I'm currently enjoying Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y. It's about Ariel, a literature grad student, who discovers the only copy of an obscure 19th century novel. Her supervisor was a specialist on the novel's author, but he's disapeared. Soon "they" are after her too, because the novel reveals how to access the world of meaningfulness in the fourth dimension. There's quantum mechanics, phenomenology, cosmology, deconstruction, gods, simulacrums, secret government projects gone bad, psychogeography, GUIs, Aristotle, mice, trangression fu; what's not to like?

Apollo Smintheus gives our heroine some useful tips on the world of meaning in the other dimension--called the Troposphere by its discoverer--, including this one:

It cannot be expressed in any language made from numbers or letters except as part of an existentiell analytic.

Clearly, what you'll get out of the book depends on what you bring to it. Ariel has sought refuge in the priory next to the Shrine of St. Jude.

I glance back over my list. I have to smile when I see the reference to Heidegger. What's Apollo Smintheus doing thinking about Heidegger? But some instinct tells me that Apollo Smintheus knows how to explain things to people in their own personal language, and my language does include terms like existentiell and ontical, as well as their grander counterparts: existential and ontological. I've never forgotten what I read of Being and Time, although not finishing it is one of the big regrets of my life. I remember those terms because they're the ones I wrote so many notes about, all in the margins of the book.

When I read Being and Time I always though of it as Being and Lunchtime: It was my private joke with myself for the month it took me to read the first one hundred pages. It took that long because I read it only at lunchtime, over soup and a roll in a cheap café not far from where I was living at the time in Oxford. That house had no heating at all, and it was damp. I spent the winetrs with chest infections and the summers with a house full of insects. I tried to spend as little time there as possible. So every day I'd go to the café and sit there for an hour or two reading Being and Time. I think I managed about three or four pages a day. As I remember this, I can't help wondering: Does Apollo Smintheus know this, too? Does he know about the day the café closed for renovations and I stopped going there? Does he know that I started having an affair with a guy who wanted to meet me at lunchtimes, and that I left Heidegger for him?

I wish I'd finished the book. I wish I'd brought it with me. But who takes Being and Time with them as an essential object when running away from men with guns? I get out of bed. There's a freestanding antique bookcase by the wall. It has a glass front and a little silver key. I look through the glass and see lost of texts written by Pope John Paull II, including a book of his poetry. There are think brown Bibles and thin white Bible commentaries; all dusty. No thick blue book. No Being and Time. As if I thought there would be.

P. 237

The blue book would be Blackwell's paperback edition, still available in the UK.  ¶ 8:08 AM