Possible Worlds

"This book contains within it the essay that turns up in every science writing anthology, “On Being the Right Size.” All science books get overtaken. You don’t normally read a science book twice — because it’s going to be out of date a year-and-a-half from now. It’s going to be comprehensively out of date in 10 years, and after 20 years you’re going to wonder why you ever trusted it in the first place. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But, strangely enough, these essays work. The ones that don’t work as science now work as a nice little picture of what people thought in 1920. It’s very well written and I’m immensely fond of it because Haldane was a man of great generosity. He was as happy, if not happier, to write for the Daily Worker as he was for the Guardian . All of these pieces of journalism are models of how to explain things to people without using long and arrogant words. He certainly was. You also get the sense that he looked for the unexpected. There’s a lovely description of being sick and then eating cheese. The cheese that he chooses to eat was a blue cheese, in a state of great bacterial decay. He describes all of that with great glee. What he’s doing there is approaching things through the sensual and the nowness of everything. Everything he starts with concerns things you can imagine. Then he goes on to the things that you can’t imagine, where you need his help. That’s what we should be doing, as journalists. We should be summing things up in one sentence if we possibly can. That’s a clear soundbite. A soundbite is a memorable sentence and there’s no point in having an unmemorable sentence. There’s a greater density of memorable sentences in Haldane’s collected journalism than there is in most great novelists’ writing. That’s a very strange trick to pull off. The same, however, is true for another book we’ll talk about."