The Infinite Complexity of the World

How much do we truly bear?

As I hold my pen, writing these words, I can smell the ink as it bleeds into the paper. I feel the metallic, slightly cold body beneath my fingertips. Its tip slides across the page, rocking, stumbling, leaving an uneven blue line. Each small resistance travels through my hand and into my arm, entering the movement of my whole body—yet I wonder: if writing a sentence can contain such a story of sensations, thoughts and emotions, how much of this story do I really bear?

And how much of everything around it?

In my moments of half-consciousness, the state in which I seem to spend much of my life, this pen is simple. Well put together, intuitive to grasp, both with my hand and with my mind. It is bearable to hold in attention. I know what it is, what it does, and where I left it.

Then, occasionally, the familiarity loosens. I begin to look behind the mask that made it so easy to recognise.

The metallic body, its blue tint, cylindrical shape and silver lining. The engraving of the brand, the typography, the depth of each carved letter. The inner chamber that stores the ink and the opening through which it passes from within to without. Already, the single thing has become a collection of things. Yet I have scarcely left its surface.

The pen has lived a life. Its materials were once displaced throughout the world, extracted and brought together for the purpose of its birth. Someone envisioned this shape. Someone decided upon its weight, its mechanism, the pressure required to release its ink. Machines made parts that other machines and hands brought together. It was packed, displayed, desired, bought. Its box travelled through places I have never visited before arriving at my door.

Even this little history is mostly a gesture towards what I do not know. “Someone decided”—who? Under what constraints, after how many failures, with what inherited knowledge? “Its materials were extracted”—from where, by whom, with what consequences? Each phrase that allows the story to continue also closes a door upon another story.

The pen was made to write well, to rest comfortably in a hand and, of course, to make itself desirable. Then it became mine. I scratched it, dropped it, forgot it for days and weeks, picked it up, refilled it and forgot it again. Its ink gave my ideas a place outside myself. Sentences I would otherwise have lost remain upon paper because this particular object was within reach.

Now those sentences are part of what I can find in it. So are the occasions on which I wrote them. A pen can be a mechanism, a possession, a gift, an expense, a reminder of a room that no longer exists as I remember it. These meanings are not engraved beside the brand. A mind must arrive with something through which to conceive them.

The course of the pen through time and its intended purpose already open more than I can follow. But there is no reason to stop at the scale of a human life.

Its materials have structures. Its warmth changes as my fingers hold it. Beneath the apparent stillness, constituents interact; energy passes through the body that my eyes accept as one stable thing. I can follow the pen down through its compounds and elements, towards the physical relations that allow this form to persist.

Or I can follow those materials backwards. The matter now gathered between my fingers belonged to a world before there were fingers to hold it. Some of its elements were formed in stars. They passed through histories for which the manufacture of a pen is scarcely an event at all. I say “formed in stars,” and a few words stand in for processes, distances and durations that the sentence does almost nothing to contain.

This is the strange lightness of what we hold in attention. A phrase can feel full because we recognise it, even whilst almost everything it points towards remains unopened.

I do not have to travel into the remote past. The pen is touching my hand now. Heat passes between them. Light strikes its body, a shadow falls across the desk, pressure leaves a temporary mark upon my skin. When I put it down, it strikes the surface, bounces and rolls. Dust gathers where my eyes see nothing. When I pick it up again, something of that encounter comes with it.

Each interaction can become the centre of another account. The sound of the impact leads into the material of the desk, the air in the room, the act of hearing. The light leads to the lamp, the electricity, the placement of objects that made this particular shadow possible. What looked like the edge of the pen is no longer the edge of what there is to consider.

And until now, it has still been just a pen.

I paid money for it. That payment entered arrangements involving people whose names I do not know: a seller, a manufacturer, a courier, others connected through wages, purchases and obligations. I cannot reconstruct the course of this particular payment. Yet “I bought a pen” can be opened into a question about labour, value, exchange, desire—about the systems through which a small object reaches a hand.

It can also become an ethical question. What work am I willing to benefit from? What do I owe to people made invisible by the ease of buying? The pen does not possess an ethical significance in the way that it possesses a length. Significance takes shape through what a mind is capable of bringing into relation with it. Another person may look at the same object and find no such question; another may find a question I could not have conceived.

