It’s ineffable
Crowley had said, That’s lunatic.
No, said Aziraphale, it’s ineffable.
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One of the themes in this book is that quantum mechanics doesn’t deserve the connotation of spookiness, in the sense of some ineffable mystery that it is beyond the human mind to comprehend. Quantum mechanics is amazing; it is novel, profound, mind-stretching, and a very different view of reality from what we’re used to. Science is like that sometimes. But if the subject seems difficult or puzzling, the scientific response is to solve the puzzle, not to pretend it’s not there. There’s every reason to think we can do that for quantum mechanics just like any other physical theory.
“you can’t start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.”
“ah,” aziraphale had said, “that’s the good bit. the lower you start, the more opportunities you have.”
crowley had said, that’s lunatic.
no, said aziraphale, it’s ineffable.
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Introduction
The common view that equates the upper classes with individualism obscures the fundamental cohesion found in the great families. The idea of grand-bourgeois individualism is all the more misleading in that this individualism is only, in its manifestations, the transliteration of the habits of the group. By its own social magic, the haut bourgeois is so well adapted to the world in which he lives, that being himself is sufficient to meet the requirements of circumstance and of other people, in the ineffable sense of the achievement of being and of irreducible individuality.
The words used to describe it—despair, fear, anxiety, obsession—do so little to communicate it. Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.For a moment, you think you’re better. You’ve just had a successful train of thought, with an engine and a caboose and everything. Your thoughts. Authored by you. And then you feel a wave of nausea, a fist clenching from within your rib cage, cold sweat hot forehead you’ve got it it’s already inside of you crowding out everything else taking you over and it’s going to kill you and eat its way out of you and then in a small voice, half strangled by the ineffable horror, you barely squeeze out the words you need to say. “I’m in trouble, Mom. Big trouble.”
Teddy told me once, “What your sound is, is a feeling. That’s it. And that’s a world above everything else.” I remember saying, “What’s the feeling?” I was writing about love. I was singing with a little bit of a growl. We were rockin’ hard on the guitars with some real blues bass lines. So I was thinking Teddy might say, you know, “taking a girl home from a bar” or “speeding with the top down,” or something like that. Something fun, maybe, and a little dangerous. But he just said, “It’s ineffable. If I could define it, I wouldn’t have any use for it.” That really stuck with me.
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