Mapping the millennium: It takes all types...

Jane Austen -- Cool artist

THERE are only two known likenesses of Jane Austen, both by her old sister, Cassandra. In one her back is turned, so that we mostly see her bonnet; in the other she is poker-faced and looking askance. "Of events her life was singularly barren," her nephew claimed, and her letters, or those that her family did not burn, reveal almost nothing of the person who wrote them. Yet the evidence suggests that Austen's life was full of inner drama. She experienced maternal rejection and sibling rivalry; she was unhappy in love and had trouble with relationships; she suffered from writer's block and bouts of depression. And her novels powerfully suggest both a world and a personality that now seems remarkably familiar. Under that bonnet and behind those vacant hazel eyes there burns the first modern sensibility.

It is a sensibility, for one thing, that is fraught with our kind of financial anxiety. Unlike Defoe or Dickens, Austen is not concerned with extreme of wealthy or poverty. What interests her is the way that money underpins the social fabric of a middle class that is otherwise precariously unstable. Money for Austen is both necessary and vulgar, and for that reason it is also sexy. Austen's other great insight is that in such a highly wrought society the self is necessarily self-conscious and provisional. In the novelists she grew up on, Fielding and Richardson, character is fate: you are who you were born to be. In Austen, who you are is a role you play. (Discomfort with this recognition may account for why, in Austen's oldest and least popular novel, Mansfield Park, Fanny Price gets so worked up over the issue of amateur theatricals; it is more playacting than she can handle) Austen's characters, even the most clearheaded and authentic like Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood, are always acting, saying less or other than they mean; and in such a treacherous arena, where a single word or gesture can mean everything or nothing at all, it is not just poor Emma Woodhouse but apparently sensible people like Anne Elliot who are often clueless.

Austen's world (which is to say our world) would be unendurable if she were not so funny about it, and this, of course, is her most essential invention of all - her encompassing irony. It is a matter not just of shrewd social observation but also of something brand-new, an ability to stand apart from life even as it is being lived, and a quicksilver narrative technique that puts us almost inside a character's head and then in an instant, with just word sometimes, darts away to someplace else. Of herself, Austen give away noting directly; she is everywhere and nowhere. She was the original master of what we now call "cool".

CHARLES MCGRATH

The writer is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

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Ignatius of Loyola -- Saintly boss

IT may come as a surprise to you who associate the word "Jesuit" with fiery-eyed missionaries and steely-eyed inquisitors that I offer the founder of the order, Ignatius Loyola, as an example of an admirable leader. But perhaps you did not know that Ignatius regularly danced for the young members of the community, and that he allowed a woman - Princes Juana of Austria - to become a secret Jesuit, under the code name of Matteo Sanchez.

I offer Ignatius because of his gifts of flexibility, a concern for the inner as well as the organisational life of those he led and a genuine heartfelt connection to those under his charge, a connection that does not allow them to become invisible in the incandescent glow of leaderly narcissism.

In his youth he was a vain, spoiled dandy. He was the youngest son of a great Spanish nobleman, born in 1941. He became a soldier and sustained severe injuries that left him bed ridden. During his convalescence, the only books available to him were the lives of the saints. So the history of the founding of the Jesuits is, in part, a history of reading.

Ignatius planned to spend his life in the Holy Land, devoting himself, in somewhat vague terms, to "souls". But the Franciscans who were in charge there could not afford to support him and threatened to excommunicate him if he did not leave. He decided to study, first in Spain in, then in Paris.

In Paris, rather casually, Ignatius collected around himself eight men who shared the goal of serving the Holy Land, but when this became impossible they turned their sights to Rome and service to the Pope. They became the first Jesuits. One of Ignatius's gifts as a leader was to envision a ministry wide enough to exploit the various talents of the group's members, and in the same, almost accidental, way that the society was founded, the Jesuits discovered the ministry of teaching, particularly founding schools for boys. Even if the Jesuits had disappeared, Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, which he wrote to help the members focus their inner lives, would be a monument to discernment and insight. This is a month long programme, led by a director, in which the participant seeks self-knowledge and growth in understanding.

One of the most moving stories about Ignatius occurred in his old age. He experienced such ecstasy saying Mass that his eyes were weakened by his tears and his body exhausted by his joy. He was told he had to slow down. He felt that his most important work was corresponding with the members of his community; to save his eyesight he gave up saying Mass with its attendant debilitating ecstasies.

The modern executive could learn a lot from Ignatius, but I fully understand that this is not realistic possibility. His way requires periods of private contemplation and public revision. His luxuries leaders do not have now and will probably not have in any imaginable future.

MARY GORDON

The writer is a novelist and essayist.

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Werner Heisenberg -- Radical thinker

IN March of 1927, Werner Heisenberg submitted to a German journal of physics the paper that contained the revolutionary theory called the uncertainty principle ("On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics"). At the age of 25, this descendant of a brandy burner, a master copper and a locksmith, this child of an upwardly mobile professor of Greek who doubted all ideologies and systems of belief and who passed this skepticism on to his son - this young man effectively sealed off for eternity what most people think of as physical reality from ultimate knowability by the human mind. He proved that it is mechanically and therefore logically impossible for anyone ever to know at any given moment the velocity and position of an electron - two fundamental properties of any particle - because, roughly speaking, if you shine enough light on an electron to see it, the light itself will alter the electron's velocity. Assuming there is some kind of bedrock material world, it is in a profound way not anschaulich, as Heisenberg put it - not "seeable".

To the end of his days, Einstein staunchly opposed this epistemological upheaval. To the end of his days, Heisenberg defended it. Normal human passion swept into the chilly region of theoretical physics, where symbols that look like the Devil's pitchfork and wavy equal signs are for most of us the equivalent of No Trespassing signs, in part because both sides knew, or at least intuited, that one thing at stake in the argument was what it means to be human - to have a conscious, cogitating self and to try to understand that self's relationship to the universe.

The greatest impact of the uncertainty principle on the idea of the self comes not from its implications about free will and determinism, nor from its suggestion that we can never really know the world, but from its thesis that we cannot know it because our very efforts to do so change and in a way corrupt the world we are trying to know. When Heisenberg threw this stone of hard mathematical physics into the pool of philosophy, its ripples required us to see ourselves, each of our own selves, as interferers with whatever we run across. Such ideas of the conscious human self as an automatic interferer, a changer, a polluter of reality, may have always been part of philosophy and even art, but it was Heisenberg who, for the first time, scientifically demonstrated that our very efforts fully to understand what surrounds us must defeat their own purpose.

In this regard he radically altered the idea of the self and intensified one of the century's - if not the millennium's - greatest anxieties: that the human self is by its nature and definition radically isolated from its context, and that in trying to overcome this isolation it must tincture and perhaps even taint whatever it finds.

DANIEL MENAKER

The writer is an editor and novelist.

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