Mystery
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How do these couples do it? When the psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell revisited Freud’s essay on impotence, he began with the observation that sexual experience is inherently private, the most opaque pleasure of all. “Although it is one of our most common experiences, none of us knows quite what sex is like for anyone else,” Mitchell writes. “The more or less standard equipment has been hijacked by the human imagination.”V This hijacking means that sex is never just a physical act. It is bound up with our most mysterious desires. “In this sense, there is always an unknown, an otherness in the experience of sexuality in both one’s partner and in oneself,” Mitchell observes. “This unknown and unknowable dimension of sexual passion contributes to both its excitement and its risks.”38
According to Mitchell, the sheer mysteriousness of sex is the reason some couples are able to maintain their desire over time. The key, he says, is to remember that even sex with a spouse can contain surprises. It doesn’t matter how intimate we are with our partner, how many diapers we’ve changed, or how often we’ve done this before: sex should become “a journey into the otherness of the other,” as Mitchell puts it. Because the act is so unknowable, it can puncture the illusion of knowing, showing us that we still have much to learn.39 While Freud imagined love as the enemy of desire—security spoils eros—Mitchell argues that the right kind of desire can save our love, waking us up from the slumber of habit. Sex, in this sense, can serve as an effective form of relationship therapy.
But it’s also not enough. As Mitchell points out, even couples with a creative sex life won’t last if they can’t take that same attitude outside the bedroom. The best relationships do this by cultivating our need for self-expansion, a fundamental human motivation to grow, explore, and develop ourselves in new ways. In one longitudinal study, led by Arthur and Elaine Aron, couples that engaged in more self-expanding activities—examples include trying a new hike, attending a concert, or starting a hobby—also reported greater relationship quality. Another study randomly assigned married couples to either participate in an exciting activity (such as taking ballroom-dancing lessons) or a pleasurable activity (such as watching a movie). After ten weeks, those couples assigned to the exciting activities reported much larger increases in relationship satisfaction. Because they experienced self-expansion together, they were more likely to stay together.40
Self-expansion also leads to more sex. In a recent study led by Amy Muise, more than two hundred people completed relationship diaries about their levels of self-expansion, answering questions such as “How much did being with your partner expand your sense of the kind of person you are?”41 They also listed any activities that led to feelings of self-expansion, like learning to skateboard, or shucking oysters for the first time. Finally, they reported their levels of sexual desire and sexual activity. The correlation was clear: on days that couples reported greater self-expansion, they also experienced much more sexual desire, which led to a 34 percent increase in sexual activity. (The sex was more fun, too.) Furthermore, the couples sustained this increase in desire over time, leading to lasting boosts in relationship satisfaction.
The benefits of self-expansion are rooted in the power of mystery. Freud assumed that the diminishment of desire was inevitable, but the research on self-expansion shows that desire can be rekindled, provided we engage in activities that reveal new sides of each other. Because self-expansion doesn’t just expand the self—it also exposes its surprises. We remember that our partner is a rounded being, and not nearly as predictable as we assumed. Our curiosity is aroused, and the libido often follows.
When we acknowledge the mystery of other people, our behavior is transformed. We become better lovers, more attentive to the needs and nuances of our partner. We have more sex. But we also become more compassionate and forgiving, more likely to judge friends and strangers as we judge ourselves. People are complicated. The self is unknowable. If art taught us nothing else, that would be enough.
I. Oddly, the woman in the painting has no eyebrows.
II. The increased parity also boosted the chanciness of the sport, which made it more entertaining.
III. The hard salary cap, which went into effect in 1994, has only made draft decisions more consequential. Because NFL rookies are significantly underpaid, at least compared to their veteran colleagues, selecting a productive college player can free up salary space for other talented teammates.
IV. According to Freud, the unsatisfactory nature of sex does come with a consolation prize: humans must seek out other gratifications, such as art and science. The root of culture, then, is the mediocre orgasm.
V. The inability to comprehend someone else’s sexual experience, Mitchell says, helps explain the “startling durability of pornography,” which results in part from a “voyeuristic longing to find out what sex is like for others.”
CHAPTER 5 THE DUCK-RABBIT
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet
The Voynich Mystery
Wilfrid Michael Voynich was an unlikely owner of one of the most famous medieval manuscripts in the world. Trained as a chemist, Voynich was sent to a Siberian prison camp in 1885 for inciting Polish nationalism. He escaped after five years with a forged passport, before selling off his glasses and winter coat to pay for a boat ticket to England. Once there, he became close to Richard Garnett, the “Keeper of the Printed Books” for the British Museum Reading Room, who persuaded Voynich to enter the rare-book business. Before long, Voynich had turned his flamboyant personality, photographic memory, and fluency in seven languages into a successful shop in London for antiquarian books.1
In late 1912, Voynich traveled to Italy in search of more inventory. He found his way to the Villa Mondragone, a run-down castle outside Rome. Voynich was in the cobwebbed attic, searching through forgotten wooden chests, when he found a stack of illuminated medieval manuscripts. Many of the vellum pages were gorgeous, full of lush art and delicate typography; they bore the red wax seals of some of Italy’s most illustrious families. Knowing the value of what he had found, Voynich bought the chests.