Consider how much is folded into an expression such as “the people involved.” Any one of those people has a life that could displace the pen entirely from the centre of this text. Their work, memories, fears, the morning before they handled its materials. We might spend a book upon what the phrase permits us to pass over. Then another upon a person mentioned in that book.

This is what I mean when I speak of infinite complexity. However far I follow a subject, I can conceive of another way to open it. A description does not exhaust what the mind might make of its object. Even its ending can become the beginning of a new description.

I could move from the pen to the chair, the table, the bed. I could choose a person from the billions around me, or a grain of sand brought home from the beach ten years ago, forgotten in a corner, stepped on, smaller and rounder than before. Nothing so humble that it could not become the entrance to more than I can bear to follow.

But the objects themselves are only one way to begin. Their interactions offer another. A room can be described through its furniture, through the movements it permits, through the things its inhabitants avoid touching. A city can be followed through its buildings, its conversations, its water, its debts. The same world is opened differently by each choice.

I can conceive of our planet as a collection of atoms, as a system, as interacting systems, as the places in which particular lives unfold. I can catalogue entities or trace relations, attend to what changed or to what persisted. Each frame permits something to become visible and allows something else to disappear from view.

The multiplication is not simply a matter of adding detail. A different frame can change what the subject is for the mind considering it. The pen as a physical object and the pen as the last gift from someone who died do not ask for two resolutions of the same account. They open different accounts, which may themselves be brought together.

And our minds are generators of what need not be real. Why limit this movement to things that exist outside them?

Consider a fictional world. Not merely the events the author has written down, but what a reader can bring into existence around them. A room described in one sentence. The childhood of a person who appears for a page. What happened after a conversation ended, or what might have happened had one word been different.

I do not mean that every unwritten detail is secretly waiting inside the book. The mind can create what it goes on to explore. It can make a world from the suggestion of one.

The love between Romeo and Juliet, the desires of Faust, an idea laid down by Nietzsche—how quickly we give these things names and feel that we have grasped them. Yet an encounter with the same passage, in another life or another moment of our own, can open something that was never present in our first account of it.

The complexity need not be an intrinsic property of the subject. It may arise through the interpretative capacity of the mind that encounters it. Something need only give thought a place from which to wander, and thought can enter worlds that the object alone could never contain.

Why stop at books? Every film, every image, every piece of music. Every game whose possibilities are met by the particular will of a player. Every artwork imagined and never made, every version abandoned for the one that was, every other person who might have encountered it and found something else entirely.

And everything that was never recorded: a sentence thought on the way home, a face invented in sleep, a conversation rehearsed and abandoned—but which sentence, which face, whose conversation? What had to happen for that thought to appear? What did it awaken, what did it interrupt, where would it have gone if something else had not arrived? Another thought, another room, another life opening behind a word I was about to pass over.

Every person, every moment, every thing that could have been noticed in that moment, every way of noticing it, the room in the memory and the memory in the room, the person remembered and the person doing the remembering and the person they imagined themselves to be—then every world they never spoke of, every world they could not speak of, every world that lasted only long enough to change a feeling, and the feeling itself, its history, its consequences, everything it touched, everything that touched it, and each of these another beginning, each beginning opening again, and again, and I have not even left the pen, I have not left the room, there is still the hand, the ink, the word—

I must stop myself.

As I enumerate even this little portion, I begin to feel a pressure that the sentences do not seem sufficient to explain. My chest tightens. My legs feel weak. There is an ache behind my eyes, and I put the pen down.

I cannot say that I am thinking all these things. I am hardly thinking any of them clearly. The examples have begun to lose their edges; I could not repeat the sequence that brought me here.

Yet the pressure remains after the sequence has gone.

For a moment, my mind feels almost empty. I look at the pen without finding another sentence. Something of what it has opened seems to persist outside the part of thought I can put into words.

Later, it will become simple again. I will reach for it because I need to write something down. Its weight will be familiar, its purpose sufficient. Almost everything will have withdrawn behind the mask.

But for that moment, the world is not merely complex beyond my telling.

It is unbearably complex.