In this book on the philosophy of science, Deutsch says: “Time is not a sequence of moments, nor does it flow.” Instead, “we exist in multiple versions, in universes called ‘moments.’” … “Other times are just special cases of other universes.”
 
Our typically parochial thinking is bounded by ego-centred time, as well as culture and place, and so when well-informed science projects deeply into distant futures, I tend to get excited like the big kid I am. The Omega point and the spread of intelligence throughout the universe! Yeah, bring it on!
 
Even if the truth will never be anything more than a representation, it can still be true.
 
“Imagination is a straightforward form of virtual reality. What may not be so obvious is that our ‘direct’ experience of the world though our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we even experience the signals in our nerves directly—we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them.”
 
Most of reality is invisible to us. “The objects and events that we and instruments can directly observe are the merest tip of the iceberg.”
 
Deutsch makes a curious point about the future of our solar system. We tend to think of the death of the Sun in 5 billion years’ time as inevitable: an implosion followed by an explosion as a red giant. However—and to take one step further the lesson of quantum theory that the observer is not separable from the observed—the scientific laws that make this outcome apparently immutable fail to take into account the existence of life. We do not exist is isolation from the universe: we are part of it, and our evolution could change the evolution of our star.
 
Intelligent life could one day control the Sun: “one cannot predict the future of the Sun without taking a position on the future of life on Earth and in particular on the future of knowledge.”

The poetry, the pace, the rhythm, the construction, the delicacy, the handling of the relationships, the balancing of death and love, the care taken in respecting the betrayed husband by making him fundamentally lacking in his own way and yet cultured; the avoidance of cliché, the provisional nature of an affair dependent on circumstance, the glamour and grime of New York in 1960 and Kennedy’s election, and the tragedy so near to and so far from being averted. By the end, the tale becomes personal and cautionary. You don’t get many shots at love in this life.

On the Greek mainland and Corfu, where he visits Laurence Durrell just as the Second World War is breaking out, the brazen first-person protagonist of the Tropics and Sexus is seen as a more Whitmanesque character, who celebrates with unalloyed enthusiasm the vitality of the people and physical and psychic landscapes of Greece. He still lives boldly and does not let money condition his experience. He is never less than outspoken and stands up for what he values.
 
My favourite anecdote is Miller’s encounter with the mayor of a mountain village on Corfu and the splendid time they have of it trading lies for the sake of pure imaginative pleasure. What a way for two strangers to meet! At one point, they both pretend to speak Chinese. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
 
In the end, though, I tired of the purple prose and my abiding impressions are all from the book’s first half, in particular Miller’s anti-war commentaries, which are not national-political in nature but concerned with the health of the soul of the world. In Epidaurus, he has an epiphany of the peace of the heart, “positive and invincible, demanding no conditions, requiring no protection. It just is. If it is a victory, it is a peculiar one because it is based entirely on surrender, a voluntary surrender, to be sure…. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace.… Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages. Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to…”