"Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or in natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression--in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so."
I was pretty good at math growing up. I enjoyed the satisfying feeling of solving problems, which came both from unraveling series of little puzzles and from knowing that you could place trust in the correlation between problem and answer.
As I got to my late teenage years, however, I starting veering more toward my (I believe) destined career as a writer and humanist and fell slowly into that nefarious disciplinary trap that tricks humanists into not only saying things like "I'm not really a numbers person" but also believing it. I used math often in life, of course, but didn't really think of it as such, and gradually the equations, terminology, and methods slipped away until the math section of the GRE I took before grad school felt like indecipherable gibberish. I was awed and fascinated by one of the other PhD students in my Comparative Literature cohort who had studied mathematics as an undergraduate. She's now doing work that connects humanistic thought to artificial intelligence. How thrilling!
I still harbor an underlying desire to refresh my memory of math and then go farther than my leaving-off point, especially as I now observe my own child's enjoyment of numbers and their (for now) straightforward beauty in elementary-level arithmetic. That is likely one of the reasons that I so deeply enjoyed The Housekeeper and the Professor, a novel by Yoko Ogawa translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. As one of the blurbs in the book's description points out, it's an "achingly beautiful story about family, memory, and math."
Because the book itself is slim and economical in its storytelling, I finished it quickly in just a few hours. However, its effects have lingered in my mind much longer, tugging at me from different places in quiet moments of my day. Ogawa tells a retrospective story that captures an unusual but tender, loving friendship between a single mother and her 10-year old son and the aging professor she cares for as a housekeeper. The driving obstacle of the plot is that this brilliant mathematician has a debilitating 80-minute limit to his short-term memory due to brain trauma from a car accident.
While certainly short-term memory limits are not that unusual as plot points go (one of my favorites is the movie 50 First Dates), Ogawa is masterful in giving the device new life through the vehicles of mathematics and caretaking. Her warm, accessible treatment of the beauty of numbers and equations turns what can seem cold and unreachable to some into something luminous and inviting. The quotidian conflicts these three characters encounter develop and resolve sparingly yet with understated emotional depth that leaves a long, gentle aftertaste after the last page.
"I uncovered propositions that existed out there long before we were born. It's like copying truths from God's notebook, though we aren't always sure where to find his notebook or when it will be open."
One of my favorite writers of all time, Jorge Luis Borges, almost exclusively wrote short fiction because he believed that you did not have to write long novels in order to tell stories laden with meaning. As a result each of his sentences is packed full with treasures that the reader must linger over, unpack, and examine. While stylistically Ogawa's writing is more minimalist than that of Borges, I am delighted to find another writer who similarly finds ways to make a small story feel epic and significant. Is it a coincidence that Borges was also fascinated with mathematics and its relationship to storytelling and experience?
The Housekeeper and the Professor was a delight. It was a touching foray through a small but infinitely impactful period of time in the lives of three unlikely friends that has reawakened my interest in mathematics while leading me to reflect with different eyes on the daily relationships in which I find myself entangled. Maybe I'll pull out that old Algebra book I stashed in the garage.
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