A Good Review.

I’ve complained about bad reviews more than once, so it’s only fair that I give credit to a good one — namely, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton. The book itself sounds like something I might want to read: William Egginton, a literary scholar at Johns Hopkins, calls this tendency “metaphysical overreach.” His new book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, is a joint biography of three figures who called attention, much as Dostoevsky did, to the problems and paradoxes that emerge when we try to extend our ordinary way of seeing the world beyond the human scale. These contradictions—or what Kant called antinomies—arise when we try to eject ourselves beyond space and time, imagining earthly life from an eternal perspective. (Egginton calls this illusory vantage “the god of very large things.”) They also arise when we zero in too closely on things at a minute scale. (Egginton…