a biographical text about him I read that one of his grandmothers was referred to as ‘Omama’.) The expressions are often very crude, with a large dose of excrement and other unpleasant aspects of the human body, and many elements of the story seem to me pointless. There is no single character in the novel who I find attractive. This is in contrast to the novel of Banine which I previously wrote about, where I find the narrator attractive. That novel also contains plenty of crude expressions but there are more than enough positive things to make up for it. I would like to emphasize that just because I find a novel unpleasant to read it does not mean I judge it negatively. A book which I found very unpleasant was ‘Alexis ou le traite du vain combat’ by Marguerite  Yourcenar but in that case my conclusion was that it could only be so unpleasant because it was so well written. I do not have the same feeling about Omama. As to the insight which I hoped I might get for Eckhart’s stage performances I have not seen it yet, but maybe I will notice a benefit the next time I experience a stage performance by her.

The plague priest of Annaberg

I find accounts of epidemics, whether documentary or fictional, fascinating. I appreciated texts of this kind by Camus (La Peste), Defoe (Journal of the Plague Year) and Giono (Le Hussard sur le Toit). This interest is reflected in a number of posts in this blog, for instance this one on the influenza pandemic of 1918. At the moment we all have the opportunity to experience what a pandemic is like, some of us more than others. In such a situation there are two basic points of view, depending on whether you see the events as concerning other people or whether you feel that you are yourself one of the potential victims. The choice of one of these points of view probably does not depend mainly on the external circumstances, except in extreme cases, and is more dependent on individual psychology. I do feel that the present COVID-19 pandemic concerns me personally. This is because Germany, where I live, is one of the countries with the most total cases at the moment, after China, Italy, USA and Spain. Every evening I study the new data in the Situation Reports of the WHO. The numbers to be found in the Internet are sometimes quite inconsistent. This can be explained by the time delays in reporting, the differences in the definitions of classes of infected individuals used by different people or organizations and unfortunately in some cases by poltically motivated lies. My strategy for extracting real information from this data is to stick to one source I believe to be competent and trustworthy (the WHO) and to concentrate on the relative differences between one day and the next and one country and another in order to be able to see trends. I find interesting the extent to which diagrams coming from mathematical models have found their way into the media reporting of this subject. Prediction is a high priority for many people at the moment.

Motivated by this background I started to read a historical novel by Gertrud Busch called ‘Der Pestpfarrer von Annaberg’ [the plague priest of Annaberg] which I got from my wife. The main character in the book is a person who really existed but many of the events reported there are fictional. Annaberg is a town in Germany, in the area called ‘Erzgebirge’, the literal English translation of whose name is ‘Ore mountains’. This mountain range lies on the border between Germany and the Czech republic. People were attracted there by the discovery of valuable mineral deposits. In particular, starting in the late fifteenth century, there was a kind of gold rush there (Berggeschrey), with the difference that the metal which caused it was silver rather than gold. My wife was born and grew up in that area and for this reason I have spent some time in Annaberg and other places close to there. The narrator of the book is Wolfgang Uhle, a priest in the Erzgebirge in the sixteenth century active in Annaberg during the outbreak of plague there. In fact in the end only a small part of the book concerns the plague itself but I am glad I read it. The author has created a striking picture of the point of view of the narrator, at a great distance from the modern world.

During Uhle’s first period as a priest there was a fire in a neighbouring village which destroyed many houses. He saved the life of a young girl, in fact a small child, who was playing in a burning house. Much to the amusement of the adults the girl said she would marry him when she was old enough. In fact she meant it very seriously and when she was old enough it did happen that after some difficulties she got engaged to him. The tragedy of Wolfgang Uhle is that he had a temper which was sometimes uncontrollable. Before the marriage took place he once got into a rage due to the disgraceful behaviour of the judge in his village. Unfortunately at that moment he was holding a large hammer in his hand. A young girl had asked him if a stone she had brought him was valuable. He had some knowledge of geology and he intended to use the hammer to break open the stone and find out more about its composition. In his sudden rage he hit the judge on the head with the hammer and killed him. He went home in a state of shock without any plan but his housekeeper brought him to flee over the border into Bohemia. He was sentenced to death in absentia and hid in the woods for five years. The girl who he was engaged to repudiated him, stamped on his engagement ring and quickly married another man. He partly lived from what he could find in nature, living at first in a cave. Later he started working together with a charcoal burner. I learned something about what that industry was like when I visited those woods myself a few years ago. Eventually he revealed his identity and had to leave.

In the woods he met a man who had got lost and asked him the way. The man wanted to go to Bärenstein, which is the town where my wife spent her childhood. He agreed to show him the way. The man told him that the plague had broken out in Annaberg and that the town was desperately searching for a priest to tend to the spiritual needs of the sick. Uhle decided that he should volunteer, despite the danger. He saw this as God giving him a chance to make amends for his crime. He wrote letters to the local prince and the authorities of the town. The prince agreed to grant him a pardon in return for his service as priest for the people infected with the plague. He then went to Annaberg and tended to the sick, without regard to the danger he was putting himself in. There is not much description of the plague itself in the book. There is a key scene where he meets his former love on her deathbed and it turns out that she had continued to love him and felt guilty for having abandoned him. Uhle survives the plague, gets a new position as a priest, marries and has children. This book was different from what I expected when I started reading it. Actually the fact that it was so different from things I otherwise encounter made it worthwhile for me to read it.

