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An Old Man’s Toy (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” the poet William Butler Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming.” With Yeats, his reader tends to imagine that things cohere insofar as they have a center which holds them. He or she imagines that a sense of purpose can hold together the many aspects of a project or a lifetime, in much the same way that the sun’s gravitational attraction holds the planets in their orbits. The physical universe, too, most people suspect, must have a center.

This is what scientists term an “intuition” about the way things are. Most laymen expect...

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