When Voynich got back to England, he began auctioning off his Italian haul. But there was one manuscript he refused to sell. This particular book appeared rather shabby: less than ten inches tall, it was filled with a mixture of botanical illustrations and bizarre drawings of naked women bathing in green pools. The few scholars who’d looked at the manuscript dismissed it as a strange collection of medieval herbal recipes, an atlas of obsolete medicine.
Voynich wasn’t convinced. Although he referred to the codex as the “ugly duckling” of his collection—the flax spine was cracking and the paint was faded—he was fascinated by the cursive text. More specifically, he was intrigued that nobody could make sense of it. Voynich latched on to an enticing possibility: the inscrutable writing was a secret code. A masterful promoter, Voynich told the New York Times that his little book would “prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth-century science.”2 Of course, revealing that black magic meant cracking the code.
Alas, Voynich’s initial attempts were failures; the writing remained indecipherable. Eager for help, Voynich gave the manuscript to MI-8, the cryptographic unit of the US Army. He assumed they’d break the code in no time, since they’d be able to match the text to the drawings and reverse engineer the cipher. But these professionals made no progress, either. (The botanical drawings, it turned out, were all make-believe.) “The more the cryptologists looked,” write Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone in their book on the Voynich manuscript, “the more obscure the cipher became.”3
After seven years of fruitless struggle, Voynich turned to William Romaine Newbold, an eminent scholar specializing in old philosophical texts at th
e University of Pennsylvania. Newbold’s breakthrough came on the last page. There he spotted three faint lines of Latin. He concluded that these lines must be the cryptographic key, the secret instructions that could decrypt the rest of the text.
In April 1921, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, Newbold described his astonishing discoveries. He announced that the manuscript was the work of Roger Bacon, a thirteenth-century English polymath and early pioneer of the experimental method. (Bacon insisted that, whenever possible, our “theories supplied by reason should be verified by sensory data, aided by instruments, and corroborated by trustworthy witnesses.”4 It was a worthy aspiration; it also didn’t stop Bacon from spending much of his career researching alchemy and astrology.) According to Newbold, Bacon’s text anticipated engineering marvels such as the telescope and steam power; Bacon described the swimming style of sperm and the swirl of distant nebulae in the sky. Given these remarkable discoveries, the Bacon codex became one of the most important scientific texts in the world. It proved that Bacon was hundreds of years ahead of his time, a scientific prophet stuck in the dark ages.
So how did the cipher work? According to Newbold, it was incredibly sophisticated; Bacon must really have wanted to hide his secrets. Newbold argued that Bacon’s system involved something like three different ciphers operating in conjunction. Some sections, Newbold said, could be understood by combining pairs of Latin letters into new letters that spelled out sentences; elsewhere, he believed the letters formed a purely phonetic alphabet. This meant that the cryptographer had to first study the calligraphic details under a microscope, attempting to parse those subtle marks. Then, once the letter was “decomposed,” the abbreviations had to be expanded according to a long list of rules, including syllabification, commutation, and reversion.5 This elaborate process allowed Newbold to turn each line of cipher into several paragraphs of Latin. The short book was actually an encyclopedia.
When a few of Newbold’s colleagues questioned his method, Newbold pointed out that his translation had to be correct since he was describing historical events and natural phenomena of which he had no prior knowledge. In September 1926, Newbold died after an attack of “acute indigestion.” In 1930, Voynich followed him to the grave. In his will, Voynich asked that his most prized manuscript—the “ugly duckling” that changed the history of science—be sold to a public institution capable of protecting its pages.
But the manuscript never sold. And it never sold because the Voynich cipher was never cracked. Although Newbold was convinced he’d solved the mystery, he was wrong. The mystery won.
* * *
In 1913, business tycoon George Fabyan asked John Matthews Manly, a professor of English literature at the University of Chicago, to investigate a series of codes that had supposedly been embedded in Shakespeare’s work. Manly liked codes, and he liked Shakespeare, so he agreed to take a look.I It took six weeks for Manly to reject the idea. The codes were not codes. They were coincidences.
A few years later, as World War I consumed Europe, the US government realized that it was in desperate need of code breakers. Manly was recruited by the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division, tasked with applying the same methods to secret German army telegrams that he’d previously used on Shakespeare.6
When the war ended, Manly returned to teaching. But he couldn’t stop thinking about codes, which led him to the Voynich manuscript. This quixotic interest soon took over his life. In 1931, nearly ten years after Newbold first announced his solution for the cipher, and five years after Newbold’s death, Manly published a forty-six-page paper on the medieval book. He made his thesis clear: “In my opinion, the Newbold claims are entirely baseless and should be definitely and absolutely rejected.”
