Benjamin Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) (NYRB 2020) [IBR2026]

The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck, a world-famous mathematician who revolutionized geometry as no one had since the time of Euclid, who inexplicably gave up mathematics at the height of his international fame, leaving a bewildering legacy that is still sending shockwaves through all branches of his discipline, but which he completely refused to discuss, right up to his death in 2014. Labatut, When We Cease To Understand the World: “The Night Gardener” ch VI A long time ago – back when I didn’t understand the world at all, but assumed that was because I hadn’t seen much of it yet – I read Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a fictionalized biography of Vincent Van Gogh. I was at the time obsessed, as any depressed teenager would be, with…