In 1993, Paul Auster published The Red Notebook, in which he collected the most notable coincidences and oddities from his life and those of his friends. One such incident was a letter that the author, who died in 2024, found in his home mailbox. It was a returned missive that Auster was supposed to have sent to a certain Robert M. Morgan at his Seattle address. On the envelope the recipient’s name had been crossed out and someone had written, “Not at this address.”
The problem was that Paul Auster had never sent that letter that was now being returned to his home. When he opened it, he saw that someone impersonating him had written to this Robert praising his work “in a bombastic, pretentious style, riddled with quotations from French philosophers and oozing with a tone of conceit and self-satisfaction (…) It was a contemptible letter, the kind of letter I would never dream of writing to anyone, and yet it was signed with my name.” Still, Auster admits in The Red Notebook that he could not bring himself to throw the letter away and, without knowing why, kept it on his desk for years. “Perhaps it is a way to remind me that I know nothing, that the world I live in will go on escaping me forever,” he wrote about the matter.
Although we are not in situations as peculiar as the writer’s, today we often view reality as if it were the product of an eccentric screenwriter. Starting with some news items that often resemble the follies of The Simpsons or plots from a dystopian novel.
A voice that has recently gained prominence as a collector of oddities is Dan Schreiber. A former co-producer of the BBC program The Museum of Curiosity, among other shows, he has recently published The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird, in which he reminds us that madness—even among great minds—is not exclusive to our era. Edison himself, a century ago, slept every night in his work clothes because he was convinced that pajamas disrupted the body’s chemistry and caused insomnia.
Closer to our time, the inventor of the PCR test that was widely used during the Covid pandemic, Kary Mullis, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, maintained for half his life that during a trip to the California countryside a raccoon that glowed in the dark had told him: “Good night, doctor.”
Meanwhile, Rosemary Brown released the record A Musical Seance in 1970, which features eight previously unknown piano works by Liszt, three by Chopin and several more attributed to composers such as Beethoven and Debussy. All the pieces on the album were being played for the first time because Brown—who was a medium—claimed they were revealed to her by the spirits of these musicians, who had supposedly continued composing after their deaths. Thousands of people bought this LP, released by a prestigious label like Philips, convinced that indeed all those piano geniuses had returned through the medium with new works.
How is it possible that so many people are willing to believe the incredible? There is a rational answer to that mystery: the so-called confirmation bias. When someone decides to adopt a particular view of reality, they unconsciously tend to seek information that confirms that theory, ignoring or rejecting any evidence to the contrary.
The algorithms that govern our digital lives reinforce confirmation bias even further. The platforms where we search for information take our browsing history into account. As a result, people repeatedly find what they like or even what obsesses them.
We find an example of this in Bugonia, by Yorgos Lánthimos, where two conspiracy-minded cousins who believe that aliens are about to invade Earth kidnap a young executive (played by Emma Stone), convinced she is an Andromedan infiltrator. On bicycle commutes to work, one of them compulsively listens to podcasts that reinforce his belief that aliens are already among us.
Many ordinary citizens live in a universe of wild speculation and magical thinking, perhaps as an antidote to a world in which they feel threatened and hopeless, since the truth is that no one knows what the future will be like even a year from now. When reality loses solidity, humans tend to create their own.
Words made to measure
— In his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig takes on the task of naming emotions and feelings we experience that were not yet in our vocabulary.
— One of the most beautiful neologisms is anemoia, which describes nostalgia for a time you have never experienced. The anemoic person always feels out of place and longs for another world, time or situation.
— Another one is gnossienne. According to Koenig, it is the awareness that someone you know has a mysterious inner life—meaning that the way that person thinks and behaves in private is very different from what you imagine.