Sard’s theorem

I have recently been reading Smoller’s book ‘Shock Waves and Reaction-Diffusion Equations’ as background for a course on reaction-diffusion equations I am giving. In this context I came across the subject of Sard’s theorem. This is a result which I had more or less forgotten about although I was very familiar with it while writing my PhD thesis more than thirty years ago. I read about it at that time in Hirsch’s book ‘Differential Topology’, which was an important reference for my thesis. Now I had the idea that this might be something which could be useful for my present research, without having an explicit application in mind. It is a technique which has a different flavour from those I usually apply. The theorem concerns a (sufficiently) smooth mapping between -dimensional manifolds. It is a local result so that it is a enough to concentrate on the case where the domain of the mapping is a suitable subset of Euclidean space and the range is the same space. We define a regular value of to be a point such that the derivative of is invertible at each point with . A singular value is a point of the range which is not a regular value. The statement of Sard’s theorem is that the set of singular values has measure zero. By covering the domain with a countable family of cubes we can reduce the proof to the case of a cube. Next we write the cube as the union of cubes, by dividing each side of the original cube into equal parts. We need to estimate the contribution to the measure of   from each of the small cubes. Suppose that is a singular value, so that there is a point where the derivative of is not invertible with . Consider now the contribution to the measure of the image from the cube in which lies. On that cube can be approximated by its first order Taylor polynomial at . The image is contained in the product of a subset of a hyperplane whose volume is of the order and an interval whose length is of the order for an which we can choose as small as desired. Adding over the at most cubes which contribute gives a bound for the measure of the set of singular values of order . Since was arbitrary this completes the proof. In words we can describe this argument as follows. The volume of the image of a region which intersects the set of singular points under a suitable linear mapping is small compared to the volume of the region itself and the volume of the image under the nonlinear mapping can be bounded by the corresponding quantity for the linear mapping up to an error which is small compared to the volume defined by the linear mapping.

Ernst Jünger

The two German writers I admire most are Ernst Jünger and Hermann Hesse (not necessarily in that order). This might cause some surprise since these two authors are so different. There are, however, some telling similarities. One is that both are appreciated relatively little in their own country and have had a better reception in France. (As some evidence for this I mention that the Magazine Littéraire had a special issue on Hesse (No. 318, February 1994) and that there is an article on Jünger in the issue ‘Ecrire la guerre’ (No. 378, July-August 1999).) Another, which is not unrelated, is that both were individualists who did not fit well into the political categories of their society. In Germany Jünger has a widespread reputation (particularly among people who have not read him) as a Nazi. It is true that he had relations to the party in the very early days but he had sufficient opportunity to regret that later. His book ‘In Stahlgewittern’ was a favourite of Adolf Hitler but an author cannot be held responsible for his readers. This book has more generally been a source of animosity towards Jünger. In this context there is a story which I think is enlightening. Jünger was an officer in the German army which occupied Paris. He attempted to visit André Gide at his home but Gide did not receive him. This was based on prejudice since at that time Gide had read none of Jünger’s books. When he later read ‘In Stahlgewittern’ he called it ‘the best book ever written about war’ and completely changed his attitude to Jünger. Unfortunately, after the first opportunity had been missed, the two never met. (I no longer remember where I read about Gide’s statement and so the quote is only approximate.) I agree with Gide’s judgement on the book. Some people may be put off by the objectivity of the book – this also applies to other writings of Jünger. It does not waste time with general talk about how bad war is. Instead it shows directly how terrible war is for the benefit of those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced it directly.

The book of Jünger which ignited my enthusiasm for his writing is ‘Afrikanische Spiele’. This is a work of fiction but it is based rather closely on Jünger’s own experiences. He was often bored in school and preferred to read adventure stories. For him Africa was the land of adventure and he wanted to go there. He ran away from school and travelled to Verdun, where he enlisted in the Foreign Legion. He was then stationed in Algeria. This was not his real aim and so he deserted and tried to travel further. He was caught and put into prison in solitary confinement. A doctor in the place he was stationed wrote to his father. Since in fact Jünger was not old enough to have joined the foreign legion and had only managed to do so by lying about his age his father was able to get him discharged and took him home. Shortly after he returned the First World War began and Jünger enlisted immediately and had his opportunity for adventure, as related in ‘In Stahlgewittern’. One thing which attracts me to Jüngers writing, in ‘Afrikanische Spiele’ and elsewhere, is the style. At the same time, the content is often remarkable. Here is a striking example. The hero of the book has taken some money with him when he left home. He feels the danger that he might give up and not dare to carry out his plan. To avoid this he takes all the money he has and puts in down a drain in Verdun. In this way he removes the chance of turning back. This reminds me a little of the story of how Nansen became the first to cross the Greenland icecap. He chose the direction of crossing in such a way that failure would have meant almost certain death.

