Tom Stoppard was a Lemur if ever there was one.
No writer has helped me understand the dangers of hyper-rationality more than Tom Stoppard, the brilliant British playwright who died yesterday at the age of 88.
Tom Stoppard’s brain was restless, and his was The Voice for the age of restless, hyper-logical and yet totally illogical brains in which we live (ChatGPT, the attention economy, the fracturing of monoculture, the postmodern failure to communicate, qwertyuiopasdf, you know what I’m talking about).
But what do I mean by a “restless brain”? And why was that the perfect attribute for a chronicler of our times? I would say that a brain—a mind—can either be restless in the sense that it is constantly searching for answers—information, knowledge, wisdom, in that ascending order—or in the sense that is paralyzed by the question —a mind that is being pulled by wild horses in equal, opposite, and infinitely many other directions, and which therefore either goes nowhere or is torn apart. Stoppard’s brain was in the first category—and it was a supreme specimen of that sort. Stoppard wrote abstract and ambitious literature that explored the depth of the human psyche, the nature of cognition, the meaning of fate, the power of philosophy, and the banality of evil—all the Big Ideas (hence, he’s a Lemur). Some of Stoppard’s most indelible characters, however, suffered from the latter disease—paralysis in the face of the unanswerable. Through the absurdist trials of these characters, Stoppard revealed to us our own hapless inertia in the void.
Most notably, I’m talking about the title characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard’s post-modern sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Ros” and “Guil” spend the first ten or so pages of the play flipping coins over and over again and debating the nature of probability and the meaning of fate. It’s a struggle. Try, for instance, to follow this rambling from Guildenstern:
“If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor, then we must accept that the probability of the first part will not operate as a factor, in which case the law of probability will operate as a factor within un-, sub- or supernatural forces And since it obviously hasn’t been doing so, we can take it that we are not held within un-, sub- or supernatural forces after all; in all probability, that is.”
Like the friend they betrayed, the two courtiers are incapable of action—or, more precisely, incapable of the kind of thought that will lead them to action (the play, by the way, is a comedy, and I promise you that it is fun to read—I’ve never seen it live, so I don’t how that monologue plays).
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fail to act, to live, to break out of the “nutshell” prison of thought in which they and Hamlet are trapped, because they are flummoxed by a discovery. Rationality, logic, space, and math are not tools that can break them out of the prison. Every time Ros and Guil try to think their way out of the absurd parameters of their existence, they fail. They try to make sense of the miraculous (a coin landing on heads ninety times in a row) through adherence to the laws of probability (see the speech above)—and they try to extend that use of rationality to the more complex scenarios of Shakespearean tragedy. They fail, and of course they do. That’s Stoppard’s point. Logic and the quest for deterministic explanations for the least explainable of phenomena lead us to lose our minds. Fittingly, how do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to make sense of Hamlet’s curiously directional language of madness? (“I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw”). Well, they try to think of it literally, of course. Eventually, a defeated Guil bursts out to Ros, “You won’t find the answer written down for you in the bowl of a compass—I can tell you that.”
In deconstructing the most Freudian of plays, Stoppard seems to be suggesting that disciplined analysis, psycho- or otherwise, can only get you so far. There are more things in heaven and earth, after all, than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Blind adherence to reason leaves one “like a mute in a monologue. Try to make sense of meaningless madness, horror, and death, and your “diction will go to pieces,” “your lines will be cut,” and “you’ll never find your tongue.”
Stoppard understood what happens to the human mind when it is made to think its way out of nihilism. He understood that devotion to pure logic rips us apart from the inside out. Reading Stoppard always reminds me that hyper-rationality is just as atavistic—and just as unhelpful— as irrationality.
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Around the time I first got into Stoppard (in my first couple years of college), I had also become obsessed with mathematical logic, behavioral economics, and the limits of rationality. I pored over lists of paradoxes and stressed about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (which asserts that there are true statements that no mathematical system can produce). I read Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (a book I’m sure Stoppard loved), which brilliantly explores this theme of the inadequacy of formal logic across math, music, and art, three different sorts of “formal systems.” I was restlessly seeking answers to a crisis of meaning that I had been confronting in our overly logical and illogical age.
During this phase I reached, in my own pea-brained way (I can’t do math…), the same gnawing crisis of confidence that early 20th century mathematicians and philosophers faced when they encountered the “crisis of the foundations” at the heart of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. I realized what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern realized when the laws of statistics let them down. We cannot rely on math, or formal logic, or even language (encompassing everything from English writing to computer code) to get us out of the morass of confusion in which we find our brains fogged in the 2020s. We stand even less of a chance than those giants did at the dawn of the 20th century—our world is so much more impossible.
And as I began to feel paralyzed by the question—totally inert in the face of logic’s failure, of the failure of all formal systems, as a college student trying to find my comparative advantage in the age of AI—Stoppard’s plays were my guide.
I hope at least taking a look into who Stoppard was, and some of the ideas his plays explored, will give you some comfort, too, as we all try to figure out whether knowledge still means anything and whether the brain really is “the most overrated organ.” Stoppard enjoyed tremendous critical adulation for his plays throughout his career, and a great degree of popularity among the “those who know” in both London and New York. But his name remains associated, for many, with difficult, cerebral, and therefore inaccessible literature. Outside of Shakespeare in Love, which he wrote the screenplay for, for some reason, his is not a name that has resonated in the popular culture in the way that it should.
So maybe you won’t read Arcadia or The Real Thing or The Coast of Utopia anytime soon. But you should at least watch Brazil, one of the great surrealist-existentialist fantasias on meaning (and also just a really funny movie)—Stoppard co-wrote the screenplay. In high school I had a DVD copy of Brazil with “Extras,” including an interview with Stoppard. I remember watching that interview and being astounded that a human being could be so wide-ranging in his intellect, so precise in his word choice, and so bitingly clever at the same time.
In my last essay for The Lemur (about why you should stop flexing about being busy), I chose a still from Brazil as the thumbnail. It’s from a scene in the film in which the protagonist, liberated from the strictures of his maddeningly labyrinthine nightmare of a world, flies with Icarus wings like an unbound angel. It’s a dream, but it’s a beautiful dream. Stoppard, whose intellect so knocked my socks off, knew that an obsessively hyper-rational human being is a flightless creature. To fly, we must remind ourselves that while maybe we think, therefore we are. But we cannot be all that we can be without a lot more than just thinking—and, to bring us back to the theme of that article, without some more free time to think about what we want out of life).
We all need to find meaning outside of rational logic (and short of madness, please). I’m convinced that will be the great personal and professional struggle of our generation. We need to figure out how to be restlessly curious—how to be always thinking without becoming machines, driven to distraction by way of logic.
And now we’ll have to do it without Tom Stoppard.
by Zachary Partnoy
