When We Cease to Understand the World: Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

Vasek was a painter, but he had also compiled an extensive collection of works he called art brut: poems, sculptures, drawings and paintings composed by psychiatric patients, mentally disabled children, drug addicts, alcoholics, perverts and sexual deviants, whose twisted visions, it seemed to him, bore the seeds from which the myths of the future

Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

“What stimulates me is not ambition or the thirst for power. It is the acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time.”

The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years.