In a previous post I mentioned that I had read a book about Jünger by Banine. I now read her book ‘Rencontres avec Ernst Jünger’. She wrote more than one book about him and I think this is not the same one I read before. The reason is that apart from describing events from the time of the Second World War in Paris she also describes how she visited Jünger in Tübingen after the war. The copy of the book I am reading is from the university library. Interestingly it contains a stamp ‘Don du Gouvernement Français’ [gift of the French government]. It would be interesting to know how that came about. According to the description in the book it was hard for Banine and Jünger to form a warm personal relationship – the positive aspects of their communication during the time in Paris were on a purely intellectual level. It has been a pleasure reading Banine again. She too is a stylist who I appreciate a lot. There are also interesting facts. Banine mentions that Jünger had read neither Proust nor Huxley and that when she gave him their books to read he did not appreciate them. She tells the story of his meeting with Madame Cardot, a Jewish woman who ran a bookshop in Paris throughout the war. The first time he came into her shop (in uniform) the first thing he did was to thank her for having displayed his book ‘Gärten und Strassen’ (in French translation) prominently in her window. This was the start of an unusual friendship. When they met on the street they usually avoiding giving any sign that they knew each other for practical reasons. When they met for the last time it was on the street in July 1944 and Jünger whispered to her ‘in a few weeks you will be rid of us’.

I will mention a passage in ‘Gärten und Strassen’ which particularly struck me and which Banine mentions in her book. In this book Jünger described his experiences during the German invasion of France in the Second World War. This time, in contrast with what happened in the First World War, he was hardly involved in the fighting at all. At one time he was the commanding officer in the town of Laon. Laon has a magnificent gothic cathedral, which I have visited myself. He describes his experience of looking at this cathedral, for whose safety he was responsible at that time, and feeling that this huge building was like a small vulnerable creature. He was successful in preventing treasures from the cathedral being stolen or destroyed, helped by the fact that those who might have done so did not realize how valuable these things were.

Despite my admiration for Jünger’s writings there is one thing which I do not like and which I feel I have to mention. This is a tendency to esotericism which he shows from time to time and which I just try to ignore. Despite this I am sure that I will continue to read Jünger with pleasure in the future.

Cedric Villani’s autobiography

I have just read Cédric Villani’s autobiographical book ‘Théorème Vivant’. I gave the German translation of the book to Eva as a present. I thought it might give her some more insight into what it is like to be a mathematician and give her some fortitude in putting up with a mathematician as a husband. Since I had not read the book before I decided to read it in parallel. I preferred to read the original and so got myself that. With hindsight I do not think it made so much difference that I read it in French instead of German. I think that the book is useful for giving non-experts a picture of the life of a mathematician (and not just that of a mathematician who is as famous as Villani has become). For this I believe that it is useful that the book contains some pieces of mathematical text which are incomprehensible for the lay person and some raw TeX source-code. I think that they convey information even in the absence of an understanding of the content. On the other hand, this does require a high level of tolerance on the part of the reader. Fortunately Eva was able to show this tolerance and I think she did enjoy the book and learn something more about mathematics and mathematicians.

For me the experience was of course different. The central theme of the book is a proof of Villani and Clement Mouhot of the existence of Landau damping, a phenomenon in plasma physics. I have not tried to enter into the details of that proof but it is a subject which is relatively close to things I used to work on in the past and I was familiar with the concept of Landau damping a long time ago. I even invested quite a lot of time into the related phenomenon of the Jeans instability in astrophysics, unfortunately without significant results. Thus I had some relation to the mathematics. It is also the case that I know many of the people mentioned in the book personally. Sometimes when Villani mentions a person without revealing their name I know who is meant. As far as I remember the first time I met Villani was at a conference in the village of Anogia in Crete in the summer of 2001. At that time he struck me as the number one climber of peaks of technical difficulty in the study of the Boltzmann equation. I do not know if at that time he already dressed in the eccentric way he does today. I do not remember anything like that.

For me the book was pleasant to read and entertaining and I can recommend it to mathematicians and non-mathematicians. If I ask myself what I really learned from the book in the end then I am not sure. One thing it has made me think of is how far I have got away from mainstream mathematics. A key element of the book is that the work described there got Villani a Fields medal, the most prestigious of mathematical prizes. These days the work of most Fields medallists is on things to which I do not have the slightest relation. Villani was the last exception to that rule. Of course this is a result of the general fact that communication between different mathematical specialities is so hard. The Fields medal is awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians which takes place every four years. That conference used to be very attractive for me but now I have not been to one since that in 2006 in Madrid and I imagine that I will not go to another. That one was marked by the special excitement surrounding Perelman’s refusal of the Fields medal which he was offered for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Another sign of the change in my orientation is that I am no longer even a member of the American Mathematical Society, probably the most important such society in the world. I will continue to follow my dreams, whatever they may be. Villani is also following his dreams. I knew that he had gone into politics, becoming a member of parliament. I was surprised to learn that he has recently become a candidate for the next election to become mayor of Paris.