In a message dated 12/02/2005 02:28:17 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
Would someone explain the general opposition of solids and surds, and
how the latter applies to the scholars in question [Pnin, Vintage p41]?
"There are human solids and there are human surds, and Clements and
Pnin belonged to the latter variety."
Many thanks.
Sandy Drescher
As one who read mathematics at Cambridge, I had always taken it that this was a poetic rather than a mathematical opposition. Mathematically, it is absurd. This is what makes it humorously right. It compares entities of different logical category. And there is no reason, for instance, why all or some of the dimensions of a solid should not be surds. For example, in a cube of side 1 unit, the diagonals of the faces have length the square root of 2, and the diagonal of the cube itself has the length the square root of 3, and these are both surds, i.e., irrational numbers.
Surds are irrational numbers such as the square root of 2; they include transcendental numbers such as pi. They cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers (whole numbers, such as 1, 2, 3,...). Pythagorean legend has it that someone (Hippasus?) died in a shipwreck because he had revealed the irrationality of the square root of 2. Beckett (in his essay on Bram van Velde, in relation to the "realisation that art has always been bourgeois") speaks of the "Pythagorean terror" at the "irrationality" of pi. (I'm writing from memory. Beckett's also a bit inaccurate, as the Pythagoreans can hardly have known pi was irrational.)
So the opposition VN is evoking, based on the wordplay of s...ds, is surely beween prosaic solidity, squareness, bourgeois philistinism, on the one hand and some kind of individuality, transcendence, otherness on the other.
Anthony Stadlen