Book of Moments, Chapter Three
On Monads, Windows, and the Problem of Point of View
After Voltaire, Missy began to understand that Elsewhere had a habit of placing departed philosophers exactly where they could do the most inconvenience.
It was not a cruel habit.
Elsewhere was rarely cruel on purpose.
It simply believed that ideas should not remain safely folded inside books forever. Eventually, they needed legs. Or tea. Or a large black wig. Or a platform ticket stamped for a destination no map was willing to admit existed.
That was how Missy found Leibniz.
Leibniz had been waiting at Elsewhere Station for three hundred and twelve years.
He did not consider this a delay.
He considered it evidence that the timetable had been constructed according to principles not yet available to him.
Missy found him beside the window, drinking tea beneath an enormous black wig. Papers covered the table around him. Equations wandered across some. Others contained diagrams, strings of ones and zeros, arguments about God, sketches of machines, and several unfinished letters.
A black cat sat on the windowsill pretending not to be involved.
Behind Leibniz hung a sign:
MONADS
Windowless.
Indivisible.
Reflect the universe from their own point of view.
Missy read it.
Then she looked at the window.
Then at Leibniz.
“Your windowless things seem to have acquired a window.”
Leibniz lowered his cup.
“They are not literally in this room.”
“That helps.”
He studied her with the patient expression of a man who had spent considerable portions of his life corresponding with people who disagreed with him.
“Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”
“Missy.”
“I know.”
She disliked this immediately.
“How?”
“You entered my universe.”
“I thought this was Elsewhere.”
“Precisely.”
That explained nothing.
Missy sat down.
On the table was a mechanical calculating device of intimidating complexity.
“What does that do?”
“It calculates.”
“So do I.”
“Reliably?”
Missy considered this.
“No.”
Leibniz smiled.
She liked him slightly better.
Leibniz believed that reality was composed, at its deepest level, not simply of chunks of matter but of something far stranger.
He called them monads.
They were simple substances, indivisible and without physical extension. You could not cut one in half, weigh it, or locate a little monad hiding underneath a microscope.
Each was a center of perception.
And each, somehow, expressed the entire universe from its own particular point of view.
Missy looked again at the sign.
“So everything has its own version of everything?”
“Not its own version,” Leibniz corrected. “Its own perspective.”
“That sounds suspiciously like the beginning of an argument.”
“It is the beginning of reality.”
He explained that two people might inhabit the same world and nevertheless experience it differently because each occupies a unique position within the whole.
The universe was one.
Its perspectives were innumerable.
Missy looked through the station window.
The sunset had turned the tracks copper. A train was approaching from somewhere that did not appear on the departure board.
“So everyone sees the same universe differently.”
“Yes.”
“And everyone assumes their window has the best view.”
Leibniz hesitated.
“That is not part of my philosophy.”
“It should be.”
There was another difficulty.
Monads were windowless.
Nothing entered them.
Nothing left them.
They did not reach into one another and push each other around.
Missy frowned.
“Then how does anything happen?”
Leibniz seemed pleased.
He had clearly been waiting three hundred and twelve years for someone to ask.
He explained pre-established harmony.
Imagine two clocks perfectly synchronized. Neither clock controls the other, yet both strike twelve at exactly the same moment. Their agreement comes from the order built into them.
Leibniz believed reality worked in something like this fashion. Each monad unfolded according to its own internal principle, yet the whole universe corresponded in extraordinary harmony.
Missy stared at him.
“So nobody is actually talking to anybody?”
“That is not quite what I said.”
“But everyone thinks they are.”
“Missy.”
“And somehow it all works.”
“In principle.”
She looked around Elsewhere Station.
A porter was chasing a suitcase that appeared determined to board a different train from its owner.
The clock above Platform Seven was moving backward.
Bob had disappeared.
“In principle,” Missy agreed.
Leibniz poured more tea.
The train at the platform gave one soft whistle.
It sounded less like departure than invitation.
Missy glanced at the sign again.
Windowless.
Indivisible.
Reflect the universe from their own point of view.
Then she looked at Leibniz.
“Do monads ever change their minds?”
Leibniz lifted his cup.
“Only from the inside.”
Missy smiled.
Elsewhere, she thought, had excellent taste in impossible passengers.
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