On ideas - Roger Cohen in NYT:

‘An Air France flight from Paris to New York lands on March 10, 2021, after passing through a terrifying storm. One hundred and six days later, the same Boeing 787 flight with the same crew, the same passengers and the same damage from an identical storm approaches the east coast of the United States. It’s impossible — the passengers and crew must be doubles — and yet.’

(…)

‘Even so, “The Anomaly” is an outlier. Published in the late summer of 2020, the novel has sold 1.1 million copies here, more than any book since Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover,” which came out in 1984. In an anomalous time, when a deserted Paris was in lockdown for months, and much of life moved online, the novel struck a powerful chord by suggesting the flimsiness of all we take for granted, what T.S. Eliot called “the old dispensation.”’

(…)

‘“I am surprised by the book’s success given that it’s so experimental, bizarre and a little crazy,” Le Tellier, 64, whose more than two dozen previous works never made best-seller lists, said. “Perhaps reading it was a means of escape.” The novel, which was translated into English by Adriana Hunter, begins with the description of several seemingly unrelated characters: a ruthless contract killer named Blake; an architect called André Vannier, whose girlfriend Lucie Bogaert, a movie editor, is about half his age and has lost interest in him; a down-on-his-luck novelist, Victor Miesel, who, in one of Le Tellier’s many literary artifices, provides the epigraph for the novel, “A true pessimist knows it is already too late to be one.”’

(…)

‘When asked if he has ever met a doppelgänger of his own, Le Tellier said that once, when he was crossing the Boulevard St. Germain, an older man stopped him. “We know each other,” the man said to Le Tellier. “I know you because I saw you in the mirror 20 years ago.” Le Tellier is a mild-mannered man who worked briefly as a college math teacher before taking up scientific journalism and starting to write novels in his 30s. In his writing, he is interested in probability, paradox, word play. Part of the appeal of “The Anomaly” is that it swerves between various genres — science fiction, a thriller, love stories, an introspective work — without being confined by any of them. It pokes fun at itself. It should be no surprise that Miesel, the novelist, is writing a novel called “The Anomaly,” or that another of his epigraphs holds that the one thing that surpasses genius “is incomprehension.” Literary constraints fascinate Le Tellier. The constraint of writing without using a certain letter, “u,” for example. Or, in another exercise invented by the French novelist Georges Perec, writing a poem to a loved one using only the letters of the person’s name. “The constraint causes something unforeseen, unanticipated, to happen,” he said. Constraint, in other words, can be liberating.’

(…)

‘The explanation for the identical June flight was not easy, causing him a brief writer’s block. Then an idea came to him: “that the world is perhaps simulated and that we are, on a biological level, nonexistent.” As one of the characters observes, Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” is therefore obsolete, replaced by “I think therefore I’m almost certainly a program.”’

Read the article here.

Wasn’t it Elon Musk who said that we live in a simulation?

See here

I stumbled upon a certain Nick Bostrom who had more or less the same idea.

The words, an idea came to him, should be delivered in a deadpan tone.

(If you believe that you are on a biological level non-existent death and illnesses are less threatening. Escapism on a slightly higher level.)