Whenever the author of But What If We’re Wrong? writes a book, he is asked how long it took to write. The answer proves surprisingly difficult
I’ve published nine books and all nine experiences have been unique. Yet there are two questions you get asked every single time, over and over again (by journalists, but also by normal people).
The first question is always: “How did you come up with this idea?” My most honest answer would be to admit that I don’t know, or that I can’t remember, or that I do remember but I don’t want to say. But because this (totally reasonable) question is asked so persistently, I inevitably manufacture a semi-cogent response that feels halfway plausible, and I repeat that response until it feels like the true answer. I suppose it’s possible that this rote reply is the true answer, and that I simply needed to work through the inquiry 25 times before realising this was the case. For example: whenever people ask me how I came up with the idea behind But What If We’re Wrong? I almost always mention watching a specific TV series (Cosmos) while simultaneously reading about the life of a specific author (Herman Melville).
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Melville publishes Moby-Dick in 1851, basing his narrative on the real-life 1839 account of a murderous sperm whale nicknamed “Mocha Dick”. The initial British edition is around 900 pages. Melville, a moderately successful author at the time of the novel’s release, assumes this book will immediately be seen as his masterwork. But the reviews are mixed, and some are contemptuous (“It repels the reader” is the key takeaway from one of the very first reviews in the London Spectator). It sells poorly – at the time of Melville’s death, total sales hover below 5,000 copies. The failure ruins Melville’s life: he becomes an alcoholic and a poet and eventually a customs inspector. When he dies destitute in 1891, one has to assume his perspective on Moby-Dick is something along the lines of: ‘Well I guess that didn’t work. Maybe I should have spent fewer pages explaining how to tie complicated knots.’ For the next 30 years, nothing about the reception of this book changes. But then [the first world war] happens and – somehow and for reasons that can’t be totally explained – modernists living in postwar America start to view literature through a different lens. There is a Melville revival. The concept of what a novel is suppose to accomplish shifts in his direction and amplifies with each passing generation, eventually prompting people (like the 2005 director of Columbia University’s American studies programme) to classify Moby-Dick as ‘the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer’. Pundits and cranks can disagree with that assertion, but no one cares if they do.
Now, there’s certainly a difference between collective, objective wrongness (eg: misunderstanding gravity for centuries) and collective, subjective wrongness (eg: not caring about Moby-Dick for 75 years). The machinations of the transitions are completely different. Yet both scenarios hint at a practical reality and a modern problem. The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true – both objectively and subjectively – is habitually provisional. But the modern problem is that re-evaluating what we consider ‘true’ is becoming increasingly difficult.
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