Place

photo: Francis Levy

Place is something you may tend to take for granted. You’re attracted enough to stay, take turns, snapshot and file your initial perceptions away under “preconceptions.” When you return you see a person, place or thing  that’s in your mind's eye as opposed to reality. The same experience applies to the people in your life. You see them in a certain way—something from which you may occasionally find yourself experiencing pushback e.g. when a child, spouse, friend or lover doesn’t agree with the mnemonic frame in which you’ve put them. They’re no longer the flighty dreamer and resent being patronized as such. Coming back to physical landscapes, you may suddenly realize that the oculus of the Pantheon looks into a void!

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

Siddhartha

 

There is a truth to adolescent angst and alienation. If you walked around with a copy of the New Directions Siddhartha in your back pocket as a gloomy teenager you may be disconcerted to find out you weren’t far off the mark. Whether you’re cremated or buried, you’ll end up alone with no one to help you—even your mother! You start as potential and end in finality, the only saving grace being, you’re no longer there to realize it or care.

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

Easy Travel to Other Planets

Zeno’s paradox proposes foreverness as a condition. Achilles never catches the tortoise, which is a good thing—he’s immortal. All that would be left to do, were he to attain his goal, is die. Seekers of the world rejoice! The romantic aging of the poet and dreamer are unfairly maligned! Easy travel to Other Planets is the title of an almost totally forgotten1981 novel, famous for its opening scene of sex between a woman and a dolphin and for its coining of the term "information sickness."

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

Fusion

photo: Asia Financial

If the Chinese succeed in cracking fusion, the world order will be changed. Once scarcity is no longer the issue, Saudi Arabia will truly become a third world country. It already rivals the Sudan in brutality as the hacking to death of the dissident journalist Jamal Khasgoggi demonstrates. Fusion will be the Ice Age for OPEC countries. Next is light. The closer to the speed of light one travels  the more time slows down—at least according to the notion of "time dilation" in relativity theory. When you return from some Kepler Star 1200 light years from earth, you will have out lived generations of your counterparts back on earth. 

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

Non-existence

You won't have to worry about spheres of influence or something as small as someone not doing what you want. You know how your mood can often depend on that action taken or not taken by someone else. Imagine in 1, 2, 5 or 10 years no longer being, no longer peering out at the world through your eyes, no longer having memories, expectations, hopes flowing through your head! Still despite all the advantages, non-being is a hard idea to swallow. Once you cross the line, there's no going back. One of the many salutary advantages of youth is to make one almost entirely immune to the notion of mortality. It's faint, distant and unbelievable. However, like a cold shower, the unavoidable imminence of the inexplicable lurks irremediably in everyone's future. Even a person who jumps out the window may entertain the notion of a soft landing, but somewhere along the way, they'll no longer be there to notice. 

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star. 

Fear and Trembling

There are three stages of being: reason, intuition and counter intuition which roughly correlate to Kierkegaard's esthetic, moral and religious categories. Kierkegaard, who could have been a great counterintelligence agent, illustrates the religious in Fear and Trembling where he addresses Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, an act which requires the ultimate leap of faith. Such an act can only be described as counterintuitive since no parent sacrifices their child. There are the exceptions you read about where mothers abandon their children. Of course scripture deals with that too in the story of Moses. Counter-intuition also resembles counterintelligence and hermaphroditism. In all of these you play both ends against the middle.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

Deaccessioning the Enlightenment

David Hume (1711-1776)

Erosion of the shoreline is a product of global warming, Coastlines shrink. The same might be said of the Humanist Project which began with Hume, Hobbes and Locke. It's not only Project 2025 and the threat to democracy but the whole notion of education. Rousseau’s Emile (1762) is a broadsheet for “Le Gai Savoir,” the joy of learning which Godard appropriated as the title of his 1969 film. The thrill of Goethe’s Faust is something you might find yourself experiencing in isolation, ditto any number of the classics which themselves depend on an inurement to literature. The great books whuch were once part of the core curriculum constitute a palette. Knowledge has always been a lonely pursuit with its satisfaction deriving from discussions on the way out of the carrel. With AI libraries and dictionaries, the repository of history and language have all been swept up in a maelstrom of data bytes.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star