The rest of the paper was a wrecking ball, dismantling Newbold’s claims one by one. Those microscopic signs that Newbold saw in the cursive? They were due to the cracking of the ink on the vellum. In one instance, Newbold had miscopied the actual text—but still somehow ended up with an “accurate” message. Manly criticized the malleability of Newbold’s decryption rules, detailing how Newbold had generated three different translations from the same Latin lines. There were historical details that didn’t add up and basic errors in spelling. And then there was Newbold’s insistence that he didn’t know about the science or the history in the text. Manly argued that it was self-delusion, and that Newbold’s “decipherments were not discoveries of secrets hidden by Roger Bacon but the products of his own intense enthusiasm and ingenious subconsciousness.”7
In retrospect, the problems with Newbold’s decryption seem obvious and undeniable. Nevertheless, academic journals and the Times had praised his work; the Voynich manuscript had temporarily changed the entire time line of early scientific history. It’s not that Newbold set out to deceive anyone. It’s that he deceived himself.
Since Newbold, hundreds of other scholars, code breakers, and hobbyists have tried to crack the manuscript. (In 1969, it was donated to Yale University.) The vellum pages have been analyzed with supercomputers by the NSA. Gordon Rugg, head of the Knowledge Modelling Group at Keele University in England, has published several recent papers showing that the basic features of the Voynich script can be replicated in a short time using a Cardan grille, a sixteenth-century method for encryption.8 According to Rugg, the manuscript is almost certainly a hoax, generated by plugging meaningless syllables into a grille system. (This helps explain why many of the world’s best cryptologists, including William Friedman, couldn’t even identify the language used in the text; scholars refer to it as Voynichese.) Rugg suggests that the manuscript was probably invented to trick a rich medieval prince, possibly by selling the encrypted book as a how-to guide for alchemy.
Yet the beautiful hoax continues to fascinate. (Since the beginning of 2019, there were more than 200 academic publications about the Voynich manuscript. It’s also been featured in countless novels, several movies and television shows, and even a few video games.) Which raises the obvious question, Why has this meaningless manuscript titillated kings, scholars, and code breakers for centuries? What is it about the gibberish writing that people find so endlessly interesting?
One likely explanation is the ambiguity of the text, which serves as an effective mystery hook. When Voynich discovered the codex, he was drawn to its enigmatic qualities. The book was written in an alphabet he didn’t know, spelling out a language he’d never heard of, featuring drawings of plants that didn’t exist. Nevertheless, the words and pictures implied a solution, featuring consistent symbols, regular repetitions, and plenty of convincing botanical detail. The result was a work of staggering ambiguity: every word seemed pregnant with meaning. It was interesting because it demanded interpretation.
But there’s a paradox here. Although people might be drawn to ambiguous medieval manuscripts, they tend to avoid ambiguous conditions in real life. In 1961, Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst working on nuclear war strategy at RAND, published a highly influential article about our reaction to ambiguity.9 (A decade later, Ellsberg would leak the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War.) Ellsberg’s paper featured a gamble involving two urns, both of which contained one hundred balls. The first urn contained a mixture of red and black balls in unknown proportions. The second urn contained fifty red and fifty black balls. If a person could successfully predict the color of the ball drawn from one of the urns, he would receive a prize of $100. The question is which urn the subject wanted to bet on.
As Ellsberg predicted, and as subsequent research confirmed, the vast majority of people prefer to gamble on the urn with the known distribution of balls.II Although the mathematical odds are identical, we tend to avoid gambles with an excess of uncertainty, a tendency that came to be known as ambiguity aversion. More recently, scientists at Caltech have shown that asking people to make decisions in ambiguous conditions leads to increased brain activity in the amygdala, a brain area associated with the emotions of fear and anxiety.10
Or look at what happened with the Voynich manuscript. If we’re not careful, ambiguity aversion can trick us into seeing conclusive answers that don’t exist, just like William Newbold. Instead of enjoying the ambiguity, we insist the code has been cracked. It’s disturbingly easy to deceive oneself.
In this chapter, we’ll learn how good art turns ambiguity into entertainment, hooking us with content that’s shifting and unsettled. We want to solve the text. We want to erase the ambivalence. We want to know for sure. However, by denying us definitive answers—by insisting that there are multiple interpretations—the art teaches us how to live with uncertainty.
In other words, it teaches us how to live.
“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”
In the winter of 1948, J. D. Salinger was a divorced writer living in a converted barn with his schnauzer in the suburbs of Stamford, Connecticut. He’d had a few short stories published in the New Yorker and Good Housekeeping, but he was struggling to pay his bills. When he wasn’t writing, Salinger was studying Zen Buddhism. He was drawn to Buddhism mostly because of meditation, which had helped him recover from the trauma of fighting in World War II. (He’d landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and cataloged the horrors of Dachau as an intelligence officer.) But the Zen aesthetic, which emphasized paradox and ambiguity as tools for reflection, entranced Salinger. He would often quote Zen koans, those short riddles that defy rational understanding. For Salinger, the best writing was itself a kind of koan, allowing the reader to meditate on the perplexing text. When he published Nine Stories, his first and only short story collection, Salinger chose the following koan for the epigraph: “We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?”13 The point of the question is that nobody knows.