Against the Day, doing some math

[Mark Kohut]

in an essay A Short View of Musil, Frank Kermode writes this; "There is an
interesting scene in *Young Torless*
where the young man is troubled by imaginary numbers like the square root
of minus one....and the mathematics master
....cannot explain how they can be related to anything describable as truth
or order."

I suggest TRP took this notion, this fear and blew it up into one of the
most overarching tropes in Against the Day.
In all his math met aphorizing in that great book, i think he uses the
concept of imaginary numbers to show another
major way modernity dissolved us into groundlessness, so to speak.

Lots of mathematics remarks in Musil's big book, The Man Without Qualities,
which might be summed up simplistically as
Mathematics is Truth and Order: The world, we, aren't. My
oversimplification, must go look more up. I have read that big
work but now must read *Young Torless. *